King Lear review – more engaging than raging

The play that Dr Johnson thought too painful to bear is today one of Shakespeare’s most popular. In the space of 12 months I will have seen three King Lears. In July it was Timothy West; this week, Antony Sher; still to come is Glenda Jackson. I have missed at least three: Michael Pennington, Don Warrington and a free adaptation by the Australian Malthouse Theatre, which set the action among the Northern Territory’s indigenous community. In his valuable book about the play in performance Jonathan Croall reminds us that King Lear is now staged more often than Hamlet.

Absurdist drama showed the play’s jaggedness to be more of a feat than a flaw. Then our 21st-century preoccupation with dementia made the exploration of derangement look particularly startling. Now exposure to the unrelieved misery of displaced people refocuses an audience’s attention on those “houseless heads and unfed sides” outside the over-staffed court. It seems that the mightiest lines are to do not with individual disintegration, or with a king losing power. They are about discovering a fellow feeling that is infinitely more disturbing than compassion. “Oh reason not the need.” Theresa May should pin the lines up over her desk.

Gregory Doran’s fluent production pays diligent attention to the “poor naked wretches”. At times too doggedly. While Sher’s Lear is wondering “whereso’er” they are, they are only too evident, plodding around the stage in woolly hats and shawls.

Sher never looks in danger of becoming one of the wretches himself. He is the prisoner of his own astuteness, always slightly contained. He begins subdued and stately. At his maddest he capers. When raging he is slightly exhilarated, tussling skilfully with the winds and thunder, as if they were particularly stern examiners. He speaks nimbly. He calibrates his decline exactly. But though he crumbles he does not crack.

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Niki Turner’s striking design – a gleaming copper disc sun, and sparse Godot-like branches raking a bleached sky – emphasises his isolation. Lear is constantly being hoisted aloft. Muffled in furs, he is carried on in a glass box. He might have been stuffed by Damien Hirst. Out on the heath he perches on a precarious tarpaulin mound, huddling together with Graham Turner’s winking Fool. He dies raised above those around him on what looks like a hospital trolley.

Catastrophe, like the King, is held at one remove in this thoughtful but unsurprising production. Two performances stand out. Paapa Essiedu, seen earlier this year at the RSC as a vivid young Hamlet, has now rethought the part of Edmund. He sets himself apart not by spitting venom but by dripping disdain. The speeches dribble out of his mouth; he punctuates them with little moues and jokes; he is utterly untrad RSC. He overdoes the comic casualness, but he is never uninteresting. David Troughton’s Gloucester is a turbine force: boiling with rage at the beginning; overbearing for large swathes of the action; completely honest in collapse. No trying for pathos and the more sympathetic for it.