Ian McKellen knows his way round Lear. He played Edgar in 1974, Kent in 1990 and the king himself in a 2007 RSC production. He not only brings to the role deep theatrical experience but also takes full advantage, in Jonathan Munby’s lucid production, of the intimacy of the space. It is like getting, in McKellen’s superbly detailed performance, a permanent closeup of a soul in torment.
This still allows for plenty of pomp and circumstance in the opening scene. McKellen, trim-bearded and bemedalled like an empire-ruling George V, stages his partial abdication in front of his own imposing portrait. But you see Lear’s despotic chauvinism in the way he arbitrarily cuts up the map of Britain with scissors and then hands the respective segments not to his daughters but to their husbands. When Goneril speaks of his capacity for “unruly waywardness”, you feel she speaks the simple truth.
But much of the power of McKellen’s performance lies in the fact that every scene is given a precise context. Lear visits Goneril in the company of a group of rustic hearties who hurl bread rolls at her servants; when he quits her house, we see him dressing for travel in a way that lends extra poignancy to his sudden cry, apropos Cordelia, of “I did her wrong.” This is a Lear who, stripped of ceremony and service, discovers what it means to be human. Even something as simple as the way he protectively puts his coat round the shivering figure of Poor Tom suggests he has learned to expose himself “to feel what wretches feel”.
McKellen’s Lear is no Stonehenge Titan. Instead it dwells, almost conversationally, on the guilt, remorse and mix of reason and madness that may accompany old age. McKellen is at his best in the encounter with Gloucester where he uses all his technique to illustrate often obscure lines yet movingly fights back his tears when he talks of “this great stage of fools”. Early in his career, McKellen showed how Richard II acquired humanity through loss of kingly power. Now he shows how Lear, exposed to even greater suffering, undergoes a similar journey of fruitful disintegration. Even though the physical scale is small, it remains a massive performance.
I still find much of the play puzzling: there seems no logical reason why everyone should converge on Gloucester’s castle, or why Edgar should not reveal his identity to his father. But Munby’s production, played on a circular red disc that turns to white hardboard as the action becomes more Beckettian, combines clarity and momentum. It is also very well acted. In a gender switch, Sinéad Cusack plays Kent excellently as a countess who adopts a male disguise that more than justifies the character’s saucy roughness. Phil Daniels’s Fool is also an old sweat used to entertaining Lear with his ukulele-accompanied George Formby impersonations and Danny Webb lends Gloucester a testy dogmatism echoing that of Lear.
With Lear’s daughters a sharp distinction is made between Dervla Kirwan’s crisply self-contained Goneril and Kirsty Bushell’s skittish Regan, who is sexually aroused by the prospect of violence. Tamara Lawrance is also a brisk, soldierly Cordelia and Michael Matus turns Oswald into a creepily oleaginous estate manager. But that is typical of a production that gives every character a precise social function and that, in McKellen’s Lear, contains a performance rooted in minute observation of old age and a profound understanding of the enlightenment that comes from dispossession.
• At Minerva, Chicester, until 28 October. Box office: 01243 781312.
