If the current state of Britain were to reflect a Shakespeare play, many might hope for Richard II: weak and despised leader brutally deposed. But with Boris Johnson resisting that plot, it is King Lear – a nation disintegrating amid a sense of everything ending – that feels most apt.
Started by Helena Kaut-Howson but realised by the cast as the director recovers from injury, the new Globe production stresses these topicalities. Costumes are modern and performers verbally underline the repeated negativities – “nothing”, “worst”, “madness” – that echo harshly across the text.
Kathryn Hunter reprises a title role she first played for Kaut-Howson in 1997. Though it is now common for women to play male classical parts – and “authentic” casting for Lear would require an octogenarian who had lost his mind and children – such productions often feminise the characters (Prospera, Malvolia), or provide explanatory context: performance in a women’s prison, say, or in Glenda Jackson’s 2016 Old Vic Lear, cross-gendering as a rehearsal room exercise.
Hunter’s first Lear used the framing of a performance by care home residents, but this time she trusts to her extraordinary transformative powers to play it as written. She is explicitly an elderly king, channelling the higher voice and epicene appearance that falling hormones can cause in male old age. Long white wispy hair atop Hunter’s slight frame gives the paradoxical appearance of a geriatric child, although with enough menace in the voice (every syllable crisply hit) to have cowed the court until now. The extreme yoga agility that is a signature of many Hunter performances – including some steepling gymnastics in the recent Almeida revival of Ionesco’s The Chairs – is deliberately suppressed here to convincingly suggest frailty.
Globe artistic director Michelle Terry is both Cordelia and Fool, casting made possible by their sharing no scenes and made plausible by Lear’s reference to that daughter as “my poor fool”. As the court clown, with Pierrot white face and long coat and scarf suggesting an audition for Doctor Who, Terry becomes one of the few actors in this role to win big laughs from the riddles and doggerel. Kwaku Mills compellingly gives Edgar a Hamlet-like arc from weakness to resolve.
Lear is a wintry tale and a premiere on the sunniest day of the year made some early scenes feel, in every sense, too light. But the mood darkened with the sky above our disunited kingdom and the final Lear-Cordelia scene was almost unbearably affecting. Hunter takes her place, with Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen, Paul Scofield (on film), and Glenda Jackson among the Lears seared in my mind.
• At Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 24 July.
