The text of King Lear is notoriously problematic, so much so that the 1980s Oxford University Press edition of Shakespeare’s works decided to publish the two main variants as separate plays rather than, as is usual, conflating them into a baggy whole. Director Angus Jackson seems slightly to favour the earlier version (The History Of King Lear as opposed to The Tragedy…) in the cuts he makes towards the admirable end of bringing his production (which transfers to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the new year) in at a whisker under the three-hour mark, but he is not timid about wielding the blue pencil on any grounds. Cordelia’s asides during the opening “division of the kingdoms” scene go, as being unnecessary and counter to our contemporary sense of drama; likewise the Fool’s final, more or less gratuitous speech in Act Three, even though any extension of such an attenuated role would be welcome here as giving Harry Melling (unusually young for the part, but excellent in it) more to work with. However, some lines are so colossally integral to our sense of Lear that, textual variation notwithstanding, they should never be cut. Never, never, never, never, never.
    
Frank Langella plays a straight bat in the title role. The English accent he adopts occasionally trips him up (too-short long “a”s, too-long short “o”s as in “whoresawn dorg”), but he gives a coherent, elegant rendition. This is moderate rather than faint praise, but I am afraid it is still slightly damning. Langella is one of those actors who are supreme technicians but occasionally find themselves in roles which illustrate the limits of technique. What he gives us is a presentation of Lear, a portrait in which the artist’s hand is always visible… in fact, there is a fair bit of actorly gesturing all round in the production. Langella sets the tone for most of his fellows: other than Melling as aforementioned, Max Bennett as a villainously engaging Edmund (he will make a fine Iago soon) and moments of Lauren O’Neil’s Regan and Steven Pacey’s Kent (is the disguised Kent’s accent Brooklyn or Bristol? With these cuts, we hear too little to determine), this is what might be called a fine A Level production (while such material still remains in any core curriculum). In the acting as in the central storm, we hear all the thunder clearly, but we see no flashes of lightning.

Written for the Financial Times.