Dr Samuel Johnson called King Lear “unbearable” in terms of the depth of its tragedy. Today we sometimes go to extremes to bear it. I have noticed during this exceptionally fecund Lear year how desperate audiences can be to take any excuse to laugh, simply to relieve the agony. Even at the tragic zenith of Gregory Doran’s production – the finest of the five I have seen so far in 2016 – when Antony Sher’s Lear makes his final entrance, crying, “Howl! Howl! Howl!”, the body of his beloved daughter Cordelia in his arms, I detected chuckles along the row from me.

Sher’s Lear, even at his most ridiculous when “fantastically dressed with flowers”, is dignified. His madness takes the form only of the idée fixe about the treachery of his two elder daughters Goneril and Regan, never becoming a loss of control as such. Even during the storm episode, his expatiation upon poverty and homelessness is almost entirely lucid, provoked directly by the presence of several houseless folk in the hovel with him. This recurring motif is an augmentation of Doran’s alluding to the especially acute social situation when the play was written in 1605-6; it may not add much, but nor is it crashing in its suggestion that the machinations at court – a court populated by people in ornately gilted robes – are as it were the problems of the 1%.

In the subplot, David Troughton deliberately keeps his Earl of Gloucester on a simmer, not pulling the focus away from either Sher or his own stage sons, both of whom are first-rate. Oliver Johnstone as Edgar is plausible both in his mad disguise and when he breaks character to share his agonized testimony with us; Paapa Essiedu (who has also been Doran’s Hamlet this year) is an articulate, charismatic, chilling Edmund. And speaking of villainy, Kelly Williams confirms my other recent observation that significantly more can be made of the part of Regan than that of Goneril.

A handful of Doran’s directorial touches are not to my personal taste, but none trips up the narrative, emotional or thematic progress. “Unbearable” is in this case a straightforward accolade.

Written for the Financial Times.