King Lear – review

Minerva, Chichester
This return to star-driven Shakespeare has in Frank Langella a commanding Lear still driven by a craving for love
4 out of 5 4
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King Lear
Born to command … Frank Langella, centre, in King Lear. Photograph: Johan Persson

We are used to director's Shakespeare. This production, which plays 32 performances in Chichester before moving to Brooklyn, is unequivocally actor's Shakespeare. It is staged with great clarity by Angus Jackson as a timeless moral fable. But what impresses is the spellbinding power of that fine American actor, Frank Langella, best known in Britain as the disintegrating president inFrost/Nixon, who plays Lear and wins.

  1. King Lear
  2. Minerva ,
  3. Chichester
  1. Until 30 November
  2. Box office:
    01243 781312
  3. Venue details

Langella has that mysterious quality known as "weight". It is not merely that he is tall, has a voice that could be heard in Bognor Regis and is more oak than ash: it is that he has an authority that compels our attention. This is palpable from the start when he needs help ascending the steps of Robert Innes Hopkins's set, which looks like a miniaturised version of Chichester's hexagonal main stage with appropriately crazy paving. Langella even cups a hand to his ear to hear Goneril's fake protestations of affection. But, despite his slight stoop and white thatch, this is a Lear who looks born to command.

This, in Langella's interpretation, is Lear's tragedy: although possessing vast reserves of power, he is steeped in self-delusion. He believes you can retain the privileges of kingship while ceding the office. He also myopically claims "my train are men of choice", when they are clearly a rowdy bunch who greet their hostess, Goneril, with noisy wolf-whistles. But what makes Langella's Lear overwhelmingly moving is not simply his predicted journey through madness to moral regeneration, but his constant craving for love.

It is there in the division of the kingdom. But Langella makes it the psychological key to Lear's character. He clasps Harry Melling's young, sharp-witted Fool to his bosom as if seeking a substitute for Cordelia, treats the semi-naked Poor Tom almost as a surrogate son and, in the scene on the heath, cradles the blinded Gloucester in his arms before trying to throttle him. I've seen Lears who pushed even further the insane contradictions in Lear's pysche: I've never forgotten John Wood, in Nicholas Hytner's 1990 production, rushing to embrace Goneril after cursing her with sterility. But Langella's tremendous Lear is defined by its belated recognition, common to virtually all Shakespeare's kings and, incidentally, to Richard Nixon, that power and love are hard to reconcile.

If I dwell on Langella, it is because he is the centre of this production: sometimes literally so, as the other actors stand in a circle around him. But there is some striking support. Lauren O'Neil is an icily sadistic Regan who has to be restrained from attacking Gloucester and later views her wounded husband with contempt, as if death were a form of weakness. Denis Conway makes Gloucester an unusually rational figure in an irrational universe: having seemingly thrown himself off a high cliff in a moment of Beckettian absurdity, he worriedly asks: "But have I fallen or no?" And, in that same scene, Sebastian Armesto's Edgar does something highly original in simulating his father's blindness in imagining the sight of the shore from the cliff.

In many ways, however, the production is a throwback to the days when we went to see star Shakespeare. But after a glut of concept-driven productions, it makes a refreshing antidote. And in Langella we have not only a star but a real actor: one who follows the familiar arc of Lear's moral awakening, but who also makes the part his own. At the end, Langella's Lear lays out Cordelia's lifeless body with paternal care as if, even in death, still anxiously searching for the love he never achieved in life.


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