As I walked into the Old Vic for last night’s production of King Lear starring Glenda Jackson, there were three people standing gazing at a poster outside. “She was famous in the olden days,” one was explaining to the others. Well, the news is, she’s doing pretty well right now.
This is certainly Glenda’s night. On stage, she is a small, slight figure and you can see the frailty of her Lear. But her core is all fierceness, rage and capriciousness – a difficult and unpredictable father for three daughters. So, clearly, she is playing a man (there are a few jokes on this theme) but this is irrelevant within minutes. From the moment she appears in black trousers and a billowing scarlet jacket she is simply the force of nature at the centre of this essentially family tragedy.
She strides on to a bleak empty stage often blindingly lit and self-consciously workaday – actors sit looking at their scripts on plastic chairs, scene shifters sweep the boards. The only time the staging of Deborah Warner’s production takes on real life is during the storm scene – rarely can black plastic have been used to such effect. But, aside from Jackson, this is a sometimes flawed production. Some of the casting seems misjudged. Edgar and Edmund (Harry Melling and Simon Manyonda), Gloucester’s good and bad sons, for instance, lack impact in spite of their propensity for mooning. Gloucester’s voice (Karl Johnson) is drowned out by the background soundscape more than once. And the gruesome scene where Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out is no longer a chilling manifestation of cruelty but a moment of audience participation – catch the eyeball.
There are, though, some strong performances. Sargon Yelda is an excellent Kent and Celia Imrie a gimlet-eyed, manipulative Goneril (who can poison her sister and clean up the vomit in her yellow Marigolds like a good housewife). Rhys Ifans is superb as the fool. In his bedraggled Superman cloak, he is wise and witty and does a nice line in TV chef and Bob Dylan impersonations.
But it is, without doubt, Glenda’s night. At times hard as steel, her ever-flexible voice mocks, rants, rages and finally breaks in unbelieving grief at the death of Cordelia. She moves from all-powerful authority figure to madness to an understanding so pitiable it breaks her heart (and the audience’s). After 25 years away from the stage and at the age of 80, she hasn’t chosen the easiest come-back. But that apparently fragile figure dominates the stage with her strength, stamina and intelligence. She is “every inch a king.”
King Lear at the Old Vic, until Saturday 3rd December 2016. For more information and tickets, visit the website.
