Theatre: King Lear
By Brendan Lemon
Published: March 9 2004 4:00 | Last Updated: March 9 2004 4:00

Jonathan Miller's new production of King Lear is neither as engrossing nor as dreary as the early reviews have painted it. You may spend some of the evening doing mental knitting but the rewards - chief among them Christopher Plummer's king - are frequent enough to dispel any sense that you have misspent time.

Plummer enters majestically, and though stripped of nearly everything by the time he arrives at the heath, the actor never quite sheds his dignity. In his mellifluous, outburst-prone way with the lines, Plummer at times seems a visitor from another era, when Shakespeare was not considered highbrow and poetry was, if not commonplace, at least prevalent.

Vocal mettle is crucial in this staging, since Ralph Funicello's set has minimal scenery, and the lavish, lace-collar-heavy costumes, by Clare Mitchell, are of the period: any visual insights, in other words, are Jacobean. That adjective, however, should not suggest brutality, since Miller and his actors have mined the text for occasional comedy. The overall tone is one of apocalyptic dexterity, and the pace legato.

The Fool is crucial here. Played unobtrusively by Barry MacGregor, and entering (a directorial liberty) initially with Lear, he trails the monarch but does not shadow him, in much the way that our absorption of events is always a beat behind the story. That story is indelible, with Lear attempting to divide his kingdom and misreading his vicious elder daughters, Regan and Goneril, and his favourite, Cordelia, in the process. Claire Jullien is especially fine in the last role.

I have seen Lears where Edgar and Edmund stole the show, or where their polar attributes held sway. Neither Brent Carver's Edgar nor Geraint Wyn Davies's Edmund is sufficient to command our attention for long, yet Davies's performance is welcome in its vigour. No one can pull focus for long, though, from the 75-year-old Plummer, whose Lear is less a summation than a reminiscence, an old man's recollection of happiness as he hurtles toward the dark.

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