NEW YORK - When the Tony Award for best actor is decided this summer, the field of competition should arguably be no larger than the stage of the Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, and limited to two of Shakespeare's most cruelly testing portraits of old men broken in body and soul.

Kevin Kline, who gave us a riotous and moving Falstaff in Henry IV, now cedes the stage to Christopher Plummer in King Lear. Plummer's performance is revelatory in two ways. It is first a reading of uncommon depth and sharply etched detail, framed by director Jonathan Miller in an effectively spartan production.

And it is the controlled work of an actor we associate with more flamboyance. Plummer, especially when slumming through his more regrettable films, has been known to serve a slice of ham - albeit of a quality that is strictly imported prosciutto.

This memorable Lear (which he first did at the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare festival in 2002) rounds out his career in a full and satisfying circle. As a young actor, Plummer starred in the 1956 Stratford production of Henry V - the monarch who assumes the burdens of rule necessarily rejects Falstaff in the process.

Now, at age 75, Plummer makes his halting entrance in Miller's pleasingly unfussy conception of King Lear. This is not a reading in which we are made to feel Lear's self-inflicted fall from the heights in strongly visualized terms. There is little in the way of opulence, and the royal house boasts scarcely more furniture than a long table and a chair.

And, in Plummer's assured treatment, we are already in the sad presence of enfeebled age at the very beginning. Lear's fingers have a palsied tremor as he unfolds the map that will divide his kingdom and unleash ambition and ruin. They tremble still at the end of the play, when he kneels to hold the body of Cordelia, the loyal daughter he banished at the outset of his heartbreaking journey.

It is one of the paradoxes of Shakespearean performance that when an actor reaches the right age to scale Lear, he often lacks the stamina for the arduous climb. But there is not a moment in the swift-flowing three hours-plus orchestrated by Miller when Plummer falters in his expertly calibrated reading.

The advantage of Miller's no-frills Lear is that nothing comes between us and the text in Lear's anguished descent from the palace and the pinnacle of authority to the humbled and demented outcast wandering the blasted heath with his Fool (Barry MacGregor offering fine counterpoint).

The drawback, of course, is that Miller's insistence that we hear and feel the words unmediated by bits of stage business and clutter opens his cast to unsparing exposure. The frugality, the minimal lighting and sound effects, create a real test, and some of his actors are found wanting.

Geraint Wyn Davies has a suave charm and cunning as Edmund, but he lacks the force of true menace. This creates problems in a play that, above all, depends on correct balances being maintained and clarified. Claire Jullien's Cordelia has the wronged innocence but not the vehemence and fire that counteract her viperish sisters.

Domini Blythe is an especially forceful Goneril, tempering her striving greed with the exasperation of the grown child dealing with a parent sliding into petulant dotage. When she says, "You see how full of change his age is," Blythe connects this ancient quarrel with a very contemporary problem.

If some of the intricate parallels are slightly off, Miller's treatment brings out the core of the play with unusual lucidity. Here, we explore the great issues of power and its illusion, as well as the fragile line between order and chaos, through the entwined destinies of two families and two blind fathers, Lear and the Earl of Gloucester. James Blendick's Gloucester, a man who cannot see the truth and then loses his sight, is exemplary.

Miller chooses early Jacobean costumes for his cast. It's a telling reminder that James I was in the first audience for King Lear when it premiered in 1606 - three years after he came to the English throne and ended, or so it seemed, a century of strife and uncertainty over the succession.

The ruler and his responsibilities were issues of life and death for English society, and for many the king was all that stood between civilization and anarchy. It's a theme that binds many of Shakespeare's works. Lear's abdication and insistence on clinging to his authority is the forum for the playwright's most compelling discussion of the issue.

Here, in Plummer's masterly and generous hands, the abandoned duties of kingship are bonded to the fate of an abandoned old man. When he rounds on Goneril and cries in incredulous frustration, "I gave you all," Plummer also sums up what he has himself given in meeting this ultimate test of the actor's art.