Many of Shakespeare's plays can withstand the Globe's pantomime atmosphere, but King Lear isn't one of them. There's something distinctly unpleasant about spotting two tipsy people flirting across the aisle while Gloucester stumbles about with his eyes gouged out. These aren't spectators but, as the Globe has it, "spectactors", a word that is understood as an invitation to giggle at inappropriate moments and, when Edmund ponders whether to run off with Regan or Goneril, to bellow, "Both". There's nothing quite like it for making one reel with snobbery.
Barry Kyle's gimmicky production encourages the restlessness, taking every opportunity to wink at the audience and thrust the actors among the groundlings. Edmund points at the balconies when he talks of "drunkards, liars, adulterers"; Kent storms through the audience into banishment; Lear's rowdy entourage even involves the crowd in a game of catch. Such unsubtle tricks are an unpalatable but understandable effort to integrate audience and action; far more problematic is Kyle's tendency to approach the text in the manner of a GCSE study aid. Each time Lear mentions his oncoming madness a drum rolls, until the storm kicks in and suddenly the word silences the elements. As Regan and Goneril sink into cruelty, both women let their hair down and expose their cleavage, the animals. More than a traditional reading of the play, this is a strikingly unsophisticated one.
The acting is too leaden to rectify matters. Julian Glover's humdrum Lear isn't an authoritative king nor a particularly piteous fool, Michael Gould's Edmund lacks real menace and Tonia Chauvet's Cordelia is simply wooden. The one thing Kyle's production does have going for it is a poetic clarity: the text grows hypnotic in its repetition of eye imagery and its interrogation of what it means to give nothing, say nothing, have nothing. But that quality can be appreciated as easily at home. Exposing Lear to the rough elements proves ruinous, in more ways than one.
In rep until September 21. Box office: 020-7401 9919.
