Thrilling, cluttered, inventive and exhausting, Sam Gold’s King Lear, which stars an impish and imperious Glenda Jackson, throws a stack of director’s theater cliches at its marble walls. Some of them stick. Running three and a half hours (padding out the folio with bits of the quarto, like the mock trial scene), the production brings avant-garde techniques to Broadway with variable success. Some of the performances are exhilarating – Jackson, of course, Ruth Wilson, Elizabeth Marvel, Matt Maher in his Broadway debut – some aren’t and the storytelling dazzles, then rambles.
Miriam Buether’s single set, a glossy wasteland that riffs on a Trump Tower conference room, stands in for Lear’s throne room, the fields of Dover and everywhere in between. (At intermission and for the storm scene, a metal curtain descends.) It’s here that Lear (Jackson) divides the kingdom, giving shares to his eldest daughters, Goneril (Marvel) and Regan (Aisling O’Sullivan), stiffing Cordelia (Wilson), when she won’t perform her love for him.
Yes, that’s a him. Jackson, initially elegant in a Le Smoking and disheveled after, doesn’t play Lear as a woman or even as a man particularly, but as every inch a king. Tipping Jackson for Lear and casting Jayne Houdyshell as Gloucester might suggest a production interested in gender, but Gold’s preoccupation here seems to be with power – who has it, who wants it, how it should best be wielded. Might, like age, is unsexing.
In the first scene, Lear treats his succession planning as some great joke. Jackson says the bit about shaking all cares and interests while Lear “unburdened crawls toward death” with a wicked smile, a punchline for a party of one. This Lear has no intention of crawling or dying and doesn’t think that his daughters and their ineffectual husbands (Russell Harvard, cast against type as a villain and Dion Johnstone) will ever rule as he has. But what Lear fails to understand (and here at least Gold’s production is illuminating) is that pranks are a symbol of privilege. Without a kingdom at his command, the joke will be on him.
Jackson, who made her return to the stage with a Lear in London in 2016 and may have applied lessons learned from a distinguished parliamentary career, attacks the role with ferocity and precision. She is an actor of great lability and great economy; even her extremes never feel indulgent. Her Lear is clever, sometimes playful, an able ruler corrupted by his own authority and unable to imagine a life absent of clout. Marvel, as formidable as ever, and Wilson, who also doubles as the fool (styled her as a kind of music hall masher) and always looks like she has just eaten a lemon and liked it, also have a superb specificity. And Maher, as Oswald, is beautifully idiosyncratic, with a very funny death scene.
But otherwise the production seems awfully busy, not least when the string quartet shoved into the back corner step out to perform some of Philip Glass’s shrill and lyrical score. Gold always has something going on, but so does this torturous, torturing play. The director’s theater techniques – the blood, the sex, the abstraction, the mess – work a lot better here than in James Macdonald’s disastrous 2011 staging at the Public (even the curtain is better), but that doesn’t mean they work particularly well.
New York has had a lot of high-profile Lears in recent years – Frank Langella, John Lithgow, Sam Waterston, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi – though no production has ever entirely succeeded. Is Lear somehow unstageable – too bleak, too awful, too extra? See it now for Jackson, towering even in Lear’s infirmity, and for its other occasional felicities, but know that it’s still a slog.
We that are young shall never see so much or sit so long.
