Doomed monarch: Ian McKellen as King Lear. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
I've a lingering unease about all the hoo-hah surrounding Ian McKellen's stint as Lear, which culminated on Monday with an appearance on the Today programme in a slot that wouldn't upset, say, a disgraced ex-minister or a keynote report on the garden bird population. (High praise amid the topsy-turvy priorities of BBC heavyweight reporting.)
The grand finale to the massive year-long arc of the RSC's Complete Works season, Trevor Nunn's production is already being described as the theatrical event of the century - and so, with grim predictability, tragedy was undercut by calamity last night when it was announced that Frances Barber has injured a knee and won't be scuttling on stage as Goneril any time soon. Press night postponed, press shuttle buses called off, no likelihood of a proper opening before Easter. Lord knows what the atmosphere is like in the bowels of the RSC today, but you can bet that the shrill deities who preside over Lear (perhaps recently released from the walls of the now-decommissioned Royal Shakespeare Theatre) are having the last, bitter laugh.
It's not that I have any reservations about the production, or about McKellen's fitness for the role - in fact I'll be queuing up with the rest as soon as the unlucky Barber or her understudy springs back on stage. And in fairness it seems that the man himself is feeling the pressure more than anyone, for all that yesterday's radio interview with Jim Naughtie uncomfortably resembled Python's Great Actors skit.
It's just that I suspect, somehow, the whole thing won't be quite as good as I know I want it to be. Maybe it's the wall-to-wall hype (and, yes, I know we wrote about it too), perhaps it's because the lead role is so craggily, incessantly draining, maybe simply because the play dwells so much on the causes and consequences of human failure - to govern, to love, to act.
Has there ever been a perfect Lear? I've encountered a fair few, and I'm not sure I can think of one. Perfect moments, yes: the savage roaring of Paul Scofield (brilliantly captured in a recent audio recording years after his original outing); Oliver Ford Davies's splenetic hand-twitches at the Almeida a few years back; the heart-crushing scene from Grigori Kozintsev's film in which a childlike, playful Juri Jarvet blithely ignores his kingdom being pulled away from under his feet.
Maybe the ultimate Lear would involve all those moments sewn seamlessly together - or perhaps David Hare has it right when he says that of the 11 scenes in which Lear appears in the play, one man can't do all of them. That might have been Shakespeare's point, in a way of thinking.
But it doesn't stop me daydreaming about who I'd like to see booked in to do the part when the McKellen circus has departed Stratford. Candidates ripe enough for speed-dial should anything befall Sir Ian surely include Pennington, Bradley and (though the heart sinks slightly, not sure why) Jacobi. Medium-term investments might include Simon Russell Beale and Mark Rylance. Left-of-centres alternatives could number Timothy Spall (yes, I really believe this one, trust me) and Warren Mitchell (don't sneer - his Shylock was fab). It's a partial list, and utterly short on Americans - though, given the reviews of Kevin Kline's recent outing in New York, maybe that's no bad thing.
Any other offers? The only rule of the game is that they aren't allowed to have played it before.
