I have a confession to make. I used to think this Shakespeare's masterpiece. Now, as I get older, I find the weight of suffering it contains almost too much to bear. Don't get me wrong: I've had some memorable evenings at Lear. But the thing we were taught to admire at school – the way the subplot echoes the main story – now makes the play seem top-heavy with grief. And I increasingly find the disguised Edgar's refusal to reveal himself to his father faintly sadistic.
That said, I've seen some excellent productions and performances, including the current Sam Mendes one at the National with Simon Russell Beale and an extraordinary one by Helena Kaut-Howson at Leicester Haymarket in the 1980s with Kathryn Hunter's Lear the occupant of a geriatric ward. But, rather than list all the Lears I've seen, I've picked out three productions that for me redefined the play.
The first was a landmark Peter Brook production at Stratford in 1962. Brook's staging had a Beckettian clarity, he approached the text with a moral neutrality so that you saw Goneril and Regan's point about Lear's band of unruly knights and Paul Scofield played Lear as a testy, military autocrat. These ideas have been absorbed into numerous modern stagings; but it was Brook who got there first.
John Wood, one of my favourite modern actors, was also a brilliant Lear in a 1990 Nicholas Hytner RSC production: when Wood, having cursed Goneril with sterility, rushed to embrace her, I got a startling vision of the senseless contradictions that inform both Lear's character and the play itself.
And, even if Michael Grandage's 2010 Donmar Warehouse production was less radical, Derek Jacobi's Lear pierced all my emotional defences with his final retreat into a bewildered innocence that suggested second childhood. I can't choose between these three productions. Suffice to say that they made what Tynan called this "flawed pyramid of a play" a joy to watch.
What are your favourite versions of King Lear? Let us know in the comments below
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