Glenda Jackson, just coming off her run in Three Tall Women on Broadway, has already set the date of her return.
Jackson will appear as the title character in King Lear in the play's Broadway run next year.
Jackson is no stranger to this role, playing it previously in 2016 at London's Old Vic. The Broadway production will be entirely different, with new staging.
She looks like no King Lear you've ever seen before - a small, thin woman in a black suit, her silver pageboy combed neatly to the side. Yet when the legendary British actress Glenda Jackson begins to speak - and then to fulminate and rage as only the narcissistic, aggrieved Lear can - she mows down men three times her size. The contrast is thrilling, and a key to the success of Sam Gold's smashing new production of the Shakespeare chestnut, now playing at the Cort Theatre on Broadway. This is a 'King Lear' that wholly captures the complexities and contradictions of its title character, a still-roaring lion who refuses to accept that winter has dawned.
Like a lot of intense, progressive, secular work in this time of revolutionary exploration on Broadway, Gold's 'King Lear' just has a better understanding of what needs to go than what needs to take its place. It wrestles mightily with the play's inherent moralism, religiosity and conservatism, and its demands that we feel our obligations. It seems to say that the old white guys made their mess all on their own.
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