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.
There are any number of quotes from King Lear that one might employ to kick off a discussion of how fully Glenda Jackson embodies William Shakespeare's disintegrating ruler. 'Every inch a King,' might do, though it is spoken ironically in Act IV, when things have fallen well apart. Rather, what came to mind not long into a viewing of director Sam Gold's outstanding production of Lear now at New York's Cort Theatre, was the bit of dialogue above, from Terrence McNally's 1994 play Love! Valour! Compassion!. Machismo just begins to graze it. The tragedy of the mad king is a study of masculine power battling its own decline and Jackson, with self-ruinous male ego animating her wiry frame, feasts on the notoriously challenging role.
An ill wind is blowing through Broadway's Cort Theatre and it's not coming from King Lear's fabled storm on the heath. It's the misdirection in this latest production of the great Shakespearean tragedy. Fortunately, there's Glenda Jackson in the title role acting up a storm herself; Her mighty talents are just about enough to make up for the many missteps in Sam Gold's flawed staging.
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