Review: KING LEAR, Almeida Theatre

Yaël Farber described King Lear as theatre’s Everest. If that’s true, then they might just have scaled the summit. Her production is a masterfully stratified timebomb. As one layer implodes it spills into the next. A chain reaction detonates and drags the environment into tumult, holding a mirror to the real world plunging itself into environmental disaster.

At the epicentre is Danny Sapani’s Lear. No frail old codger, he is bulking and boisterous. A tiger ready to pounce. You do not want to come between this dragon and his wrath, yet there is enough gentle delicacy to balance out the explosive anger. He holds his daughters tight, gently smiling and emanating paternal warmth. It’s heart wrenching to feel his psyche crumble at Goneril and Cordelia’s betrayal.

Farber’s Lear often feels ungarnished in a good way: she avoids tacky hot takes grounded particular setting or concept. Without flashy gimmicks there is just razor-sharp focus on the text and the slimy political subterfuge bubbling beneath it.

That focus cuts deep into the core of fractered family dynamics. A superb supporting cast wield the language like syringes, sharp, clean, and swift, as if they are injecting poison into each other. Fra Fee’s Edmund is a gorgeously snake-like and particularly brilliant at savouring each syllable as he unfolds his sly schemes. Faith Omole’s wistful Regan is saddled with doubt, pliable to icy Goneril’s manipulation (played by a robust Akiya Henry).

Merle Hensel’s set design conjures a dreamlike ethereality. A veil of metal chains dangles around the back of the stage. It ripples as actors bash into them catching flashes of light as it shimmers. Peter Rice’s ghostly soundscape accentuates the spine-tingling sense of uncanny.

But as dreamlike as it starts, a stark reality pulsates within it, eventually grounding the production. Literally. As Lear crumbles into madness and blood is spilled, dirt muddies the increasingly claustrophobic stage. The bodies pile up, a cluttered elemental wasteland. You can almost smell the rotting pollution – we have woken up but are still in a nightmare. Less a shock inducing alarm bell, and more a sober lament for a planet already burning. Isn’t that all the more harrowing?

If there was any doubt, at the climax the fool (a mesmerisingly Beckett-like Clarke Peters) remerges dragging a rusted globe behind him. As Lear collapses in a final flurry of sweat and tears it bursts into flames. Urgh. There goes any delicious subtlety wrenched out from underneath and trampled over but my goodness what gut punch of an image to be left with. Edmund’s “Thou, nature, art my Goddess; to thy law my services are bound" couldn’t be more tragically ironic.

King Lear plays at the Almeida until 30 March

Photo Credit: Marc Brenner

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