King Lear
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

A schoolmastery tone is implicit in their (RSC) plan to have their production of King Lear (Barbican) cross-pollinate with Edward Bond’s Lear in the pit. 

Actually Adrian Noble’s production now seems less Bondish, more generous, than it did at Stratford. True, the crucial protesting servant at Gloucester’s blinding who claims to have served Cornwall ever since he himself was a child sounds as if he still is a child, but I'm sure this is accident rather than debasing design. I had expected this production to suffer from my intervening exposure to the Olivier television version, but it is in fact as thrilling as before, and richer. 

Michael Gambon’s Lear has, so to speak, grows into his age; and he takes the first half of the play superbly. His capriciousness is massive, more so because of this actor's native reasonableness. He never sounds saner than when he curses Goneril or prays not to go mad. Gradually his sanity becomes alarming; it cloaks gigantic self-deception. He goes mad logically; of course Poor Tom was ruined by his daughters. The mock-trial remains wonderfully serious, its crowning paradox, Lear’s earnest ‘Is there any cause in Nature that makes these hard hearts,’ uttered as he stabs the Fool. 

That irony aside, this, the production’s most famous invention, is perplexing. People say it is symbolic, but of what? Why should Lear, who is learning to think, kill his conscience? It makes, of course, a spectacular end to a spectacular performance, though I doubt if Antony Sher’s pyrotechnics actually reveal more than Michael Williams’s quieter music-hall veteran in the last Stratford version. If the play dwindles in its second half, it is not through the Fool’s absence, but through Lear’s. There is no special vision at Dover, and no surprise at the reconciliation; it is just Mr. Gambon being gentle, as usual. But he is moving at the end. 

In Shakespeare, intelligence backed by experience equals authority: practice has made Malcolm Storry’s Kent perfect, and Sara Kestelman’s Goneril, gradually extinguishing conscience, very near.