Review of Sam Gold’s King Lear (2019)

Cort Theater, New York City, April 04 – July 07, 2019

This production of King Lear – perhaps like every one that is undertaken with any amount of skill and care – shows how right are those critics (e.g. Bloom) who claim the play cannot be properly staged, no matter what the merits of its cast and crew, and also perhaps how these detractors miss the point of any live theater, which is not to enact some ideal, perfect rendition of the play, but to put on a spectacle inspired by the playwright’s words, a spectacle that will have an effect on us, the audience, and which we can then analyze and react to and judge its various strengths, surprises, and wonders. And a production as rich and skillful as this one gives us much to praise, but part of the enjoyment of the experience is that the praiseworthy elements are not at all what we predicted or expected when we entered the theater.

With that introduction, readers may anticipate my first observation: Glenda Jackson as Lear was what I had come to see, was the object of all the media and hype, and yet wholly disappointed me for the first half of the play. Her blocking in the first half was a study in one bizarre choice after another, delivering far too many lines with her back to the audience, or while seated, and all of it with a shockingly diminutive physicality, as with the lines, “O Lear, Lear,…