Just a grumpy old man

Corin Redgrave's moustachioed King Lear still reminds me of a peevishly aggressive, Edwardian colonel from the Home Counties, prone to uncontrollable rages about the way young women will insist on having their own way.

His performance, which a few critics rated great at its Stratford-upon-Avon premiere in 2004, but others of us felt lacking in size and scope, appears conceived as a detached, satirical view of an upper-crust autocrat and imperious power-broker.

It is as if Redgrave refused personal identification with the role, preferring to play the monarch from the outside, identifying Lear as a familiar type rather than a perplexing individual.

Bill Alexander's torpid, four-hour production makes it seem as if the tragedy is being staged in a rehearsal room roughed up by vandals, not in a country tipping towards civil war. Long tables are constantly up-ended and rearranged. Lightning causes a clichéd fissure in the back wall and the atmosphere turns existentially bleak.

The sense of Britain possessed by cruelty and reduced to elemental bleakness survives fitfully. Ruth Gemmell's Regan with her cruel, spikey hair and Emily Raymond's decorative Goneril miss a touch of evil, as does Matthew Rhys's soft Edmund.

The blinding of David Hargreaves's low-key Gloucester, though chillingly managed by Anatol Yusef 's sinister Cornwall, does not send him out on any journey of self-discovery.

The same complaint could be made of Redgrave's Lear. He first comes on bent and doddering, then straightens up to reveal himself in brisk middle age, not the usual four score. This jocular gesture proves revealing and significant. It emphasises this Lear's chronic childishness, his tendency to assume a role rather than to be himself.

"Who is it who can tell me who I am?" becomes Redgrave's motif and a suitable, provocative one for a Lear given to self-mockery.

The performance, however, succumbs to an externalising tendency: those familiar Redgrave mannerisms of clicking fingers, the wobble and tilt of the head, the throaty barks and snarls of fury when Lear's daughters refuse an overload of knights, make relatively light of what ought be grave. There are flashes of pathos.

Yet out on the blasted heath with Leo Wringer's serene, Caribbean Fool, Pal Aron's winsome Edgar and Louis Hilyer as a superlatively wracked Edgar, or howling over Cordelia's corpse, Redgrave's defiance and grief are characteristically lacking in mightiness.

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King Lear