The RSCs King Lear at the Courtyard Theatre, review

By Charles Spencer Published: 5:26PM GMT 03 March 2010

Greg Hicks as Lear and Geoffrey Freshwater as Gloucester Photo: ALASTAIR MUIR

Watching David Farrs vitriolic and stubbornly idle new prolongation of King Lear is similar to examination a pigmy perplexing to erect Stonehenge. He simply hasnt got the directorial strength, impression or discernment to magnitude up to the plays challenges, rectilinear the inlet or illuminate the moments of redemption. What we get instead is a fender box of melodramatic tricks.

It would be vapid to discipline them all in full. The movement is set in a semi-derelict room or factory, with oppressive neon lights that keep fizzing and sparking in between scenes a Lear for a post-industrial age of recession. But Farr cant have up his mind about the period. Sometimes the characters wear furs and Gothic gowns similar to total from a angel tale. At others they are ready to go similar to Edwardian multitude figures, and there are additionally visible references to the First World War with soldiers in tin-hats and nurses in immaculately stiff uniforms. Whats blank is a clarity of a awake thespian world.

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And a small of Farrs stunts appear merely fatuous. In the charge theatre for instance, a singular missile of complicated sleet buckets down on Lear, whilst the rest of the theatre stays wholly dry. Is Lear so insane that he hasnt got the clarity to move out of the downpour, one wonders wanly. At any impulse I half-expected the worried aristocrat to mangle in to the carol of Traviss strike singular Why Does it Always Rain on Me?

The RSC is creation a big strain and dance about the joining to long-term behaving ensembles but the performances here are extravagantly disproportionate and there is probably no clarity of a association joined by a usual clarity of purpose or aesthetic.

I have never seen such a lifeless and uncharismatic Edmund as the one played by Tunji Kasim, who wholly lacks the glamour, quick mind and cruel effrontery the purpose demands. Samantha Young looks pleasing as Cordelia but creates you recoil each time she opens her mouth since her accent of the hymn is so abysmal.

On the and side, Kelly Hunter and Katy Stephens are distinctively assail as Goneril and Regan, Kathryn Hunter proves deeply in contact with as a small Fool whose face is etched with intolerable pang at Lears plight, whilst Geoffrey Freshwater proves deeply relocating as Gloucester, a asocial clubman who discovers his amiability in suffering. There is a excellent peculiarity of spirituality, too, from Charles Aitken as an unworldly Edgar who looks similar to one of El Grecos svelte saints.

As Lear, Greg Hicks gives a bewildering curates egg of a performance. He is a shining orator of Shakespearean verse, but his behaving mostly seems to be all technique and no heart. He lacks grandeur, though not vitriol, in the good scenes of anger, there is surprisingly small pathos in his anguish, and the high morality and love of his settlement with Cordelia proves wholly over this majority unnatural of thespians.

Like the prolongation that surrounds it, Hickss Lear in conclusion lacks the mass of suggestion that this pretentious and daunting magnum opus demands.

Tickets: 0844 800 1110