King Lear Review: Derek Jacobi Mesmerizing at BAM

Edwin Booth was one of the first actors to play King Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, just 12 years after his brother assassinated Abraham Lincoln. One wonders: Did Brooklyn audiences in 1877 find a special resonance in  Shakespeare’s tragedy of family treachery, blindness and disloyalty – not just because of the performer before them on the stage, but because so many of their families had been torn apart during the Civil War?  

It is unlikely that anybody thinks of “King Lear” as an especially American play, and indeed in the past 20 years, the productions of “King Lear” at BAM have been imported from the Republic of Georgia, from Brussels, and from the Royal Shakespeare Company (this one starring Ian McKellen). 

Now the latest “King Lear” at BAM, running at through June 5,  comes from the Donmar Warehouse, starring Sir Derek Jacobi and directed by Michael Grandage, outgoing artistic director of the acclaimed London theater company.   You can’t get more British than that. Yet, paradoxically, that may be what allows this King Lear to do something different from what the average American might think of as “Shakespearean.” 

The American Lears I’ve seen, such as James Earl Jones, boom. Jacobi ... squeals ... and whispers ... and delivers his lines in a strange, mad sing-song ... and cries, red-faced, a fragile old man wracked by loss. Yes, when at the beginning of the play, King Lear gathers his three daughters together to give them his kingdom, he shouts in rage at his daughter Cordelia for refusing to flatter him, shunning her and giving everything instead to his two other daughters Goneril and Regan. Then he shouts in fury at them for betraying and belittling him.  But it is in the later scenes, when Lear has turned mad, that Jacobi offers a quirky and mesmerizing interpretation. 

The Donmar, which last brought its production of Strindberg’s “The Creditors” to BAM directed by Alan Rickman, and has transferred its productions of “Red,” “Hamlet” (starring Jude Law), “Mary Stuart” and “Frost/Nixon” to Broadway,  is a theatrical powerhouse whose home theater contains only 252 seats. This helps explain why it specializes in pared-down, intimate performances.  Its “King Lear” is “only” three hours long, the result of judicious trimming. The set by Christopher Oram looks like the unpainted boards of a boardwalk, used both as floor and as backdrop. The actors dress largely in black. Music is added, but it is of the ping-ping-ping variety. 

Pared-down, however, does not mean bloodless. This is most evident in the subplot, where Edmund, the villainous bastard son of The Earl of Gloucester, schemes to turn his father against his half-brother, the virtuous Edgar. When Duke of Cornwall and his wife Regan pluck out Gloucester's eyeballs with their fingers, we see the bloody eyeballs in his hand and then on the floor, and over the next few scenes we are treated to the spectacle of a Gloucester who is not just blind but whose face and shirt are covered with blood. It is no school-girl crush that both Goneril and Regan have for the evil but sexy Edmund. At one point, Goneril viciously grabs Edmund’s private parts, a threat that turns into a passion. (Doesn’t her name sound like a venereal disease?) Alec Newman as Edmund makes villainy seem dashing.

The 16-member cast is comprised of accomplished Shakespearean actors, by which I mean they have mastered the rhythm of the Bard’s language (something that you cannot say of all American actors, even some very good ones), and their articulation makes them relatively easy to understand, even from the balcony (although, given the cavernous 874-seat Harvey Theater, theatergoers might consider bringing along both the script and a pair of binoculars.)  

Derek Jacobi launched his acting career by playing Hamlet as a teenager, and, although he is still best-known as the stuttering Emperor Claudius in the 1976 BBC series “I, Claudius,” (and he won an Emmy for a guest appearance on Frasier), he has routinely taken on Shakespeare for more than half a century.  Now 72 years old, Jacobi has both the age and the experience to scale what actors call “Mount Lear.” If he gets there through an odd and unexpected path, so much the better.

“King Lear” runs at the through June 6.