King Lear, Almeida Theatre Review ★★★★★

Danny Sapani’s extraordinarily compelling performance elicits a dizzying array of emotions as we watch his Lear disintegrate from all-powerful, arrogant leader with the world at his feet to dispossessed raging wreck beset by madness, and at last simply a father mourning the daughter he wronged.

Yaël Farber’s production throws new light on Shakespeare’s sprawling King Lear by turning it into a visceral modern-day study of ambition, family disfunction, betrayal and the horrific consequences of a man’s susceptibility to flattery and lies.

On Merle Hensel’s minimalist, yet tremendously versatile set – a bare stage, a curtain of thin metal rods duskily lit by Lee Curran – the play opens with excited courtiers setting up for a press conference. On strides Lear: imposing in his grey suit, head held high, a ruler at the height of his power, about to make a crucial announcement. Yet his youngest daughter Cordelia’s refusal to play along with his need for flattery brings about a fit of violent, insane rage, prompting the fateful decision which will unleash the tragedy.

The disfunction of Lear’s family, heightened by ambition and the ruthless search for power on the part of his eldest daughters, Goneril and Regan, finds a parallel lower down the hierarchy in the family of the Earl of Gloucester, the King’s loyal subject, he, too, along with his legitimate son Edgar, betrayed by his bastard son Edmund.

Throughout a two-hour long, never less than gripping first half, the intermeshed tragedies of the two families unfold with ever greater urgency, with stagecraft and performances combining to create a tense atmosphere that never slackens. As Goneril, Akiya Henry is stiffly determined to grab power, regardless of the doubts of her husband Albany (Geoffrey Lumb). Regan, played by Faith Omole as a woman prone to histrionic ruthlessness, is aided and abetted by her husband, Cornwall (Edward Davis).

In a particularly impressive performance, Fra Fee’s scheming Edmund is a sneering, muscular Ulsterman, his obsessive nastiness barely disguising his hurt at his inferior position as the bastard son.

And then there’s Clark Peters’s Fool.

Almeida Theatre, King Lear, Clarke Peters as The Fool. Photo: Marc Brenner

With his detached, soft-spoken wisdom and hypnotic stage presence, Peters makes his truth-speaking Fool the moral fulcrum of the story.

The first half culminates in an edge-of-your-seat apocalyptic storm scene, all rain, thunder and lighting, where a pitiful, gibbering Lear stripped down to his underwear runs around impotently raging at the elements.

Absent throughout much of the first half, Cordelia, in a finely calibrated performance by Gloria Obianyo, returns in the second as a soldier fighting for her realm; but the interval has broken the spell and this half has a less engaging feel of loose ends being tied.

Throughout scenes of sex and violence we watch everybody get their comeuppance with a degree of detachment until we’re again drawn in as a blood-curling cry rends the air and a pitiful Lear enters carrying Cordelia’s dead body.

Sapani does pathos like few others - his mourning brings tears to the eyes.

In a sombre finale, The Fool returns to advise ‘Speak what we fell, not what we ought to say’ while from the assembled cast there rises a rendition of Bob Dylan’s Hard Rain Gonna Fall.