Review: ‘King Lear’ on PBS’ ‘Great Performances’

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The Royal Shakespeare Company’s ‘King Lear,’ directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Ian McKellen, which played here at UCLA’s Royce Hall in October 2007 -- without me in the audience, unfortunately -- becomes available to all Americans tonight via the PBS “Great Performances” series. It’s not a straight live filming of the stage production but has been redesigned for television, though with the same players wearing, as far as I can tell, the same clothes.

Times theater critic Charles McNulty, reviewing the UCLA performance, found the acting at times overly large, but while there is still a bit of vamping among the villains, the playing must have been dialed down for the camera. (And McKellen’s brief onstage nudity -- he drops his pants -- happens out of frame.) In my less-than-expert, regular-guy-who-happens-to-love-Shakespeare opinion, it’s certainly worth watching. I’m no scholar of this stuff, but Shakespeare didn’t write for scholars; he wrote for the contemporary equivalent of a television audience, which is to say, for everyone, though at a higher level of poetry and thematic purpose and with more subtlety and psychological insight than TV usually wants or gets. But he was Shakespeare, after all.

With certain brief exceptions, this is an easily intelligible, ultimately moving production of a monumental play -- towering and deep, full of dread and mystery, wind and rain, hate and love -- about the limits of human power and what a drag it is getting old. Do I need to say that it’s the story of a king who prematurely divides his lands among his daughters, with an eye to becoming their semiretired permanent shared houseguest? Even in a comedy, this plan would lead to trouble.

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(Photo by Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)