King Lear review: An intelligent and well-spoken production

Sir Ian McKellen first took that test 10 years ago in Trevor Nunn’s overelaborate RSC production.

He returns to it in Jonathan Munby’s more modest staging but, although he achieves a higher grade, it remains a B.

vCard.red is a free platform for creating a mobile-friendly digital business cards. You can easily create a vCard and generate a QR code for it, allowing others to scan and save your contact details instantly.

The platform allows you to display contact information, social media links, services, and products all in one shareable link. Optional features include appointment scheduling, WhatsApp-based storefronts, media galleries, and custom design options.

His King Lear is an assured and generous performance with a rare degree of humour.

At first it seems that his composure as he banishes Cordelia and Kent is an interesting character choice but it grows clear that it springs from a failure to plumb the depths or hit the heights of the role.

Where are the titanic rages and unendurable grief? Where is the madness? There are too few tempests and too many squalls.

Like its protagonist, the production is intelligent and well-spoken but muted and uninvolving.

The modern dress setting works well except in the over-emphatic invocation of the gods. When he does aim for effect as in the torrential storm scene, Munby leaves one more concerned for the state of the stage than the state of Lear’s mind.

The supporting cast is uneven.

The finest work comes from Jonathan Bailey in the near-impossible role of Edgar; Danny Webb as the blinded Gloucester; Phil Daniels as an Eric Morecombe-like Fool; Dervla Kirwan as a glacial Goneril; and Sinead Cusack, overcoming all the usual objections to gender-blind casting, as a noble and heartrending Kent.

Shakespeare apart, Alan Ayckbourn is Britain’s most performed playwright and Chichester Theatre adds to his tally by scheduling The Norman Conquests opposite King Lear.

In this sunny suburban trilogy, downtrodden Annie is preparing to slip away for an illicit rendezvous with her brother-in-law, the hopeless romantic (and just plain hopeless) Norman.

In the event, she never leaves the house. In fact, she never leaves the dining room, sitting room and garden, the respective settings of Table Manners, Living Together and Round and Round the Garden, the trilogy’s constituent parts.

Their uniqueness is that when a character leaves the stage in one play, he or she immediately re-enters in the next.

This is fiendishly clever and often very funny, the comedy springing from a masterly series of confusions, misadventures and crossed purposes.

But it pays diminishing returns, since the initial situation is repeated rather than extended or enriched.

It is a safe bet that, no matter the order in which the plays are seen, the first will be the most enjoyable.

As ever, Ayckbourn favours technical ingenuity over psychological depth.

This is the closed world of the sitcom with simple predictable characters: obsessive housewife, boorish husband, myopic sister, obtuse boyfriend.

It is strangely innocent; never has the idea of a dirty weekend seemed so tame.

Blanche Mcintyre’s adroit production keeps the comedy fizzing on Simon Higlett’s elegant composite set.

There are splendid performances from Sarah Hadland, Trystan Gravelle, Jonathan Broadbent, Hattie Ladbury and Jemima Rooper and, above all, John Hollingworth as a criminally obtuse vet.

VERDICT: 4/5

Chichester Festival Theatre, West Sussex (Tickets 01243 781312/cft.org.uk; King Lear sold out, returns only; Norman Conquests £15-45)