Classy act

Michael Grandage, boss of the Donmar, is a most unusual director. He has no ideas. His rivals go in for party-theme, concept-album, pop-video Shakespeare (provincial folksiness in metropolitan disguise), but Grandage just goes in for Shakespeare. He arrives with no prejudices or pieties, only solutions. He’s the bard’s delivery boy.

His current production of King Lear sweeps the stage clean of the usual Ozzy Osbourne clutter and reduces the inventory to just three items, a map, a chair and a pillory for Kent. Nothing else. This daring austerity opens things up and allows the mysterious, grotesque, lurching and inscrutable play to do its best and worst, to charm, horrify, move and appal us. There is nothing Grandage won’t consider omitting. He does the storm scene without the storm. So obvious. So effective. At last, we hear the words. And we can relish the suggestion that the real tempest is the one in Lear’s mind.

Derek Jacobi is a surprise. With his slight frame and intimate, velvety voice he was an unlikely choice to play a deranged monster but he covers the terrain with astringency and conviction. Rather than aiming for a big showy tour de force, he goes the other way. He goes small. The three facets he offers us are enough. The obtuse self-destructive tyrant, the embittered loner bickering with his family, and the dandelion-wreathed outpatient whose mental overthrow guides him to a gold mine of accidental truth. A fine supporting cast is led by Gina McKee, who brings an unsettling quietness, a watchful malice to Goneril, flavoured with an explicit and manipulative eroticism.

I wasn’t entirely taken with Christopher Oram’s whitewashed set — the bleached-out look suggests art studios or yuppie penthouses — but his costumes are perfectly judged.