Sam Mendes’s King Lear is a must-see for masochists

Directors appear to have two design options when approaching a Shakespeare tragedy. Woodstock or jackboot. Woodstock means papal robes, shoulder-length hair and silver Excaliburs gleaming from jewelled belts. Jackboot means pistols, berets, holsters and submachine-guns. Sam Mendes sticks the jackboot into King Lear in an attempt to find ‘a modern understanding of the story’, as he puts it.

What this ‘modern understanding’ reveals is that Shakespeare’s opening scene allows the dramatic focus to move between the personal and the political with invisible fluency. Mendes destroys this asset by laying on a televised show trial. Lear’s daughters, surrounded by scowling commandos, are arraigned at miked-up tables as if accused of treason. The intimidating atmosphere leaves no room for the weird intimacy and hypocrisy of the family drama to unfold. When Cordelia’s speech infuriates Lear, he overturns two of the chunkiest tables (rather too easily for a man of 80), and the crash-bang-wallop of flying furniture kills the great line, ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath!’

This production enjoys experiments. In the storm scene (thundery but rainless), Lear perches on the brink of a hand-cranked diving board that soars 20 feet into the air while he hammers out his lines. Not a great idea. Lear’s gang of irregulars, all dressed like Action Man, are a pest. They laugh uproariously at everything the Fool says, and their guffaws, rattled out like clockwork, always start and end in unison. The Fool’s utterances may be ribald, cheeky and perceptive but they aren’t wisecracks. Not to today’s audience, anyway, and to pretend otherwise is to generate confusion.

Mendes is often tempted to use the over-large Olivier to showcase his high-concept ideas. But he’s also aware that it works better with a second enclosure within its vast spaces.