Simon Russell Beale as Lear, not in his perfect mind.
The NT Live series has already given us a King Lear: Derek Jacobi's spellbinding performance in a production at the Donmar Warehouse was in the 2011 programme.
This time, though, it's the National Theatre show itself, beamed live from the Olivier to cinemas in Britain, Europe and North America and
arriving Downunder on hard drive a few weeks later.
How it compares with the Jacobi version is largely a matter of taste, since the interpretations are so strikingly different. The earlier one, which emphasised the great tragedy's metaphysical elements, was chillingly calm, but what Mendes has cooked up here is a play about a man (and the world) deranged.
An interval featurette posits the idea of Lear as a man with a very specific form of dementia - for much of the second half he's in a hospital. He starts as a fearsome figure, something between a dictator and a chairman of the board. But when his division of the kingdom degenerates into a tantrum, we glimpse someone who will take the whole play to admit that "to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind".
Thus the mock trial scene in the hovel on the heath becomes more deeply disturbing and Beale, a regular presence in these NT shows, does a wonderful job: his Lear is not a man going mad, but a man realising he has already gone. The "terrors of the earth" speech, in which he casts around in vain for an apt description of the revenges he will wreak, is heartbreaking.
