[In the following review, Weber evaluates Jan Lauwers's 2001 experimental interpretation of King Lear, noting the production's deconstructive approach to language and summarizing individual performances.]

If poetry is crucial to your appreciation of Shakespeare, you can pass on the King Lear by the Belgian theater troupe Needcompany, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater through Sunday.

In fact, those who harbor expectations of any theatrical conventions at all would do well to abandon them before buying a ticket, lest the deconstructionist vision of the director, Jan Lauwers, drive them to the exits prematurely. Dozens of people at Wednesday night's opening performance obviously would have benefited from the warning.

With a trimmed script (the show runs just short of two and a half hours without intermission) and a cast of only 11 (two roles are doubled, with Josse De Pauw as Kent and the Fool and Dick Crane as Cornwall and Albany), the famous narrative of grueling parallel strife in a family and a kingdom is broken into barely recognizable shards.

That said, even accepting the counteraesthetics of deconstructionism, this Lear seems long on stridence and short on revelation. Speeches are sometimes declaimed at the audience, sometimes shared with other characters; scenes are staged to melt into each other or else merely end, with actors abruptly walking offstage or the lights blacking out.

Performed on a largely empty stage with a small, low platform front and center that is primarily a podium for Lear (Tom Jansen), the play is presented in three languages, mostly Dutch and intermittent English, though Cordelia (Carlotta Sagna, who is also the show's choreographer), in particular, is partial to French. English surtitles pass electronically overhead. The diminishment of language is purposeful, of course (though a poke in the eye nonetheless), and it is furthered by other factors. It isn't clear, for example, that all the actors who deliver their lines in English actually know what they're saying, and Gloucester (Simon Versnel), who spends most of the play seated in a chair at the front of the stage, is a mumbler.

In place of language and conventional character portrayal, which is also undermined, are other kinds of artifice. The show signals its nonverbal intentions with an introductory dance, and intermittent intervals of mere movement persist throughout; the silences in the production are striking. Ms. Sagna's choreography is full of repetitive body undulations that can grow so whippingly fierce that it appears the dancer is trying to separate her head from her neck; it is, in any case, abstract work.

Mr. Lauwers occasionally overlays the action with recorded music of an egregiously anachronistic ilk (an arch cover of “My Baby Does the Hanky Panky,” for example) and other effects; electronic static accompanies Lear's raging on the heath. The costumes have elements of the realistically modern. (In their dark suits, tieless, Lear and Kent look like a couple of paunchy executives after a wearying workday.) But they also include oblique signifiers.

Many of the characters, for example, wear layers of bright necklaces, and at the height of his madness, Lear dons a headdress of flowers and lowers his trousers. And should anyone not yet get the idea that disbelief should not be suspended, just before Gloucester is blinded by Cornwall, Hannibal Lecter-style with his teeth, Mr. Crane steps out of character, turns to the audience and says, “This next bit is impossible onstage,” incorporating an obscenity for good measure.

In such a production, assessing the performances is troublesome, to say the least, though I found myself paying close attention to Mr. Jansen, whose mien is authoritative, his anger fierce and his anguish terrifying. The lissome Ms. Sagna makes a calmly fetching Cordelia, a blonde, of course, against the dark-haired and angular witchiness of Regan (Anneke Bonnema) and Goneril (Grace Ellen Barkey). Mr. De Pauw, who seems ubiquitous onstage, donning and removing a jester's coxcomb to go along with his business suit and knit shirt, is appealing in his formality and understatement. Gloucester has a rather inactive role in this production; Mr. Versnel, a burly actor, purposely makes him into something of a potato sack, weary of life, a dead weight awaiting disposition. Mr. Crane plays the rival husbands of Regan and Goneril as disdainful twin punks. Wearing a kilt, Hans Petter Dahl makes a not terribly charismatic Edmund, and Misha Downey as a soft-spoken Edgar delivers his lines as if he had never studied acting and didn't understand why he should.

In such a production, you wait for resolving chaos, and in this, at least, there is no disappointment. Act V begins with an announcement by Mr. De Pauw, who shouts “Act Five” and then takes on the role of a stage prompter.

Seated at a table, he cries out the names of characters who are supposed to speak, but the lines remain unspoken as they flash by overhead. Meanwhile, amid cacophonous noise, an enveloping cloud of smoke and a hail of flashing lights, the other performers create a pastiche of apocalyptic riot, a fiercely angry ensemble dance that evokes a battlefield, a backstage rehearsal hall and an underground S-and-M club.

That the tragedy of King Lear evolves outward from family agony and that its widening gyre of enmity is world-threatening are not new ideas, but there is some satisfaction in this scene. Its energy is compelling, its ugliness esthetically pleasing and not just unruly. Indeed, its vision of humankind as being at the mercy of itself and its passionate divisions seems particularly appropriate now. After all the puzzling, impatient-making and willfully unbeautiful stagecraft that comes before, it at least makes sense.