[In the following review of Jonathan Kent's staging of King Lear at King's Cross for the Almeida Theatre, Stokes lauds the production's “high aesthetic” style and Oliver Ford Davies's Alzheimer's-informed Lear.]

The actor Tim Pigott-Smith said on the radio recently that one of the greatest strengths of the Almeida Theatre while it has been under the artistic control of Jonathan Kent and Ian MacDiarmid is that it has remained “an actor's theatre”. The word “actor” here was probably in silent opposition to “accountant”, rather than to director or to designer, since Kent and McDiarmid have constantly enlarged their theatrical ambitions, often in expensive ways, so that their company might give the best of itself. There has been a consistency of prioritles that amounts to something like a style. Of course, the plays themselves have had a lot to do with it. Unlike Sam Mendes's Donmar, the Almeida has shown little interest in American musical theatre; unlike the Royal Court, its sense of the contemporary has only occasionally got beyond Friel, Hare, Barker and Pinter; unlike the Young Vic, it hasn't relied on visitors. The repertoire has been uncompromising: Racine, Pirandello, Molière, O'Casey, Shaw, Marivaux, Euripides and Wedekind, a serious and largely European canon. The Almeida has been a theatre of the highest aesthetic standards. Perhaps that is as close as one can get to defining its achievement under the celebrated joint direction.

Deep in the black interior of the Victorian theatre in Islington or circling among the caryatids of the Hackney Empire, where the company took its Hamlet in 1995, not so pungently as at the Bouffes du Nord or Wilton's Music Hall but unmistakable none the less, an aura of past performances has hung in the air. But the Almeida's more recent forays, undertaken while the Islington theatre is being refurbished, have been to temporary homes where no ghosts walk, the emptied spaces of “urban renewal” and post-industrialism. At the deserted Gainsborough Studios off the City Road, where they played Coriolanus and Richard II, and now in a former coach depot at King's Cross, there is no obvious connection between play and place. Here, on the contrary, theatre becomes an intruder on somebody else's defunct business, distinctly non-site-specific.

In and around such buildings, borders become arbitrary, like the temporary partitions that mark out a playing area from the surrounding shell. And, in the way that urban spaces often do, they seep into one another. The boundary between the world of the Caledonian Road and the world of the High Aesthetic is marked by a liminal theatre bar, vast and noisy. Beyond, the theatre area is itself malleable, permeable, able to take on the colour and the mood of the play in question. For Chekhov's Platonov, more than three hours long, Kent and his designer Paul Brown provided an extraordinarily broad stage that accommodated a river, a railway, a country house and part of its estate, a vista of the unintegrated community on which the play's meaning depends; for Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things, the environment, largely aural, was a cavernous rave, filled with ear-tormenting contemporary rock; for Brian Friel's The Faith Healer, chilly vacancies around a focal point, occupied in turn by the three monologists, evoked the bleak village halls that the healer, his wife and his manager had encountered on their bitter tours around the country.

It must surely have been an awareness of the varying potential of the space, as well as their usual ambition to engage with greatness, that made Kent and MacDiarmid choose King Lear as the production that would mark their retirement as the Almeida's artistic directors. Lear would apply the High Aesthetic style to the close observation of intimate breakdown—since, as Jonathan Kent has gone on record as saying, the production would also draw on his own experience of watching an aged relative suffer from Alzheimer's.

We begin, though, with prestige and the trappings of a public world. This time, Paul Brown has enclosed both audience and actors in the same dark wood panelling, an official stateroom which looks as if it might have been furnished by Harrods in the 1930s, that will serve throughout for the homes of the king and his daughters. The division of the kingdom is a kind of televised press conference, and we see the filmed result simultaneously on the several monitors above our heads. Confessing their devotion, Goneril and Regan preen before the cameras, while Lear tries to look dignified before the screen goes fuzzy as the action gets messy. It's a neat enough comment on the media, but soon dropped, returning only at the very end of the play when the monitors, again full of blurred interference, fail to show us the off-stage battles we can certainly hear.

The determining moment comes a little later in Act One, Scene One, when Goneril and Regan, in slinky cocktail dresses, express their particular version of a more domestic experience. “You see how full of changes his age is”: “He hath ever but slenderly known himself”: “The unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them”; it is not hard for actresses as confident as Suzanne Burden and Lizzy McInnery to give these familiar lines a new tilt that hints strongly at our sanctimonious insistence on “age concern”. Throughout the production, the relatively modern dress encourages modern delivery and modern gestures. Consumed by rage, Goneril will sweep a cluster of family photos off an official-looking desk; before the blinding. Gloucester is strapped down with electric flex; afterwards, his abused head is stuck inside a lampshade.

Whereas in 1999, at the Barbican, Nigel Hawthorne's brave experiment of making Lear ironic throughout never gave audiences the emotional battering they have come to expect from the role, Oliver Ford Davies's collapse into dementia touches universal chords very quickly indeed. Too quickly, perhaps. In his memoir of Iris Murdoch's last years, when she was sick with Alzheimer's, John Bayley has written of the worry, frequent among friends and relatives of an invalid, that in the course of decline a unique identity might become “lost in the common symptoms of a clinical condition”. It is an unease as appropriate to this deeply humane interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedy as it is natural to life. But, like Murdoch, Ford Davies doesn't give in that easily. While conscious of what the novelist called “sailing into darkness”, he is still resistant. Jonathan Kent has him first gaze at his reflection in a rectangular mirror and then, appalled at what he sees, smash the glass. The new self goes unrecognized by the old. Indeed, Lear's journey from “Let me not be mad” to “Oh Fool. I shall go mad” (as Ford Davies stresses it) might now be seen as Shakespeare's dramatic elaboration of the awful question asked by Judi Dench in the film of Bayley's book: “We all worry about going mad. How would we know?”

Madness is truly “a disease in my flesh”. Ford Davies rumbles and snarls, sometimes gabbling so quickly that he loses the listener. Gathering speed like a steam engine, he does at least slow down to deliver the terrible curse “into her womb convey sterility” with an implacable, piston-like intensity. Worries that his voice, with its disconcerting sibilance, might not last the evening are relieved in the second half (following the blinding of Gloucester), which has a more subdued mood. At the peak of his crisis a wild old man in vest and socks, he is by the end confined to wheelchair and pyjamas, sad candidate for the old folks' home.

Ford Davies's demented Lear is surrounded by performances which indicate modernity in other, more allusive, ways. Anthony O'Donnel's Fool, a small man in an even smaller suit, is fond of imitating W. C. Fields; James Frain's Edmund is wryly confident and sexy; Tom Hollander's initially boyish Edgar regresses even further as a childish Poor Tom; Paul Jesson's Kent shifts his social class by changing hairstyle and accent; David Ryall's Gloucester is a complacent politician who discovers reality the hardest way and, following the Folio text, is given the half-line “And that's true too” to deliver with dismal resignation.

A basic spatial movement of invasion from outdoors allows Kent's stocks to be set up rather incongruously in the all-purpose interior room where Lear's knights have already made mayhem. The motif soon becomes over-whelming. Jonathan Kent's fondness for the unbounded qualities of water, already indulged with the lagoon he created with Brown for his production of The Tempest two years ago, takes over completely. The rain it raineth for more than twenty minutes, relentless, at first beyond the boundaries of the state room but eventually soaking the padded furniture, drenching the wooden floor, forcing down the walls, collecting in pools and threatening to flood out into the front row of an audience which is already feeling chilly and damp. All barriers dissolve. Later, in the closing moments of the play, we see through the sodden ruins of the set to the brick walls and rickety metal ladders of the external wall of the coach depot. Cordelia (played quietly by Nancy Carroll) appears framed by some broken panes of dirty glass. The picture is simple, affecting—and cheap.

That's the trouble with the High Aesthetic style: it usually costs more money than accountants think reasonable, it flaunts its right to take its time and, in the end, often appears to come to nothing, discarding the very world it has so laboriously constructed. The question any audience must ask itself is whether the shared experience of great drama is helpfully served by such expenditure. Will something come of that unaccommodated nothing? In this case, the answer, unquestionably, is yes. The grandeur of Shakespeare's play lies in its insistence that unaccommodated lives are not trivial, and the Almeida's High Aesthetic style helps us to locate that dignity near King's Cross Station on an exceptionally wet night.