[In the following review of Jonathan Kent's production of King Lear for the Almeida Theatre, Duncan-Jones praises the combined performances—including Oliver Ford Davies's Lear and those of the supporting cast—but laments weaknesses in setting and design.]

King Lear, with which the Almeida Theatre's run at King's Cross is coming to a close, gives the company a last opportunity to showcase the theatrical potential of an old bus depot. Two possibilities must have presented themselves: a primitive Lear, or an explicit “bus depot” one. The first would have permitted use of the deep, dark spaces of the huge playing area to represent the uncultivated tracts of pre-Christian Britain, in which “For many miles about / There's scarce a bush.” In the second, a 1950s bus shelter could have figured as the hovel in which Lear and his fellow outcasts spend an uncomfortable night: you shout for ages in the rain and then three madmen turn up at once. Either of these settings would support Lear's essentialist belief in his own kingly status, whether as feudal lord or beneficiary of post-coronation popularity.

Interestingly, Jonathan Kent and the set designer, Paul Brown, have taken a third way, choosing to alter the space radically rather than draw attention to it. The whole interior has been reductively enclosed within dark wooden panelling. A lounge-suited Lear stands behind a big desk like a pompous managing director. Perhaps the ritzy set is meant to suggest a sinister dictatorship, but to me it looked more like a pretentious hotel. Although the all-enclosing panelling is gradually dismantled in the course of the play, after receiving a thorough soaking from far, far too much rain, it continues to draw attention from the text. The same is true of the overloud sound effects and music, which force the actors to deliver their lines with unsubtle stridency. Video screens above the auditorium serve no particular purpose other than to distract our view from the events onstage.

Fortunately, the company's energy and talent make this an exceptionally high-impact production, if not a deep or moving one. Oliver Ford Davies is in all ways so strong as Lear that his death comes as a real surprise, for there has been little sense of his mental or physical frailty. Davies plays Lear as Old King Cole, an affable, boisterous but thoughtless man who craves constant companionship and affection. His egotism works particularly well in the scene where he clasps an embarrassed Regan (Lizzy McInnerny), quite sure that she must be the devoted daughter his fancy has painted; and better still in the scene where he is so much beguiled by the “philosopher” Poor Tom that he neither actually listens to what Poor Tom says nor ever notices that his previous favourite companion, the Fool (an excellent and tough performance by Anthony O'Donnell), has been left out in the cold. Davies's Lear is mad almost from the outset, in the Elizabethan or the modern American sense of “mad”: he is furiously angry, sometimes comically so. Yet he is always good company, and it is this, rather than any underlying sense of kingship, that lends credence to the unswerving loyalty of Kent and Gloucester.

Amid the breathless hurtle of Jonathan Kent's fast-moving production, certain details emerge particularly well: the unholy alliance between an icy Cornwall (David Robb) and an oleaginous Edmund (James Frain); the needy dependence of an unusually sensitive Edgar (Tom Hollander) on his bluff father; the pastoral beauty and moral authority of Cordelia (Nancy Carroll) as she stands framed high up against greenery at the very back of the deep stage. But it is regrettable that the large cast of 18—the same number that it is thought Shakespeare's company needed for this sprawling historical-tragical chronicle—includes not a single non-white performer. Yet, despite all its excesses (too many gimmicks and gadgets, too much noise, water and furniture moving), this is an important production. Don't miss the Almeida's last bus.