[In the following review, Wolf finds Jonathan Kent's 2002 modernistic staging of King Lear at King's Cross generally well-realized, and praises the performance of Oliver Ford Davies as Lear.]

There comes a time in any worthwhile production of King Lear—and Jonathan Kent's largely stirring Almeida production is certainly that—when the sorrowful heart of this mightiest of plays bursts wide open. That moment arrives relatively early in this final Kent staging after a decade co-running (with Ian McDiarmid) the Almeida, to generally thrilling results. (The pair step down in July.) In one of his many spasms of rage, Oliver Ford Davies' Lear smashes the elongated mirror by his desk, returning to it soon after in fearful recognition of the damage he has wrought “O let me not be mad,” he says prayerfully, the shattered glass offering its own silent rebuke. By then, the die is cast and Lear's decline is clear, his downward journey a march toward chaos that gets tempered too late by love.

Kent planned his farewell production around Ford Davies; this is their fifth collaboration. The playhouse is perhaps best known internationally for its visiting stars (Cate Blanchett, Juliette Binoche, Kevin Spacey), but it has been no less crucial for allowing British actors—whether Oscar nominees (Ralph Fiennes) or otherwise (Richard Griffiths)—repeated chances to shine. In the past, Ford Davies has specialized in a bemused quizzicality of an achingly moving sort: His doubting cleric in David Hare's Racing Demon won him an Olivier Award a decade ago and remains one of the most unaffectedly anguished perfs in my experience. And his last line in that play—“Is everything loss?”—could equally be asked by Lear, who ends Shakespeare's tragedy “a ruined piece of nature” embodying what the Duke of Albany calls “this great decay.”

The question was whether so apparently gentle and genial a presence as Ford Davies could summon from within the fury that starts Lear on his momentous fall. The answer is mostly yes, given a Lear who is at his best once he ceases to bray. Making a near-incantatory song out of “and my poor Fool is hanged,” or uttering the closing litany of “never-s” as a wounding decrescendo, this is a Lear that Racing Demon's Lionel Espy would recognize (and not just because of the actor's inimitably hangdog posture): However animated he seems by anger, his mad monarch is fueled by loss.

It's somewhat surprising, then, that the production finds what humor it does, much of it of the spiky, barbed sort sounded by Anthony O'Donnell's altogether first-rate Fool. A squawking chicken one minute, his bottom a drum for Lear to beat out a tune on the next, this Fool fully abets Lear in what Goneril refers to as the king's “new pranks.” At the same time, there's a cautionary slant to the Fool's tricks here, as if they exist merely to divert attention away from a one-time ruler turned “poor, infirm, weak, and despised.” Similarly redefining a key supporting role is Suzanne Burden's ravishingly rapacious Goneril, a sleek and sexually charged malcontent whose elegant coiffeur—both she and Lizzy McInnerny's able Regan have Princess Diana hair—conceals a cold, most likely absent heart.

Not all the production operates at this high level, with even Ford Davies succumbing at times to the generalized high-decibel wash that can afflict Kent's stagings of Shakespeare (cf. his Richard II two seasons ago but not his Coriolanus). Ford Davies isn't helped by a vocal timbre that makes it sound as if he is gargling the verse—on that front, he's shown up by David Ryall's faultlessly spoken Gloucester though virtually anyone would have trouble shouting down a clangorous storm scene that makes for some pretty amazing spectacle: Paul Brown's elegantly paneled contemporary set—in visual terms, the play could be taking place in Gosford Park—collapses in bits and pieces even as the rain sweeps in (audience members in possession of their own porous country manse may well get a particular fright).

Elsewhere, the modernism of the staging is sufficiently reined-in not to irk the purists while audacious enough to suggest that Peter Sellars might have lent an assist. (Lear delivers his opening partition of the realm before TV cameras until his querulousness gets the better of him and the plug, quite literally, is pulled.) Cast out onto the heath, the floral-crowned, fallen monarch enters into a timeless physical landscape, accompanied by a Gloucester whose earlier loss of his eyes found him seated alone on stage, his head encased in a lampshade, like some absurdist figure out of Magritte.

One could wish for an Edmund who is a shade less casual toward the language than a newly close-cropped James Frain (though Tom Hollander, after an all too typically petulant start, deepens beautifully into the contrasting part of Edgar). And some may find the scenic wizardry—Mark Henderson's near-expressionist lighting included overwhelms the import of the play rather than informing it. But listening to Lear speak of “this great stage of fools,” one feels the ever-primal pull into darkness of a play that dares say and show the most terrible things only to achieve a paradoxical cleansing by which you feel better about being alive.