[In the following excerpted review of Barry Kyle's Globe Theatre production of King Lear, Garner observes that the Globe stage is not well-suited to the tragic elements of the drama, and cites a number of weak individual performances within the drama's main plot.]

Presented with Macbeth and Cymbeline as part of the Globe's “Celtic Season 2001,” Kyle's King Lear is a starkly theatrical interpretation of Shakespeare's vast tragedy. The Globe stage is reduced to its forestage playing area, and the backdrop of its set is built out of weathered boards. In keeping with the production's scenic severity, what few props there are contribute to the effect of roughness and plainness. Lear's kingdom has a totalitarian feel to it: the men of his retinue are clad in boots, and their clothes (a mixture of the Jacobean and the modern) are neo-fascist in appearance. Carousing on stage, kicking a soccer ball as they make their way through the audience, they resemble a gang of thugs.

Julian Glover's Lear, the presiding authority of this world, is a stern and volatile figure, assured in his power over his kingdom while given to outbursts of rage and violence. When Cordelia refuses to gratify his ego, he hurls her roughly to the stage floor. As the consequences of his decision to partition his kingdom and disinherit his youngest daughter play themselves out, Lear becomes increasingly volatile; Glover delivers his 2.4 tirade at Goneril (“Dry up in her the organs of increase”) with sadistic fury. At the same time, impressive though his performance is, Glover's is not among the most commanding Lears of recent decades. In truth, it is hard not to feel that the production works against him in some ways. The storm scene, so crucial to our understanding of the King's inner turbulence, is staged with minimal dramatic impact. Lear and his Fool stagger across the stage, joined by a rope, but their physical gestures are the primary scenic evidence of the force of the storm they are combatting. The scene is given minimal sound accompaniment (unlike the final battle scenes, which are staged with drums and other noise resonating from different parts of the building). Glover's Lear is also not helped by Tonia Chauvet, who gives a verbally awkward, physically inhibited performance as Cordelia. Chauvet's inability to establish a human moral presence and to convey any convincing claim to her father's affection makes clear how much an audience's perception of Lear depends on his relationships to those who love and care for him.

The occasional mutedness of the play's central plot owes something, of course, to the Globe environment itself and the fact that the performance I attended took place on a bright (and hot) Wednesday afternoon. Such conditions mitigate against the modes of audience absorption that we are accustomed to in the controlled environments of modern theatre buildings. Spectators mill about, come and go, and talk to one another—the poetry of inner breakdown of Lear takes place within a broader urban soundscape comprised of airplane engines, sirens, and general noise. In the end, the overall strength of the Globe Theatre's King Lear results from the ways it exploits this performance environment, exploring the theatricality intrinsic to this darkest of Shakespeare's tragedies.

There are the usual entrances and exits through the audience, as well as theatrical elements that exist inside and outside the field of drama (a female vocalist sings, in view of the audience, above the dramatic action). But nowhere is this theatricality more evident than in the plot involving Edmund, Edgar, and Gloucester. Michael Gould's Edmund, who is first seen watching the events of the first scene from a pole to the front right of the stage, delivers his bastard's soliloquy from the yard. Playing the crowd like the Vice figures of morality drama, Edmund is outrageous in the intimacies he establishes with the audience. At one point, he took a water bottle from one of the spectators and had a drink, and during the soliloquy in which he debates whether he will take Goneril or Regan, members of the audience called out their opinions. The result of this bond with the audience is, not surprisingly, that Edgar comes off as even more of a “catastrophe of the old comedy” than he typically does. As the play goes on, however, the histrionic balance shifts, and Paul Brennan's Edgar acquires his own performative power. As with Kent (robustly performed by Bruce Alexander), disguise allows Edgar to express himself through multiple personae; as he plays mad with Lear and leads his father to the heights from which he wishes—in his despair—to jump, Edgar becomes a powerful presence on stage, a rival histrionic center to the natural dissembler Edmund.

Though Kyle's King Lear was considered by many of its London reviewers to be one of the Globe's more successful productions, there was a concern in the press that it emphasized the comic over the tragic. Behind this verdict one sensed a deeper critique: that, like other Globe shows, the production played to the audience rather than to a cultural tradition of which tragedy remains the most prestigious emblem. The performance environment of the restored Globe, it continues to be claimed, is more suited to comedy than to tragedy. It is hard not to hear condescension here toward the spectators who patronize the Globe and enjoy its fare. But despite the fact that different staging and casting choices might have given the production more conventionally “tragic” resonance, one of the accomplishments of the Globe King Lear may be to point to a different experience of the tragic, a more populist appreciation of tragedy's affective and interactive possibilities, and a deeper sensitivity to the ways in which performance conditions influence and complicate tragic response.