Ten Productions of King Lear
- W. Y. Geng
- Dec 9, 2015
- 14 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
One of Shakespeare’s most enduring tragedies, King Lear explores domestic strife, territorial division, and the complexities of familial relationships. The play unfolds through parallel narratives of two aging fathers, Lear and the Duke of Gloucester, both grappling with loyalty, betrayal, and the fragility of human bonds. Through its meditations on passion and reason, power and vulnerability, King Lear interrogates human existence with striking contemporary relevance. In this essay, I will introduce ten productions of King Lear, examining how directorial vision, acting style, design choices, cultural contexts, and the sociopolitical zeitgeist shape and reframe its meanings.
1. Harley Granville-Barker’s 1940 production
To witness a war during a war is both daunting and haunting. Directed by Harley Granville-Barker and starring John Gielgud, the 1940 King Lear production at the Old Vic was, according to The Times, the “first genuine theatrical occasion of the war”. Staged at the outbreak of World War II, the dark, mad, and tumultuous world of King Lear was realized—both literally and figuratively, in fantasy and in reality. As Gielgud delivered Lear’s broken words onstage, the world outside was falling apart. Fear had never been so real; madness had never made more sense. Beyond illustrating the inevitability and inescapable consequences of war, Granville-Barker’s production conveyed “the patience needed to endure, and the value of simple compassion” amid political turmoil and existential crisis. Gielgud later recalled that “audience members would come to his dressing room to thank him for the pride and courage the production gave them amid the horror of war”. The impact of the production was thus inseparable from its historical moment.
2. Peter Brook’s 1962 production
Extremely experimental, distinctively stylistic, and aggressively modern, Peter Brook’s 1962 King Lear revealed a bold, bleak, and bare vision of the play. Influenced by postwar avant-garde dramatists such as Antonin Artaud, Joan Littlewood, and Bertolt Brecht, Brook’s production incorporated highly physical performances and a metaphysical scenography that exposed “the mechanics of the stage and created startling visual effects”. The bareness of the stage reflected Brook’s concept of the empty space, which he defined as “any space in which theatre takes place”. Onstage, from nothing comes everything; nowhere leads to everywhere. As emptiness expands, plenitude emerges, saturating the simplicity of the set with symbols and suggestions.
Milton Sulman described Brook’s King Lear as building “an eerie world somewhere between an antiseptic operating theatre and a concrete segment of nowhere.” The staging consisted of three plain white walls, against which hung an oriental-looking shape, symbolizing “tiny humanity dwarfed by a vast, bleak universe”. Principally Brechtian, the costume and lighting designs were simple yet sharp—precise and deliberate—serving to “[make] the audience take stock of the scene before being engulfed in automatic response”. Rather than treating King Lear as timeless, Brook grounded it in a specific, brutal reality, depicting a world governed by violence, cruelty, and stark realism. His barren, unforgiving stage deepened the psychological complexity of the play, transcending its classical spirit to achieve a kind of primitive modernity.
Brook believed that theatre is shaped by its historical moment: “A production is only right at a given moment, and anything that it asserts dogmatically today will be wrong fifty years from now”. His King Lear reflected a nihilistic and apocalyptic vision, pairing Shakespeare with Beckett and linking the play to the political agonies of the twentieth century. The weight of history, particularly the Holocaust shaped how audiences engaged with the play, making it impossible to separate King Lear from the brutal realities of the modern world. The production was rehearsed during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The looming fear of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union influenced how the produciton was received. As Alexander Leggatt observed, “actors and audience had this fear in their bones, and the refusal of comfort at the end was true both to the text and to the audience’s perception of its own world”.
3. Adrian Noble’s 1982 Production
Shakespeare, who described Lear’s world as a “great stage of fools”, best encapsulated Adrian Noble’s 1982 production. The Fool, played by Antony Sher, became the focal point of discussion and debate for what critics called his “shameless eclecticism”. Reviewers, when commenting on Sher’s performance, did not settle on a single comparison: Grock, Little Titch, Max Wall, George Formby, Michael Crawford, Chaplin, Rigoletto, and Beckett’s tramps. Sher blended various theatrical conventions and performance styles, creating a Fool that was as much an experiment as a role. “There is something very liberating about wearing a red nose, both externally and internally”, Sher reflected. “You look, feel, and sound odd, exaggerated, caricatured”. However, his Fool, overtly stylized and overly exaggerated, disrupted the balance of the play, at times overshadowing other characters.
The Fool is the most subtle and spiritual role in King Lear. He is the truth-teller who lies faithfully, the jester who penetrates suffering with laughter and expresses sorrow with tenderness. He is both the outsider who comments on events onstage and the ultimate insider who embodies Lear’s inner world.
During the production rehearsal, Britain was at war with Argentina. The production drew directly from its political climate. The scene in which Cordelia’s soldiers stacked planks and passed sandbags down a line was inspired by televised footage of British troops preparing for deployment in Plymouth Harbor.
4. Adrian Noble’s 1993 Production
Adrian Noble’s 1993 production of King Lear was bright and colorful, with the characters dressed in Regency coats. Designed by Anthony Ward, the production featured a monumental globe that symbolized the psychological and dramatic shifts onstage, alternating colors from ethereal blue to bloody red. Additionally, a giant map of Lear's kingdom was papered onto the stage floor, only to be torn apart—mirroring the fragmentation of Lear’s realm and family.
Robert Stephens’s portrayal of Lear embodied both poignancy and vulnerability, earning widespread praise from critics. One of the production’s most striking moments occurred when the globe cracked open, releasing a torrent of dry sand during the violent scene of Gloucester’s blinding and Cornwall's castration. Through the use of symbolic props and bold visual metaphors, the production achieved a highly stylized and visually stunning effect.
5. Helena Kaut-Howson’s 1997 production
Helena Kaut-Howson’s 1997 production of King Lear in Leicester was an experiment in which the director used gender-blind casting to explore various possibilities and contradictions within the play. Although the gender twist was a defining feature, both the director and her leading actress, Kathryn Hunter, denied the relevance of feminism and gender issues to the production, instead focusing on old age and “human experiences that were not necessarily gendered”. Unintentionally yet inevitably, Hunter’s performance foregrounded the interplay between Lear’s role and her gender, and expanded the character’s physical and psychological dimensions by combining maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity, paternity and maternity. Some critics reacted negatively to this transvestite Lear, or to cross-gendered Shakespeare in general, arguing that the gender experiment undermined Shakespearean authority and amounted to nothing more than a “meaningless exercise in modish casting”. Others, however, believed that Hunter’s Lear transcended gender, and that the issue ultimately faded from significance.
The production thus opened the possibility of examining the play through a gender lens. The cross-gendered Lear was a successful interpretation from both textual and creative perspectives. One often-overlooked aspect when staging this play is the absence of a mother or queen. The fact that Lear raises his daughters alone justifies the artistic choice of rendering him as both mother and father. Additionally, the transvestite Lear illuminated critical issues concealed beneath the traditionally male Lear and achieved magnificent and meaningful effects. As Kaut-Howson stated, the moment Lear cursed his daughters “attained a whole new level with a woman's Lear, because when a man does it, it’s just a vicious little man, cursing a woman, hating her, but when mother curses her daughter, it becomes a terrifying moment”. This perspective shed new insight into the behavioral and psychological dynamics of the wicked sisters. Instead of being evil from the outset, Regan and Goneril might have gradually descended into perversity.
Beyond textual analysis, Hunter’s Lear was also rooted in lived experience and inner reality—the ultimate, universal truth sought by all forms of art and literature. Inspired by the recent death of her elderly mother, Kaut-Howson infused the production with her personal emotions and reflections: “When she was dying... I could see that she was thinking, and I could see that she was going through all her past, which was terrible and very stormy, full of enormous, incredible struggles and sacrifices and king of Lear-like delusions as well... So I saw her going through all this in her head... And then when she died I slept in the house when she lived and... I dreamt [of] her shaking the walls of it from outside, like Lear... like Lear in the storm”.
Drawing from her family history, Kaut-Howson shifted the play’s setting to post-World War II Eastern Europe and developed a dominant motif of hunting and being hunted: “My mother, being Jewish and Polish, spent the war being hunted and continually running from place to place, hiding, and working in the fields, and then being recognized again. So the theme of hunting and being hunted in King Lear was very strongly fished out in our production”. This historical backdrop juxtaposed the postwar nihilistic interpretations of the play—put forth by Jan Kott and Peter Brook—with the redemptive perspectives suggested by A. C. Bradley and Grigori Kozintsev. Far more than an experimental or conceptual gimmick, the twists of gender, time, and space in this production represented a genuine rendering of human reality and a powerful realization of artistic truth.
6. Peter Hall’s 1997 production
Finally, we have an old-fashioned, minimalist, fast-moving production of King Lear, with characters dressed in formal Jacobean costumes delivering Shakespeare’s lines with lucidity, artistry, and ease. Acclaimed by critics and well-received by the public, Peter Hall’s 1997 production at the Old Vic restored the vocal and imaginary space, stripping away any distracting visual spectacle and preserving the raw force of Shakespeare’s verse and the power of its storytelling. As one reviewer noted, “it is a real pleasure to hear the verse spoken so well... I have never been more aware of the play’s architecture, both in the grand design and the detail, the intricate patterning not just of scenes but recurring vocal motifs such as ‘nothing’, which punctuates the whole play like a terrifying void.” This statement highlights the ambivalent nature of technology and stagecraft. While enriched by scenery, theatre remains, at its core, an art form rooted in language and live performance. An audience does not only watch a play but also hears it. The evolution of theatre technology both enhances and diminishes this experience, considering that the most powerful lines and enduring plays were written in an era when even minor lighting and sound effects posed challenges. When form overshadows content, substance takes second place to style. Modern staging sometimes prioritizes spectacle—vision and sound—at the expense of the architecture and rhythm of words. Can stage scenery, so easily overdone, ever match the visual eloquence and pictorial latitude of cinema?
7. Tadashi Suzuki’s 1988 Stage Adaptation
Original, outlandish, and provocative, The Tale of Lear, directed by Japanese avant-garde dramatist Tadashi Suzuki, shocked audiences with a postmodern style that was both visually enlightening and emotionally evocative. Borrowing elements from Noh and Kabuki theatre, this highly theatrical and stylized adaptation of King Lear redefined the boundaries of dramatic arts, reshaping expressionism, absurdism, and radicalism. Compressed into a 100-minute performance and staged with an all-male cast, the adaptation broadly followed Shakespeare’s play but reimagined Lear as an old man in a nursing home, accompanied by a Nurse who also doubled as the Fool. Throughout the production, the Nurse silently yet avidly read a book, seemingly dictating the dramatic action onstage. This character foregrounded the notion of storytelling, introduced a Brechtian distancing effect, and established a play-within-a-play structure.
The inclusion of the Nurse blurred the boundary between fantasy and reality, leading the audience to experience the play as a figment of the Old Man’s imagination and a real-time visualization of the book she was reading. The doubling of the Nurse and the Fool created an alienating effect which, rather than being derived from Brecht’s influence, pointed directly to the source of Brecht’s innovation.
Brecht studied verfremdungseffekt and gestus in both Asian theatre and Shakespeare’s works. He observed that traditional Asian acting emphasized physical gesture, embodying emotional detachment and a self-conscious awareness of performance. Expressing their awareness of being watched, actors in these traditions “present” their roles rather than “play” or “become” the characters. In Suzuki’s production, the Nurse did not portray the Fool in a conventional sense; instead, she presented the character, reading the Fool’s lines aloud directly from the book. The character doubling and play-within-a-play structure also reflected a defining feature of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy—his frequent use of double plots, parallel structures, narrative layering, and character doubling to heighten the play’s self-awareness and theatrical representation.
The Fool in King Lear has traditionally served dual functions: as comic relief, providing the audience with a break from the main plot, and as an observer-commentator, existing both within and outside the dramatic action. Suzuki’s Nurse/Fool embodied this duality, functioning as a reader, an outsider, and a witness to the unfolding tragedy.
Carefully designed and meticulously choreographed, Suzuki’s production transformed the literary imagination of Shakespeare into a physical and metaphysical theatrical space. Rather than relying on spoken storytelling, the dance-like movements and tableau-like stillness conveyed the narrative. As Hilary DeVries observed, “a mime-like manifestation of character [is] the essence of Suzuki’s theatrical methodology”, suggesting “a focus not on individual character and behavior but on suspended states of mind and emotions and their relative postures and juxtapositions.” Extremely physical yet exceptionally spiritual, Suzuki’s King Lear moved outward in its expression while simultaneously delving inward into the unspoken depths of human tragedy.
The production’s sculptural posturing and use of stillness raise fundamental questions about acting methodology and staging choices. Acting is an art form that exists above nature and reality—it is saturated with intention and design. Studying visual artworks can provide valuable insights into how artists capture emotion and narrative. One example is Michelangelo’s David, in which the sculptor chose to depict David at the precise moment of decision—the instant between “conscious choice and conscious action.” His contrapposto stance and turned head create a pose that is natural, exact, and powerful, making that fleeting moment eternal.
Theatre, compared to painting or photography, often moves too quickly for its meaning to be fully absorbed in real time. Critics and scholars frequently deconstruct performances into discrete moments, analyzing each paused segment to fully unpack its impact. Pause and stillness provide both time and space for the audience to process and reflect. Onstage, no motion is part of the motion; stillness is as much an action as movement. In Suzuki’s King Lear, the slow, deliberate motion and carefully composed stillness not only translated but also transcended the unspeakable language of this enduring tragedy.
8. Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 Film Production
Now, the vast space of Shakespeare’s stage finds its equal on the screen. Ran, directed by Akira Kurosawa, loosely follows the storyline of King Lear while preserving the play’s core spirit. In this screen adaptation, Kurosawa takes full advantage of cinema’s unique relationship with time and space to render the dark, turbulent, and wild world described in the original text. Set in sixteenth-century Japan, this cross-cultural interpretation of King Lear achieved both international commercial success and critical acclaim. “What’s remarkable about Ran,” wrote film critic Kenneth Turan, “is that the drama enhances the spectacle the same way the spectacle bolsters the drama. Few other directors had Kurosawa’s ability to convey the intimate as well as the epic, to handle stillness as well as violence.” Indeed, theatre vocalizes while cinema visualizes; the stage describes, the screen depicts; the theatre liberates, the camera captures. A master of cinematic form, Kurosawa projected Lear’s inner chaos and political turmoil onto the screen using vast physical landscapes, eloquent visual composition, and expressive, suggestive camera angles and edits. The war between England and France—often presented offstage in theatre through sound effects—becomes in Ran a striking and ravaging battle sequence, conceived with no dialogue or sound. With vibrant, symbolic color palettes, Kurosawa paints the story onto the cinematic canvas, translating this magnificent work of literature into an expressionistic language of image, motion, and silence.
9. Trevor Nunn’s 2007 production
Critics hailed Trevor Nunn’s 2007 production of Lear King in which Ian Mckellen gave a multi-dimensional performance of Lear as a kind father, willful king, and feeble old man, demonstrating a physiological and psychological virtuosity and energy an actor can only hope to achieve. As stated by Germaine Greer, McKellen's method “had more to do with impersonation than interpretation”. His Lear was every inch a king and every bit a man, who aged, angered, sinned, and suffered, going through a spiritual and moral journey in which his mind rotted and grew, his madness rose and fell, his spirit decayed and developed, and his character transformed and eventually transcended. What ultimately made this production distinctive, however, was the daring nude scene when McKellen dropped his trousers and displayed his genitals, which became the determinate moment for both the character and the audience. “At the very point when McKellen mightily distracts his audience by exposing himself, Lear is realizing that kingship is a delusion, whether it be sovereignty over a state or over oneself.” The naked Lear not only pushed the performance to its artistic and physical boundaries, but also penetrated the cultural and literal nuances in the text.
The juxtaposition of nature and nakedness is of great significance in Lear King. As stated by Judy Kronenfeld in her book “King Lear and the Naked Truth”, “Clothing” is a convenient and crucial metaphor for “working through some of the major oppositions in Western thought such as nature versus culture, wisdom versus eloquence, the literal versus the figurative, object versus sign.” The sisters’ eloquence is clothed; Cordelia’s plainness is naked. Lear as a willful king is clothed; Lear as a powerless man is naked. According to Kronenfeld, Cordelia, Kent, and ultimately Lear “express truth, true feeling, or essence” with fewer and sharper words as opposed to other characters’ fake and flattering speeches. To some extent, the play is a process of deconstruction and denudation, where all forms of fabrication and decorum are eventually stripped off, leaving only the dark, bare, and naked truth under the light.
Additionally, the play’s representations of nakedness and clothing also reflect the religious elements of Zeitgeist. In a sense, the audience’s views on nakedness determine how they would respond to the play. Depending on time and period, nakedness carries different meanings. In Renaissance Christian culture, according to Kronenfeld:
[N]ature, when understood as the God given, as God’s handwork (analogous to nakedness as primal innocence), is superior to culture or art, understood as human traditions or institutions (analogous to clothing as “polluted” or deceitful). On the other hand, nature, when understood as fallen, perverted, or weak (analogous to shameful nakedness) is inferior to culture, art, discipline, or grace, understood as the supplier, repairer, or rectifier of nature (and analogous to clothing as decent necessity, or essential protection).
Moreover, as stated by Walter Cohen, “Edgar’s concluding preference for feeling over platitude surely belongs in the radical Protestant tradition.” Therefore, the shameless or shameful naked Lear and the corresponding audience’s reaction have significant connections of Zeitgeist.
Set in Ruritanian court, the production was beautiful designed and richly rendered, with the characters dressed in ornate military uniforms and opulent bell-like dresses. As stated in Susannah Clapp’s review, “Lear’s rabble-rousing followers are Cossacks, with fur hats and greatcoats - is got up as a traditional 19th-century theatre.” Unlike many other productions which underplayed sound effects, Nunn’s production overplayed aural drama, where loud shots, thunderclaps, animal noises, trumpets and organs interplayed.
Further Notes on Nudity and Nakedness
Erwin Panofsky brought up the “four symbolical meanings of nudity” distinguished by “medieval moral theology”. “Nuditas naturalis” is “the natural state of man.” Natural nakedness represents nature as fallen, perverted, or weak, in a shameful or helpless state “conductive to humility” — that is, requiring grace, culture, art, or discipline to repair or rectify it. “Nuditas virtualis” is described as a “symbol of innocence,” “preferably innocence acquired through confession.” Such symbolic nudity employs the Christina trope of divestment of polluted “clothing” to figure the recovery of an original innocence. “Nuditas criminalis,” the third category, is “a sign of lust, vanity, and the absence of all virtues”; it is a category exemplifying perverted or fallen nature, and one that assumed that rationality requires being clothed. “Nuditas temporalis” is “the lack of earthly goods, which can be voluntary” as in the practice of the Apostles or monks or necessitated by poverty, invokes nudity as simply positive symbol of a “natural” state superior to human traditions or institutions.
10. David Farr’s 2010 Production
In his 2010 production of King Lear, David Farr radically changed the text and rendered a dark version of the play. The critics, however, criticized his approach as too superficial and theatrical, “without digging into [the play’s] knotted existential depths.” The production saw hyperbolic mechanical performance and traits of the Theatre of Cruelty. The highly exaggerated violence undermined the intimacy, affections, and subtleness of the characters’ suffering. The characters were flat, single dimensional.
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