English reserve is not what it used to be, except perhaps in the London theatre, where the applause tends to be scanter and more short-lived than in other European capitals, often barely sufficient to see the actors into the wings after their curtain call. Standing ovations are so rare as to be remarkable, but for the past couple of weeks at the Old Vic, almost a thousand people have been on their feet every night to applaud Glenda Jackson in Deborah Warner's production of King Lear.
At 80, Jackson has returned to the stage after an absence of 25 years, during which she served as a Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, standing down before last year's general election. Before turning to politics, she was among Britain's most celebrated actors, and the winner of two Best Actress Oscars, for Women in Love and A Touch of Class, as well as an Emmy for portraying Queen Elizabeth I in the television series Elizabeth R.
Jackson has acknowledged that the choice of one of Shakespeare's most demanding roles for her comeback was a risky one, and few could have predicted her triumph in producing one of the most powerful, memorable portrayals of Lear in a generation.
Erupts
Tiny and stick thin, she comes onstage in black trousers and a long red cardigan similar to the one she wore in the House of Commons when she issued a blistering denunciation of
Margaret Thatcher
after the former prime minister’s death in 2013. Playful at first as she divides the kingdom among her daughters, the menace in her clear, rasping voice erupts into wrath as she banishes Cordelia for her refusal to join in her sisters’ flattery of their father.
There is self-pity but no sentimentality in this Lear, which makes the king's descent into madness all the bleaker, a bleakness which is heightened by the economy of Warner's production. There are other fine performances too, notably Rhys Ifans as the Fool, tender and anarchic, a Superman costume draped across his shoulders as he plays a Dylanesque snatch on the harmonica, and falls asleep in a shopping trolley during the storm.
Sargon Yelda is a funny, brave and passionate Kent, and Celia Imrie and Jane Horrocks are at once vile and vulnerable as Goneril and Regan. But all eyes return to Jackson, by the end bare-legged in a baggy shirt, all boniness and frailty, in Lear's words "the thing itself".
There have been at least six productions of Lear in Britain this year, and Anthony Sher opened in the role at the Barbican this week. All these productions were planned long before June's EU referendum and this month's election of Donald Trump but the play feels curiously apposite for the moment we live in.
The last woman I saw playing Lear was the German actor Marianne Hoppe in Frankfurt in the summer of 1990, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. Hoppe was 81 and had been one of Germany's biggest stars during the Nazi years and was married to Gustaf Gruendgens, who was the inspiration for Heinrich Mann's Mephisto.
Exhilarating
That production resonated in a
Germany
which was watching an old order passing, to be replaced by a future that was exhilarating but also daunting and sometimes harsh. Brexit has produced no exhilaration, only fear – the Brexiteers’ that they will be betrayed, and the Remainers’ that they already have been.
Both Brexit and Trump’s victory have left some in the old, liberal order wondering if, like Lear, they have clung too long to privilege, and bungled their succession because of their own foolishness. But perhaps the main reason Lear strikes a chord today is because of what it says about truth, and the necessity of truth-tellers such as Cordelia, Kent and the Fool, as well as the price they pay for it.
In this, it chimes with WH Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, which many despairing Americans have been sharing online since Trump’s election last week, and its most familiar lines:
“All I have is a voice/
To undo the folded lie,/
The romantic lie in the brain/
Of the sensual man-in-the-street/
And the lie of Authority/
Whose buildings grope the sky:/
There is no such thing as the State/
And no one exists alone;/
Hunger allows no choice/
To the citizen or the police;/
We must love one another or die.”