King Lear

This disappointing 1999 production of King Lear, starring and co-directed (with Tony Rotherham) by beloved British actor Brian Blessed, opens one of Shakespeare's most admired plays with random scenes from a Druidic ritual occurring beneath a lunar eclipse. The formidable Blessed, ordinarily a larger-than-life figure onscreen, here portrays the senile, desperate king as a man of compressed emotional violence, playing everything small—including, unfortunately, Lear's famous encounter with an epic storm. Blessed seems to have embraced the idea that a camera's ability to capture drama on an intimate scale means that the play's inherent power will be apparent in close-ups and hushed voices. But this strategy only diminishes the production, with Lear's daughters—Phillipa Peak as Cordelia, Claire Laurie as Regan, and Caroline Lennon as Goneril—all seeming thin, and Jason Riddington also coming across too lightly as Edmund, the illegitimate son of another ill-fated father (although Blessed's wife, Hildegarde Neil, fares much better as a slightly alien version of Lear's beloved Fool). Most scenes are shot in authentic-looking castle interiors, although nearly all of the exterior action shots look either muddled or silly. Shakespeare completists may want to add, but this is optional elsewhere. [Note: also newly available from Kultur is a 2003 mounting of Hamlet, starring Will Houston as the brooding Danish prince.] Aud: H, C, P. (T. Keogh)