Minerva, Chichester
This return to star-driven Shakespeare has in Frank Langella a commanding Lear still driven by a craving for love
We are used to director's Shakespeare. This production, which plays 32 performances in Chichester before moving to Brooklyn, is unequivocally actor's Shakespeare. It is staged with great clarity by Angus Jackson as a timeless moral fable. But what impresses is the spellbinding power of that fine American actor, Frank Langella, best known in Britain as the disintegrating president inFrost/Nixon, who plays Lear and wins.
Langella has that mysterious quality known as "weight". It is not merely that he is tall, has a voice that could be heard in Bognor Regis and is more oak than ash: it is that he has an authority that compels our attention. This is palpable from the start when he needs help ascending the steps of Robert Innes Hopkins's set, which looks like a...
This return to star-driven Shakespeare has in Frank Langella a commanding Lear still driven by a craving for love
We are used to director's Shakespeare. This production, which plays 32 performances in Chichester before moving to Brooklyn, is unequivocally actor's Shakespeare. It is staged with great clarity by Angus Jackson as a timeless moral fable. But what impresses is the spellbinding power of that fine American actor, Frank Langella, best known in Britain as the disintegrating president inFrost/Nixon, who plays Lear and wins.
Langella has that mysterious quality known as "weight". It is not merely that he is tall, has a voice that could be heard in Bognor Regis and is more oak than ash: it is that he has an authority that compels our attention. This is palpable from the start when he needs help ascending the steps of Robert Innes Hopkins's set, which looks like a...
- 11/11/2013
- by Michael Billington
- The Guardian - Film News
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