King Lear is a play I do know reasonably well, I had to study it in English as part of the topic themes of love of various poems, plays and books. Though I am more familiar with other Shakespeare plays. This King Lear is excellent, slightly superior to Olivier's version which apart from the music was great. One here though may wish for sets that gave you a better idea of where the production was meant to be set. Although I didn't think the production values looked too bad I was rather confused to where it was supposed to be set.

Trevor Nunn's stage direction is very effective, it is lively in pace yet manages to give the play the right amount of poignancy and intensity it should. The picture and sound are crisp and clear. The dialogue as always with Shakespeare is brilliant, both poetic and haunting in King Lear and coming across as that here as well. The performances from a great cast are on the most part spot on. Ian McKellen is pitch-perfect as Lear. I do remember it did take some time when I was studying it to feel genuine sympathy throughout for the character(I do agree the way he is in the first act may put some people off, especially if you are not familiar with the play beforehand). McKellen however does make you feel sympathy for him, his quieter and perhaps more intimate moments are suitably gentle and moving, and the character's intensity is intense.

Romola Garai's Cordelia more than holds her own, I was genuinely moved by her also. I have also rarely seen a better played Fool than Sylvester McCoy, sometimes he is hilarious but at the same time, mainly because of the Fool's heartfelt sympathy to Lear, he does make the audience make us feel for him, his fall is very tragic and we do feel it. In contrast, there is a suitably evil Goneril from Frances Barber who also gives the character depth. As well as a fine performance from Ben Meyjes as Edgar, his madness is very convincing, he handles the many complexities of the character better than most and his aiding with Gloucester's fall proves to be really quite poignant.

Jonathan Hyde shows great loyalty as Kent. Phillip Winchester is not the most subtle of Edmunds, though in fairness trying to give subtlety to a psychopathic role is not easy, but you do clearly see his deviousness and for me this is an Edmund that truly gets under your skin. William Gaunt is fine as Gloucester, as mentioned his fall is movingly done on all counts. Overall, the cast do much to make this production of King Lear as successful as it turned out to be. 9/10 Bethany Cox

This is a video production of a recent Royal Shakespeare Company performance of the play. I had heard about it because a friend of mine was living in London once (a little jealous) and told me that she had gone to see a performance of King Lear in which Ian MacKellan played the lead role (very jealous). So, when I discovered that this video was available on Amazon I bought it immediately. Generally I have not appreciated many of the play to television performances, especially the old BBC releases because they tend to take a very minimalist approach. While I find the minimalist approach on stage to be very good (most Shakespeare productions that I have seen to date have all taken the minimalist approach to scenery, but they also spend a lot of detail on the costumes). When it comes to movies based on Shakespearian plays, I do tend to prefer better scenery.

It is difficult to determine the period that Nunn has set his version of the play, though the costumes tend to suggest early 20th century, though my understanding of Shakespeare is that the period is generally timeless. Normally when plays were performing, contemporary costumes were used, however I have noticed that a lot of the movies (and plays) these days tend to have a period set at least prior to World War II. Obviously in Shakespeare's time there were no guns so there generally is no reference to firearms, however many of the plays at the time are very minimalistic on the description front, and only very important actions are mentioned. It is interesting to compare a written form of a play by Shakespeare, which would have minimal directions, to say Bernard Shaw, who extravagantly describes the scenery in his plays.

This time watching through Lear what I noticed was how Edmund is manipulating the situation to his own advantage. He is a bastard and thus has no entitlement of anything, but through his scheming and intrigue, he carefully removes everybody that could be a threat to his rise to power, and then brings himself close to both of the sisters (which would raise him to the position of king). King Lear is also a very bleak play, one in which the ending has the stage floor littered with bodies. In a normal Hollywood production, the invasion by the French would have been successful, in that we understand that Cordellia and the King of France are good people, where are the other sisters and Edmund are scheming manipulators. However, they do not win, they lose, and further, they are also imprisoned. It is only when Edgar finally confronts his wicked half-brother that they are freed, but by that time it is already too late. Both Goneril and Regan are dead, and Cordelia has been hung. To be honest, rewriting the ending so that Cordelia survives, to me, completely destroys the play.

This is the best televised KING LEAR I've seen since Laurence Olivier's spectacular all-star version in the mid-Eighties.

The cast is uniformly excellent. Ian McKellen shines as King Lear, both tearful and noble, and Romola Garai is radiant and tender as Cordelia. Frances Barber and Monica Dolan are both deliciously desirable and genuinely menacing as the scheming sisters, Regan and Goneril. Sylvester McCoy is a touching and witty fool, and Philip Winchester is a dangerously seductive Edmund.

Another reviewer raised an interesting question: in what era does this KING LEAR take place? Laurence Olivier's classic version was set in ancient England, with Stonehenge like backdrops and characters resplendent in heavy Celtic ornaments of gold and silver.

This story, however, is clearly meant to be set in Czarist Russia. Lear's hundred knights are re-imagined as singing, dancing, somersaulting Cossacks. His daughters wear delectable ball gowns. And Lear himself is clearly patterned on real-life Russian author Leo Tolstoy. The intriguing question is why Trevor Nunn went this route.

The answer lies in a classic literary essay, "Lear, Tolstoy and The Fool" by George Orwell. Orwell recounts how, in his last years, the one-time womanizer and literary lion Tolstoy became savagely puritanical, renouncing not only sex and alcohol but the literary classics of his youth. He even wrote a religious pamphlet denouncing Shakespeare as a depraved and immoral writer of the decadent past! Orwell does not mock Tolstoy for his opinions, but he does engage in some fascinating speculation about Tolstoy's hatred of Shakespeare. He points out that the last years of Tolstoy's life actually parallel the story of King Lear in uncanny detail. Just like Lear, Tolstoy attempted to renounce his privileges and power as a member of the Russian nobility. His children turned against him when he attempted to give away the family fortune to the poor. He fled from his own lands and died in poverty, accompanied by one faithful daughter.

All this makes for fascinating viewing, but in the final analysis it's the acting and directing that make this production a classic. The intimate use of the camera allows the viewer to go in depth with characters who are usually played as one dimensional monsters. Watch the way Monica Dolan's Regan reaches for her wine cup whenever she's nervous or upset, and you can easily understand what causes her eventual downfall. Watch how Goneril's henchman Oswald turns his back when Goneril is making out with handsome Edmund. Notice how the King of France is exasperated when Cordelia looks to Burgundy instead of him after Lear denounces her as an outcast. All of these characters grow in this sensitive film presentation of Shakespeare's greatest play.