This year's installment of
The Greg & Tony Show brings us to what has always
been inevitable, as Antony Sher takes the title role in Shakespeare's bleak but
beautiful
King Lear. Gregory Doran's rule of the RSC has been criticised
(largely by me, to be fair,) for sometimes resembling an extended vanity project for
his husband, a criticism he's presumably not too worried about dispelling, as this
is a production whose aesthetic is all about showing Lear not so much as a king but
as a god. Funnily enough that meant I saw parallels with
the show I saw last night,
but where Haile Selassie worked into his old age to desperately try and cling on to
power, Lear starts to believe the adoration he gets is his divine right, and gives
up the power that is the only reason anyone respected him.
