National Theatre Live: King Lear

The work is a recording of a stage play. The play is King Lear. At the centre of the account are two ageing fathers. One is a king, the other his courtier. Both reject the children who truly love them. That blindness sets off a run of events. Ambition and treachery are inside those events. Family and state fall into a struggle for power. The struggle ends in bitter ways. Many count the play the greatest tragedy ever written. Ian McKellen plays Lear. Sinéad Cusack, Danny Webb, Kirsty Bushell and James Corrigan appear in Jonathan Munby and Ross MacGibbon’s British production of 2018, which runs two hundred and twenty seven minutes.