Word: goneril
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...heroic, each line he utters a precious gift from the depleting stock of his time. But there are reasons beyond enlightened sentimentality to treasure this Lear. To support him Olivier has assembled an actors' aristocracy: Diana Rigg and Dorothy Tutin as Lear's treacherous daughters Regan and Goneril, Colin Blakely as the faithful Kent, John Hurt as Lear's Fool, Leo McKern as old Gloucester, David Threlfall (Smike in the R.S.C.'s Nicholas Nickleby) as Gloucester's loving son Edgar. Olivier has pruned the text significantly but fairly, tightening the action like a noose...
...rest of the cast fares less well, unable to break free of Sellars's spell, like automatons in a technocracy. Grace Shohet is properly bitchy as Goneril and Anne Clarke makes a vapidly cruel Regan but they remain one-dimensional. James Bundy plays Kent with remarkable sincerity but his brawl with Oswald (a surprisingly meaty role in the hands of David Prum) sinks to absurdity. Mathew Horsman and Judah Mandlebaum labor with Albany and Cornwall and Max Cantor skates onstage intermittently as the court's errand...