Glenda Jackson, just coming off her run in Three Tall Women on Broadway, has already set the date of her return.
Jackson will appear as the title character in King Lear in the play's Broadway run next year.
Jackson is no stranger to this role, playing it previously in 2016 at London's Old Vic. The Broadway production will be entirely different, with new staging.
The joy of watching Glenda Jackson as Lear in Sam Gold's lean and clear production is that she doesn't approach every well-known speech or phrasing at a grandiloquent gallop. Jackson's most noticeable verbal extravagance is an almost comically elongated rolling of her r's, and so "crawl" becomes crrrrrrrrrawl." (She also played Lear in 2016 in the U.K., though in a different, critically hailed production; it too rang with the present-day echoes of Brexit.)
Much of Jackson's performance takes place on the elocutionary level. She doesn't so much speak her lines as seethe them. Vowels are stretched for whooshing emphasis; consonants are crashed upon with the force of a speeding car against a highway divider. The diction is so pyrotechnical that it may come as a surprise to learn that Jackson's Lear is more personalized this time around, more human. In London, she was a stylized archetype waging war against the gods. Here, she's a declining father whose dictatorial temperament is making for a rough ending. Unfortunately, the production and her performance often seem at loggerheads.
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