SOURCE: Neill, Heather. Review of King Lear. Times Educational Supplement, no. 4431 (1 June 2001): S24.

In the following review of director Barry Kyle's King Lear at the Globe, Neil admires the “clarity” of the staging and highlights themes of family and political disintegration in the production.

The Globe is transformed for this first production of the theatre season. A rough plank facing hides the familiar decorated back of the stage, and swags of fairy-lit leaves and twigs are looped around the galleries. The latter add to a sense of occasion, but not perhaps the right one, being too reminiscent of a high street shop window at Christmas. The rough boards are, however, in keeping with the directness of Barry Kyle's production.

The interlinked stories of the two families of Lear and Gloucester provide a means of exploring wider disintegration, the breakdown of authority and accepted sexual morality, madness and civil...