SOURCE: Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Review of King Lear. New Statesman 131, no. 4575 (25 February 2002): 42, 44.

In the following review of Jonathan Kent's production of King Lear for the Almeida Theatre, Duncan-Jones praises the combined performances—including Oliver Ford Davies's Lear and those of the supporting cast—but laments weaknesses in setting and design.

King Lear, with which the Almeida Theatre's run at King's Cross is coming to a close, gives the company a last opportunity to showcase the theatrical potential of an old bus depot. Two possibilities must have presented themselves: a primitive Lear, or an explicit “bus depot” one. The first would have permitted use of the deep, dark spaces of the huge playing area to represent the uncultivated tracts of pre-Christian Britain, in which “For many miles about / There's scarce a bush.” In the second, a 1950s bus shelter could have figured as the hovel in which Lear and his...