King Lear – Review – Sheffield Crucible Theatre
By Clare Jenkins, September 2026
It’s 21 years since Ian McDiarmid last appeared as Lear on the Crucible stage. Then, it was in Edward Bond’s play Lear. Now, aged 82, he returns in the title role of this Shakespearian tragedy: as the man who, by testing the love and loyalty of his three daughters, loses his kingdom, his mind and ultimately his life.
If at first his performance seems light on majesty and authority, McDiarmid – an award-winning stage actor as well as Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars film franchise – more than makes up for it as Titas Halder’s tightly focussed production progresses.
Initially more petulant than powerful, more frail than fierce, his Lear grows in stature even as the character himself descends into confusion, painful regret and madness.
Betrayed first by his pitiless eldest daughter Goneril (a magnificently icy Katie Winpenny), then by the equally ruthless Regan (a statuesque Justina Kehinde), he reveals a man stripped of both regal and paternal status, unable to comprehend the depth of his fall. The result is both moving and mesmerising – and intensely human.
“Pathos and vulnerability”
Accompanied into exile only by his loyal Fool (the nimble, break-dancing and popping Max Revell) and two courtiers in disguise (Mark Holgate’s sympathetic, Yorkshire-accented Kent, Harry Redding’s youthful ‘Mad Tom’), there is real pathos and vulnerability in his doddery and demented utterances.
‘I fear I am not in my perfect mind…I am old and foolish… Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven…’ Both pitiful and heartbreakingly playful, McDiarmid’s performance is the self-reflective centre of a quietly disturbing production. At the end, imprisoned along with his youngest (and only loyal) daughter Cordelia, he finds comfort in his madness, tenderly trying to reassure her that they will ‘Sing like birds in the cage’.
The actors, however, are curiously served by Richard Kent’s unremittingly bleak set – a stark metallic wall and grey circular shallow pit that wouldn’t look out of place in a film set inside a dystopian spaceship or a military bunker. Perhaps it’s supposed to represent an ancient stone circle (Shakespeare based his play on the legend of a Celtic king)? The only prop is a branch of a tree for the blinded Gloucester (a very finely judged performance by David Birrell) to cling onto in the middle of the apocalyptic storm.
[A word to the wise: if blood isn’t your thing, avert your eyes in the brutal blinding scene, which opens with Regan, Goneril and their husbands (Jay Saighal’s regretful Cornwall, Milo Twomey’s Albany) exploding onto the scene like avenging furies out of a futuristic blockbuster.]
“Unusually intense”
The costumes, too, blending medieval and modern, are almost defiantly unencouraging – shiny black leather jackets, drop-crotch pants, sludge-coloured tunics… When Cordelia (Bebe Sanders) – exiled to France after refusing to play her father’s ‘who loves me most’ game – finally reappears towards the end of the play, the raincoat covering her floor-length dress makes her look like the bland civil servant she sounds like. Albeit a civil servant with a dagger tucked into her belt – by this stage, everyone has turned feral, hiding a weapon somewhere on their person.
This lack of aesthetic appeal may well be intended to force the audience to concentrate on the words (of which there are many over the course of nearly three hours). But it makes it hard to differentiate between luxurious palace life and the harsh outdoors, despite composer Sarah Angliss and sound designer Emma Laxton’s throbbing soundtrack, the odd chirping bird signifying the natural world. Ryan Day’s lighting, meanwhile, magnificently conjures up the violence of the thunderstorm, with alarming flashes of light and clouds of volcanic smoke.
Reservations aside, this is an unusually intense production, with an impressively unified ensemble. A word, too, for Fode Simbo’s cunningly deceptive Edmund, Gloucester’s illegitimate son and the Iago-like figure who turns father against son, wife against husband, sister against sister.
King Lear runs at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre until 19th September: sheffieldtheatres.co.uk
images: Johan Persson
Clare is a journalist, former BBC Radio broadcaster and co-founder of the independent radio production company Pennine Productions. She and her national newspaper travel writer husband Stephen McClarence have been regular visitors to India for different work commissions.
Two years ago, their book, Teatime at Peggy’s: A Glimpse of Anglo-India, was published by Bradt: https://www.bradtguides.com/product/teatime-at-peggys/, and is now in its 2nd edition. They are currently working on a sequel.
Clare’s also written a number of books based on personal testimony, and is currently compiling an oral history of Sheffield Newspapers for Sheffield Archives and the British Library.
