Pocket Play Review: King Lear at the American Shakespeare Center

Author Julie Hammonds is on a quest to complete Shakespeare’s canon in calendar year 2025. In these pocket play reviews, she records brief impressions of each show she sees.

• The Play: King Lear
• The Company: American Shakespeare Center
• The Stage: Blackfriars Playhouse, “the world’s first re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre”
• Run Dates: February 13 through April 19, 2025
• Memorable for: the intimacy of Blackfriars Playhouse, a re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre, which somehow made the Lear family drama more intimate and painful
• The Helen McKenzie Award for proving that Shakespeare didn’t write roles for men, he wrote them for actors goes to Angela Iannone as King Lear

Pocket Play Review: It might seem like the grand fairy tale that is Shakespeare’s King Lear would lose some of its grandeur when tucked inside an intimate indoor performance space such as the Blackfriars Playhouse. The small theatre holds only about 300 audience members.

Surely the famous scene where the aging Lear faces his terror of going mad as a thunderstorm rages around him requires a big stage and the support of massive lighting and sound effects?

As it turns out, no: Not when you have a commanding actor like Angela Iannone playing Lear. Throughout the play, this fine actor showed us the strength of a king and the physical and mental costs of grief and advancing age.

Though the thunderstorm was conveyed in subtle sound effects, it was Iannone’s acting that conveyed Lear’s terror of vulnerability. And because plays at Blackfriars are performed in shared light, we in the audience didn’t sit in darkness, simply watching from an emotional distance. We shared Lear’s journey, experiencing the pain of betrayal, the anguish of love and loss, the sweetness of his relationship with the Fool (played with magnificent tenderness by Summer England).

This great theatre, a re-creation of the early indoor stages on which Shakespeare’s company would have played, turns out to be an ideal setting for what director Paul Barnes called “a tale like no other … rendered through some of the most powerful poetry ever written.”

In sum: In the intimate space of the Blackfriars Playhouse, we don’t just see King Lear, we feel the pain of betrayal and the fear of senility, the heartbreak of a broken family and the tenderness of devoted friendship, the full range of emotion captured in Shakespeare’s timeless tale.

[photo source: Wikimedia Commons]