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.
There is a tragedy happening at the Cort Theatre, but it's not the tragedy of a rash and overweening English king, his three daughters, and the gaping maw of violent nihilism opened up by his childish demand that they turn their love for him into a competition. It's not the tragedy of a great king gone mad but rather of a great play that's lost its wits and its way. After a royal amount of hype built on the promise of the towering Glenda Jackson's role-defining performance, the painful truth is that Sam Gold's King Lear is a hot, heavy mess. And more painful still, Jackson's Lear fails to transcend it.
It's often said that there's no greater grief than a parent's loss of a child, so it follows that there's no more devastating moment in King Lear than when the monarch's pitiless odyssey through familial betrayal, rage and madness, triggered by his own blind vanity, leaves him cradling the dead body of the one daughter whose love for him was pure. That goes double when the title character's tragic arc is explored, in Sam Gold's aggressively modern, gender-blind production, by the magnificent Glenda Jackson. The searing pathos of Lear's abject diminishment seems all the more powerful given the steely authority that precedes it.
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1973 | Off-Broadway |
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1982 | Off-Broadway |
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1996 | Off-Broadway |
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2004 | Broadway |
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2011 | Off-Broadway |
Public Theater Production Off-Broadway |
2014 | Off-Broadway |
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Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park Off-Broadway |
2016 | West End |
Old Vic Revival Production West End |
2018 | West End |
Chichester Festival Theatre West End Revival West End |
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Broadway Revival Broadway |
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2024 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
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2019 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play | Ruth Wilson |
2019 | Drama League Awards | Distinguished Performance Award | Ruth Wilson |
2019 | Drama League Awards | Outstanding Revival of a Broadway or Off-Broadway Play | King Lear |
2019 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Actress in a Play | Glenda Jackson |
2019 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play | Ruth Wilson |
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