This difficult task is made immeasurably easier by the presence of some extraordinary acting talent, including several former members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In his pacing, scowling, fluttering despair and anger, he has as many sounds as an orchestra and is in every slightest move and gesture a king. The styling is abstract but also familiar, with portentous background music of the sort you hear at movies. The actors don't just walk onto the stage. They pace as in a procession moving in geometric angles around and across the painted white square, sometimes stopping as if they were sculptures.
Troops clap and laugh in unison or mime shouting.
Three knights battle with long sticks as if in a slow ballet. Then the duplicitous Goneril and Regan plot against their father and each other. Robert Richmond directs a riveting scene in which Lear, in his night shirt, and clearly disintegrating, interacts with his deformed fool, given a stunning performance by Louis Butelli, his twisted face and body exuding anguish. Both Lear and the fool are bald, and as they interact, Lear seems to metamorphose into his fool. Keeping up with the standard set by Cochrane, Kenn Sabberton is brilliant as both Edmund and Kent, creating so much sinister darkness in one and light in the other that one has to look in the program to realize the same actor is playing both parts.