Two Long-Lived Kings on the London Stage

LONDON — Can you scale Everest twice? Yes, and formidably so in the case of Ian McKellen, who first played King Lear in a world tour for the Royal Shakespeare Company just over a decade ago.

Now 79 and so more age-appropriate for the part, the rightly venerated actor has returned this summer to the same role, in a far more intimate but even fiercer production that opened Thursday at the Duke of York’s Theater here and runs through Nov. 3. It will be screened in movie theaters via National Theater Live on Sept. 27.

This latest “Lear,” smartly if unshowily directed by Jonathan Munby, adds to a London theater season thronged with royals. George III can be glimpsed twice over, in the musical phenomenon “Hamilton” and its satirical cousin, “Spamilton,” which opened here Tuesday night. Ken Watanabe is holding forth as an unusually playful King of Siam in “The King and I” at the London Palladium, and Rhys Ifans, as the vainglorious despot in a rare local sighting of Eugène Ionesco’s “Exit the King,” at times suggests a Lear-in-waiting.

McKellen nonetheless exists a league apart, and not only because of his commitment to the theater at a time when so many colleagues of his generation have forsaken the stage. Writing in the “Lear” program that Shakespeare’s most scalding tragedy felt like “unfinished business” for him, he seems to be working his way through familiar terrain entirely afresh. Listen, for starters, to the way he phrases “which of you shall we say doth love us most?” as Lear carves his kingdom among his daughters: A slight upturn on the word “most” implies that even he cannot believe he is asking so hateful a question.

And whereas his previous Lear, directed by Trevor Nunn, traveled to theaters described by the actor as “too uncongenially spacious,” this iteration is happening in an auditorium that accommodates just over 500 people. No wonder it is a hot ticket.

That McKellen and his supporting cast exceed expectations speaks to an unusually lively and vital take on a play that can sometimes seem embalmed. So propulsive is the 3 1/2-hour production that it does not really need its percussive, thriller-like soundscape, more suitable to a police procedural.

No stranger to declamation, McKellen lends a welcome softness to Lear’s decisive “howl,” as if what matters most is not the decibel level but the sense of psychic excoriation as the wayward monarch comes to grief.

The acting spoils are shared with a cast whose standouts include James Corrigan as a fully self-aware Edmund and Sinead Cusack, a stage veteran of many decades, whose female Kent becomes the unfussy moral arbiter of the play. But when McKellen takes his solo bow at the end, the exultant response of the audience is bittersweet: He has intimated that this may be his Shakespearean swan song. If so, he has had quite a run.

Lear reports his age as “fourscore and upward,” which is to say 80-something. That makes him a mere stripling compared with Bérenger, the scraggly-haired monarch played by Ifans in “Exit the King,” who has made it to an impressive 483 years and is not best pleased when, finally, he must call it quits.

His belated and unwelcome reckoning with the grim reaper propels Ionesco’s play, which has been revived at the National in a fresh adaptation by its director, Patrick Marber, and is running in repertory through Oct. 6; the production is the first time a work by the celebrated Romanian-born French playwright has been at the National.

A classic of the absurdist repertoire, “Exit the King” (“Le Roi se meurt”) parallels “King Lear” in its defiant rage against the dying of the light (“I will remain standing and I will howl,” says the fallen despot, who gets a mini storm scene of his own). Depicting a kingdom facing collapse, Anthony Ward’s high-walled set shows a crack running through a royal crest, and it flies away to reveal an inky, existential blackness for the closing sequence. And as in Munby’s “Lear,” Marber extends the action into the audience: Runways would seem to be in vogue this season.

“I’m dying,” Bérenger bleats from his wheelchair, “so let everything die.” Ifans brings a chalk-faced, dark-eyed eloquence to a play that is at its best when musing on mortality and considerably less involving when attempting a deliberately off-kilter comedy that quickly palls. (Running about half the length of the new “Lear,” “Exit the King” feels far longer.)

The opening introduces a motley retinue of royal wives and hangers-on, who include two contrasting queens, a doctor-turned-obituarist (the ever-welcome Adrian Scarborough) and a bustling servant played by a game Debra Gillett, who also happens to be Marber’s wife. Presumably, she does not mind playing a character noted in her husband’s fresh take on Ionesco’s script for her “ghoulish, bulging eyes.”

Positing a “proto-dystopia” where “abnormal is the new normal,” this “Exit the King” makes nods in the direction of today’s skewed political landscape, but such social commentary as might exist is sacrificed on the altar of facetiousness — I do not recall remarks about “the royal hemorrhoid” and the like in other productions.

Ifans is the occasion here, in a performance light years removed from his scene-stealing screen turn as Hugh Grant’s slobby roommate in “Notting Hill,” which first brought him to a broader public. Indeed, between Bérenger and Ifans’s direct acquaintance with “King Lear” — he played the Fool to Glenda Jackson’s diminutive monarch in 2016 — the actor would seem to be circling Shakespeare’s piteous ruler for himself someday. Let’s hope it does not take him 483 years.

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