MARY CONWAY revels in a powerful reminder that human lives are not defined by physical perfection
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King Lear
Bristol Old Vic
3/5
APPROPRIATELY, when “the realm of Albion has come to great confusion” and we are told that the nation is critically divided between youth and age, Shakespeare’s greatest play is a bold choice for this collaboration between Bristol Old Vic Theatre School students and a core of established actors.
Director Tom Morris has sensibly gone for simplicity in his somewhat truncated adaptation, which opens with what could have been a wild end-of-term student bacchanal. The gulf between Timothy West’s crusty Lear, David Hargreaves’s easily beguiled aged Gloucester and Stephanie Cole’s grandmotherly Fool and the rest of the youthful cast brings home generational tensions.
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