BARRIE Rutter is not playing King Lear for the first time.

He did so originally in 1999, but the stars have aligned once more for the Northern Broadsides actor-manager/artistic director to play the seventh age of Shakespeare’s man in a touring production that will form a centrepiece of the inaugural York International Shakespeare Festival next month.

Above all, Barrie was asked by director Jonathan Miller if he would play the lead in what Miller considers to be “the most interesting play Shakespeare ever wrote”.

“Listen, what was behind this one is that Jonathan asked me to do it,” says Barrie, who enjoyed such a fruitful partnership with Miller for Broadsides’ revival of Githa Sowerby’s Rutherford & Son in 2013.

“He asked me, ‘What about doing King Lear?’. I said, ‘Do you mean me doing Lear?’ [or Broadsides] and he said ‘Yes’. I’m 68 now; like Lear, I’ve got three daughters, and with Jonathan’s forensic analysis of human behaviour, it isn’t a great mountain of a performance.

“It’s a study of depression and the realisation that 99 per cent of the world live like this but he didn’t realise it. Then there’s Lear’s decline into dementia, but Jonathan is not having me doing any of that roaring. I’m not trying to out-shout the storm.”

 

York Press:

Jonathan Miller directs Barrie Rutter in King Lear. Picture: Nobby Clark

As one of the big four heavyweight Shakespeare tragedies, there is a tendency for King Lear productions to drag on. Not so in Miller’s account. “It’s one hour and ten minutes each half, so there’s no indulgence. There’s no big production going on,” says Barrie. “That’s our desire, to make it more human. That’s the object; Jonathan is interested in plays where the focus is on people talking to each other.”

The shift from the epic to the more intimate enhances Rutter’s playing of Lear’s descent into dementia. “There’s every sense of his dementia, so that’s why it’s never about out-shouting the elements. This Lear blames both nature and nurture for the depression he’s in, so he couldn’t do anything about the weather and just thinks, ‘Go on, rain’.”

Barrie first played Lear in very different, indeed very tragic, circumstances 16 years ago. “I invited Brian Glover to do it, when I was going to shave my head and play the Fool, and alas and alack I had to take over when Brian died,” he recalls, still with sadness in that stentorian Hull voice. “I knew I was too young and I learnt properly how not to do it, directing others better than myself, but there were lots of terrific things in that production.

“This time, it’s a relief that Jonathan is directing, listening to him in rehearsal and then taking the show on the road as we have done for 20 years. Gone is the big poetic voice and the big attack in my Lear. There is rage but not the loudness of the rage; as Jonathan said, ‘I’m interested in the rage, not its volume’.”

Sixteen years on, being older has changed Barrie and the world has changed too. “The world is now much more aware of dementia. It’s out there in a much more overt way, like Julianne Moore winning a BAFTA and an Oscar for Still Alice,” he says.

“Jonathan has directed King Lear five times now, and though he’s hinted at directing it in this way before, now he’s 80, he acknowledges there’s more understanding of dementia, and our desire is that people should understand Lear better too.”

• Northern Broadsides’ King Lear, visits Quarry Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, April 8 to 11 and 15 to 18; Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, April 21 to 25; and York International Shakespeare Festival, University of York, Heslington East Campus, York, May 12 to 16. Box office: Leeds, 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk; Scarborough, 01723 370 541 or sjt.uk.com; York, 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk