King Lear, Royal & Derngate, Northampton, on tour at Grand Opera House, York, today until Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york THE Grand Opera House thrives when presenting musicals, children's shows, comedians' tour nights and tribute concerts.

Rightly, the theatre's owners, the Ambassador Theatre Group, like to diversify the programme still more by bringing plays to York, and so here is King Lear the week before The Illegal Eagles and One Night Of Queen do their tribute thing next Wednesday and Thursday respectively.

King Lear is a Royal & Derngate, Northampton production, now on tour in association with ATG, who initially booked Max Webster's show for a week-long run, before reducing it to Wednesday to Saturday in response to underwhelming ticket sales.

Maybe, the public's perception would be that King Lear is more of a York Theatre Royal kind of night-out, but as the curtain prepares to rise on today's opening 2.30pm matinee, your reviewer – who saw a matinee in Northampton – urges York's theatregoers to go to the other place, the Grand Opera House. Red velvet seats; proscenium arch stage; good acoustics and sightlines; all present and correct, so what's the difference?

There is a further reason for encouraging you to attend King Lear: one of England's very finest Shakespeare actors, Michael Pennington, is playing Lear on his storm-savaged journey from reckless folly to crushed self-awareness.

Playing him at the ideal age of 72, when he can still carry the body of daughter Cordelia; playing him with such fervour for the second time after making his Lear debut as the only Englishman in an otherwise all-American cast at the Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn in 2014; playing him after playing so many other Shakespeare roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the English Shakespeare Company, the company he co-founded and so memorably brought to the 1988 York Festival to present the Wars of The Roses history plays.

Yes, King Lear is a difficult play, a grim play, a dysfunctional family drama of terrible and tragic consequences. However, it would be even more of a tragedy to not experience Pennington's moving performance in Webster's visceral production that pulls no punches in being graphic, as Pip Donaghy's Gloucester's eyes are gouged out and tossed to the ground. In Pennington and Donaghy's hands, Lear and Gloucester's tender reunion brings a lump to the throat as Lear's madness assuages.

There is humour too, more than usual, although not from Joshua Elliott's gaudy young Fool, while the sensuality is suitably hot and bothered between Catherine Bailey's Goneril and Scott Karim's sinuous,snake-hipped villain, Edmund. Beth Cooke's Cordelia tugs at the heartstrings, while Gavin Fowler excels in his dual role as Edgar, disguising himself as Poor Tom, the madman.

Sally Scott's Regan carries her baby in her arms with all the enthusiasm of a fox for fox-hunting, as cold and austere as Adrian Linford's 1940s' set of dark, satanic walls, gloomy windows and a deathly metal door.

King Lear, Royal & Derngate, Northampton, on tour at Grand Opera House, York, today until Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york