"In a way, it’s impossible to review Gold’s staging of 'King Lear,' because, in the arrogance of its conception...."

"Gold has set the play in what I took to be a contemporary universe, but I have no idea why the great hall where Lear (Glenda Jackson) meets with his family to divvy up his kingdom is covered in gold leaf. Are we in a North Korean palace? Trump Tower? A Russian oligarch’s apartment?... Goneril (Elizabeth Marvel, overreaching as usual) has an American twang, while Regan (Aisling O’Sullivan) speaks with an Irish brogue, and Ruth Wilson, doing her very best as Cordelia, and later as the Fool, has clear, British stage diction. Wouldn’t Lear’s daughters have grown up and been educated in the same place? Are their accents meant to indicate that they’ve already retreated into separate territories? Or does Gold mean to telegraph who the daughters 'really' are by giving them their own voices?... [R]ather than allow these actors to do what they do so well, Gold degrades their grace. He has [Pedro] Pascal’s Edmund... simulate a quickie with Goneril, after which she smears his lips with their sexual fluids. Is this a shocking gesture or a 'shocking' gesture? There’s much talk of body parts and copulation in 'King Lear,' as well as a great deal of nasty paternal derision, as when Lear calls his elder daughters 'unnatural hags.' When Glenda Jackson, the butch girl of my dreams from all those incredible seventies movies, utters such lines, the other actors shrink...  In the first half of the play, she is ferocious and loud, grandstanding and bellowing. She calms down in the second half, when Lear’s mind disintegrates, and I wish she could have shown some of that nuance sooner."

The New Yorker's Hilton Als does not like Sam Gold's version of "King Lear." The "butch girl of [his] dreams" just isn't doing it right, for some reason that I suppose I'd have to see the production to understand. The headline extracts Als's point like this: "Sam Gold’s Self-Serving Vision of 'King Lear'/In a new staging, the director uses Shakespeare’s words as a launching pad from which to explore his own theatrical concerns."

Why "Self-Serving"? Gold is pleasing himself and not the audience? But why is the audience disserved? There are so many productions of "King Lear." It's not as if the audience needs one particular approach and not another. At one point, Als asks, "But where do you draw the line between an interpretation that is freeing—and thus freeing to the audience, too—and one that is just frustratingly and bafflingly self-indulgent?" And that's a question I would ask about this review.

Speaking of self-indulgent, Als spends a good part of his column talking about Duke Ellington, whose connection to the subject is nothing more than that he once recorded an album full of instrumentals inspired by Shakespeare plays. It is, according to Als, "a sensual, undulating, and thoughtful album" that shows "the value of great artists’ being driven by the work of other great artists to create something new." So what? That has little to do with putting on a play with actors that have to speak a pre-determined text that has been interpreted and reinterpreted thousands of times.