Unless you’ve already got yourself a ticket, you probably won’t get a chance to see Derek Jacobi tackling Shakespeare’s mighty ‘King Lear’. So instead here’s its equally mighty director Michael Grandage in conversation with Steve Wright.

"I’ve got to take issue with that, because I think the final four lines of ‘Lear’ are probably the most redemptive thing ever written.” Michael Grandage, top-drawer director, helmsman of London’s brilliant Donmar Warehouse this past decade, now directing Derek Jacobi in Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’, is countering Venue’s assertion that the ending of Will’s great tragedy is, well, a bit bleak really.

Grandage’s Donmar production, starring Jacobi as the ageing, bewildered monarch betrayed by his own daughters and sucked into an ever-deepening series of conflicts and betrayals, tours to Theatre Royal Bath next week, trailing breathless reviews in its wake (“Fast, vivid, clear and, thanks to a performance that reminds us why Jacobi is a great classical actor, overwhelmingly moving,” praised Michael Billington in The Guardian).

But back to that ending. Death is all around as the curtain comes down on ‘Lear’: the King himself has died, of grief at the death of his beloved, formerly forsaken daughter Cordelia. Goneril and Regan, Cordelia’s deceitful, scheming sisters, and the traitor Edmund have also met their end. Of all the writers to have tackled the story – an ancient Celtic legend – Shakespeare is the only one to have wrought such a bleak ending. But no, says Grandage: there is a sense of rebirth here. “Look at Edgar’s final speech [“The weight of this sad time we must obey;/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say./The oldest hath borne most: we that are young/Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”] After all this death, destruction and apocalypse, Edgar, a young man and a good man who has seen his father blinded and his king die in front of him, stands up and says, ‘We’ve got to come through this stronger: there is a future.’

“Now, as we speak, God knows there must be people in Japan thinking the same thing, sitting among annihilation and trying to find something positive. That’s the greatness of ‘Lear’: it resonates, wherever it is performed, to individuals or nations in a dark place and looking for a way out. It’s hardly a happy ending, but there is a man able to stand up and say, ‘come on, we’ve got to go forward’.”

An ageing monarch, a kingdom divided, a child's love rejected: ‘Lear’ is widely held to be one of the greatest works in western literature, exploring the very nature of human existence: love and duty, power and loss, good and evil. As Lear's world descends into chaos, all that he once believed is brought into question. It is, Grandage concurs, “an extraordinary play”. It’s also, he says, overwhelmingly about one protagonist – and one actor. “There are a few plays – ‘Lear’, ‘Hamlet’ and a few others – that are dominated in an extraordinary way by one character. Productions of those plays always need to be led by the choice of actor. I’m not the kind of director who says, ‘I want to do ‘Lear’, now let’s find someone to do it with’. It has to come from a connection between an actor and director.”

That connection came 10 years ago, when Grandage directed Jacobi in ‘The Tempest’ at Sheffield. “The moment we started working together we knew we spoke the same language. We started talking about the future and he said that in about a decade he wanted to do his Lear. So I started reconnecting with the play, for the first time since school, with him in mind and with 10 years to work on it. The whole thing came about through our joint enthusiasm.” Actors, he says, come right at the heart of his programming decisions. “During my tenure, the Donmar [which he’ll be leaving in December for pastures new] has been, without apology, an actors’ theatre. Of course it’s also been a writers’ theatre, and a directors’ theatre. But if you can start with an actor’s enthusiasm for a role, you’ve got the most amazing launchpad.”

Grandage is talking down the line from New York, where he has two pressing commitments – preparing for a six-week run of ‘Lear’ at the Brooklyn Academy after its UK tour, and directing ‘Don Giovanni’ at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. The latter is his second foray into opera after directing ‘Billy Budd’ at Glyndebourne last year. And it’s a medium in which he already feels comfortable. “My approach has always been about creating big pictures, moving bodies around the stage, and generally telling a story visually as well as through the words. That visual storytelling translates easily from theatre to opera.”

His ‘Lear’ is a simple, minimal affair, with a sparse stage set, pared-down soundscape and very few props. “Put simply, it’s set in a sort of white timber box. That came about for two reasons. Firstly, we wanted to preserve that extraordinary rehearsal-room atmosphere, where you go into a white-washed room with just a few windows and nothing else, and rehearse a play. You then leave the room five weeks later and you add clothes, music, a set, lighting: all things that transform it, hopefully for the better. But there is also something that gets lost – some purity, simplicity, honesty, where there is nothing in the room except director, actors and text. So we thought: is there a way to preserve that?”

The second reason for the clean white lines was Grandage’s idea of the play’s physical and temporal setting. “We asked: what is Lear’s Britain, what was it like? That led us to a pagan world, which seemed to make sense. Every time we tried to update it, certain scenes played very well but others felt shoehorned into a concept that wasn’t consistent. So we returned to a kind of pagan Britain, and out of that came a very sparse world made of wood and timber.

“It’s a simple, open, honest environment, and it allows the play’s extraordinary power to come through. It’s one of the greatest plays in the English language. So why would you want to spend time dressing it up and showing people a different kind of world to the simple, powerful world you can tell the story in?”

And just what is ‘Lear’s extraordinary power, Michael? “Its greatness is its combination of so many themes. It’s a complicated play. For example, it examines fathers’ relationships with their children – not just through Lear and his three daughters but, as strongly, through Gloucester and his two sons. These two sets of fathers and children run right the way through the play.”

There is also, in Lear himself, an extraordinary depiction of madness – Shakespeare’s word, although, says Michael, today we might choose from an arsenal of medical terms from dementia to Alzheimer’s. “It’s an incredibly detailed, empathetic portrait of an ageing, declining mind, and of somebody trying to put off that process. It’s a 400-year-old play, but its investigation of Lear’s decline feels as though it could have been written today.” Another major theme, he says, is the play’s political element – families at war, a nation at war. A fourth theme, and one Michael has zoomed in on, is forgiveness. “With Lear’s ability (or inability) to forgive Cordelia for not professing her love for him as devoutly as her two sisters, Shakespeare taps into something much bigger: how easily are we humans able to forgive, how essential a part of our humanity is forgiveness? And it works both ways, because the person being forgiven also needs to be big enough to accept. It’s such an extraordinary dilemma at the heart of the play. So there are four very big themes: in most plays I tackle, you’re lucky if you get one theme that big.”

So what is the Grandage/Jacobi chemistry based on? “During rehearsals, Derek wants some discussion, but there comes a point where he hands it over to the director to get on with the vision for the piece. He trusts a director, whereas some actors are highly suspicious of them. Let’s be honest, in the centuries-old history of the theatre, the director is one of the newest inventions. But the way I like to work as a director – simplifying rather than complicating – is in tune with Derek’s methods. He knows I’m not one of those directors who says, ‘It would be good to do ‘Lear’ in modern-day Japan’ because, while that would be brilliant for 45 minutes, it would date pretty quickly.”

Collaboration, a creative push-me-pull-you, is also key. “We’re in it not to just turn up and say ‘this is my vision’, but to explore it together. I think we use what we do in the theatre to try and understand who we are and to get through life. You don’t want to just turn up and do it, because then you don’t advance in any way as a human being. But both Derek and I favour a simple, honest, emotive approach: we want to offer audiences a way into a drama. We’re not doing it for ourselves in a small room, we’re doing it to share with a group of people every night. It’s important always to be aware of what you are doing this for.”

KING LEAR WAS AT THEATRE ROYAL BATH UNTIL SAT 9 APR. FOR REVIEW CLICK HERE.

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