Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Four stars
The dustsheets are covering the furniture and the paintings have been taken down in the family home where Lear holds court in Finn Den Hertog’s brutal and bloody version of Shakespeare’s all too human tragedy of power and loss. The chandelier too that will later resemble something between a wrecking ball and a guillotine is all wrapped up as the ageing matriarch indulges a last gasp chance to lord it over her three daughters. As the sisters gather, it looks for all the world like their mother is about to be carted off to what these days might be euphemistically be called a retirement home.
As Lear’s cry for attention seeks only flattery from her offspring, her oldest and middle daughters Goneril and Regan tell her what she wants to hear, and are duly awarded a slice of the queendom as their inheritance. Her youngest, Cordelia, alas, is having none of it. This not only drives Lear mad, but kicks off a full on war, while Cordelia plays the fool in a bid to keep her mother sane, effectively becoming a clown doctor while the family self-destructs. On one level this is an everyday domestic fallout. The consequences that result in the play’s tale of succession, dynasty and sibling rivalry gone ballistic are writ in ever more epic fashion in Den Hertog’s production.
Goneril and Regan’s legacy snatching ambitions have rarely seen them exposed as such out and out bad girls as is the case here in a pair of combative performances by Jenny Hulse and Lindsey Campbell. Campbell’s Regan in particular goes full on gangster mode in a strutting alliance with Reuben Joseph’s Edmund that borders on strip cartoon super villain status. When she lays down a plastic sheet in preparation for Gloucester’s interrogation, what follows is pure Tarantino.
By the second half, the regal walls of designer Emma Bailey’s checked floor set have been demolished entirely as the storm rumbles and broods by way of Mark Melville’s seismic underscore. As the play’s family sized body count piles up, the use of contemporary piper Brigade Chaimbeul’s Celtic tinged music gives the feel of a mass wake.
At the centre of all this is a stunning Maureen Beattie as a mercurial Lear, whose loss of faculties erupts into view in a towering performance that quickly moves from anger to confusion to heartbreaking resignation as she can rage against the storm no more. Forbes Masson leaves himself equally exposed as Gloucester, whose scenes with Dylan Read’s disguised Edgar are as moving as those between Lear and Ailsa Davidson’s Cordelia. There is able support too from Ali Craig as Oswald, Beruce Khan as Albany and Mercy Ojelade as Kent.
The result sees Den Hertog and co remain faithful to Shakespeare’s original while ramping up the interfamilial tensions between mothers, daughters and the ambulance chasing hangers on that surround them in a way that reinvigorates the play as it is brought to unrelenting and explosive life.
The Herald, July 11th 2026
Ends
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