I seem to be missing something here: the hail of critical abuse which has fallen on the Ninagawa King Lear at the Barbican, not unlike the hail of stones which falls on the actors during the storm amid Yukio Horio's setting, seems largely based on the amazed discovery that Sir Nigel Hawthorne is not a heroic actor and that the priorities here appear to be somewhat Japanese.

As the production was rehearsed in Tokyo, opened in Tokyo, has a Japanese director, designer and Fool, not to mention a largely Japanese backstage staff, the objection is much akin to the complaint that Kurosawa's Throne of Blood is doubtless a wonderful movie hut somehow not quite Macbeth as we used to know and love it at the Old Vic.

I have to object that the wonder of this Lear is precisely that it does not correspond to anything we currently think we know about the play; from the moment of his casting, it was surely clear that Hawthorne was probably going to he considerably underpowered for the early part of the play; he would be no match for the storm even if it did not consist of falling boulders, and he is deeply unauthoritarian even when dividing up the kingdom.

But given the Japanese reverence for old age, and his own talent for portraying a mind diseased, it was also surely a fair bet that he would deliver in Act V a touching and heart-rending old man and this he unquestionably does. Indeed, I have never seen a Lear which ends better; instead of the usual exhausted old upfront thespian, staggering about the stage under the weight of his dead Cordelia, we get an almost Chekhovian revelation, as though the whole play has been leading op to this moment and not counting down towards it; similarly, Hawthorne plays the post-Dover scene with John Carlisle's equally brilliant Gloucester as if they were the tramps from Godot, adrift in a bleak landscape of the broken mind and awaiting they know not what.

True, it doesn't all work that well; it was unwise of Ninagawa to encourage Anna Chancellor and Sian Thomas to play Regan and Goneril like pantomime dames on speed, but as against that Robin Weaver is a wondrously still, serene Cordelia, and Hiroyuki Sanada an amazingly acrobatic Fool. What this King Lear usefully reminds us is that we don't hold the patent on Shakespeare, and that Japanese conventions and traditions, both social and theatrical, can give us insights into the play we would never otherwise have learnt. The result is infinitely more moving than many bigger and some even better Lears; above all, it is mercifully never familiar or predictable.