The Times, October 29 1999

AFTER his triumph as the straitjacketed protagonist of The Madness of George III, it was inevitable that Nigel Hawthorne would tackle the father of all mentally challenged kings. But last night left me feeling that Yukio Ninagawa, with his built-in delight in Oriental stage effects, was not the right man to direct him - nor, I fear, is so essentially benign an actor as Hawthorne the right chap to play Lear.

Take the great storm scene. Given the mildness of his emotions and body-language, Hawthorne might be bumbling about the garden without an umbrella to protect his nice dressing gown from a light drizzle. And that's doubly odd, because he actually needs a hard hat to be sure of avoiding the small boulders distractingly dropping from the flies.

Thud, bump, bounce. As conceived by Ninagawa in one of his picturesque and maybe symbolic moods, an English tempest is a dangerous rockslide prettily combined with thin towers of light and raindrops.

Surprisingly, Hawthorne's first appearance signalled stronger things to come. His Lear bustles irritably on stage, swathed in silver linen and animal skins, to unsettle an already nervous court with his long silences and erratic whimsies. And Ninagawa uses the scene to establish more than most directors do: rifts between all three daughters, Goneril's distaste for the husband she will try to have killed, Lear's total uninterest in her and, until she snubs him, his complacent joy in Cordelia. But the emotional stakes, initially high, soon dwindle. Hawthorne wheedles, wails and unhappily quavers, but never achieves the intensity of bewilderment, pain and grief he managed as King George. There is no horror in "let me not be mad" and little more than pique in his rages.

The famous speech in which Lear identifies with the "poor naked wretches" he once neglected might be a Sunday-school sermon. True, Hawthorne has touching moments, as when he hugs John Carlisle's blinded, weeping Gloucester or droops over Cordelia's corpse; but they lack the force to shake - let alone crack - your heart.

We're left with a poignant, warm-hearted, occasionally even comical Lear, not a majestic savage burning on his invisible "wheel of fire".

If you seek power, you must look elsewhere, notably to Sian Thomas's fierce Goneril, who slaps the furniture when she isn't emotionally beating up others. She, Anna Chancellor's Regan and William Armstrong's Edmund seem more obviously evil than is the fashion nowadays: which is as fine by me as is the blunt, unaffected goodness of Christopher Benjamin's Kent. Michael Maloney's Edgar is a plus, especially when disguised as the screeching, shrivelled vagrant Poor Tom; but Hiroyuki Sanada's capering, cartwheeling Fool is an inarticulate intruder from another culture.

Still, you'll be impressed by entrances that begin at the very back of the bare, planked stage and continue past high, heavy walls embossed with Japanese flowers. Indeed, Ninagawa's theatrical skills embrace even Gloucester's eye-gouging, which ends with what look unpleasantly like two squidgy turnips below the poor, tortured man. But the most visually striking revival of Lear needs some sort of volcano at its epicentre - and that, I fear, is wanting.

BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE