CAST INCLUDED: Nigel Cooke (Kent); Caroline Faber (Goneril); Amanda Hale (Cordelia); Forbes Masson (Fool); Tobias Menzies (Edgar); Jonjo O'Neill (Edmund); Pete Postlethwaite (King Lear); Charlotte Randle (Regan); John Shrapnel (Gloucester).

This production ran at the Everyman from 30 October - 29 November 2008 before transferring to the Young Vic in London. Production information from Theatre Record; may be incomplete.

"Is it necessary to emphasise the play's 20th-century echoes by opening with the voice of Margaret Thatcher promising harmony over discord? Or to turn Lear's knights into football hooligans? Or to give Caroline Faber's Goneril a pregnancy that eventually brings her a baby that Michael Colgan's new-man Albany pushes about in a pram? Or to upstage Lear's death by ending with a gratuitous infant's off-stage wails?"  ~ Benedict Nightingale, "He may be a rugges actor, but his Lear has surprising subtlety", The Times, 7 November 2008

"The cast are dressed in charity shop cast-offs, as though for a 118 advert, and footage of rioting is projected on to Giles Cadle's design, which is a derelict vista of corrugated iron, weed-punctuated paving stones and broken glass."  ~ Patrick Marmion, "Viciously modern, this Lear speaks our language", Daily Mail, 7 November 2008

"We were teetering perilously close to the disaster of Peter O'Toole's Macbeth"  ~ Christopher Hart, Sunday Times, 9 November 2008, in Theatre Record 2008, Issue 23