King Lear on BBC Two, review: Anthony Hopkins led a seriously starry cast but the modern-day setting let them down

It is another big year for King Lear (BBC Two). After Glenda Jackson’s towering effort at the Old Vic last year, 2018 has already seen Antony Sher’s performance at Stratford, while in July Ian McKellen will take his version to the West End.

No doubt conscious of the competition, director Richard Eyre assembled so many galacticos for his bells-and-whistles modern-day-set TV version that at first it was hard to concentrate on anything else. Say, isn’t that Emma Thompson and Emily Watson as Goneril and Regan? Oh look, there’s Tobias Menzies from Game of Thrones doing Cornwall.

Here’s Florence Pugh, making – very successfully – the unusual transition from Lady Macbeth to Cordelia. The two Jims, Broadbent and Carter, moustached-up for Gloucester and Kent. Oswald (Christopher Eccleston) looks familiar, too. Who? Yes, exactly – the Doctor. And blow me down, if it isn’t Andrew Scott as Edgar, eyeballs akimbo. 

At the centre of it all was Anthony Hopkins, growling and prowling. He has history with the part: He was so traumatised by playing the king at the National in 1986 that he gave up the stage soon afterwards. One of the many challenges of the role is that it starts at 10, energy and volume-wise, and slowly dwindles to 0.

During the divvying-up ceremony, I worried that he might bellow his way through the whole play, but he improved as he calmed down. By the time Lear met the blind Gloucester with Edgar, outside a concrete shopping centre, all three actors were purring. Scott was excellent throughout, which will be no surprise to anyone who saw his stage Hamlet, recently shown on the same channel. 

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In general there were few complaints about the all-star cast, or the script, which was chopped heavily but smoothly so that the audience could get to bed in good time. The real weakness was the setting, the kind of contemporary alternate-universe British military state we have seen a thousand times before. Perhaps it once felt fresh, but in 2018 it is as straight as you can play it. Range Rovers pulled into a glossy Tower of London. Men in fatigues strode around. Bombers streaked over the countryside.

It’s quite something when a modern setting serves to alienate Shakespeare’s language, rather than make it more appealing. It worked best when it retreated into the background. For all its grand canvas of war and royalty, Lear is in some ways a very small play, an accumulation of petty errors and jealousies. This King Lear was best when it was quietest.