Written by William Shakespeare

Directed and Adapted by Finn Den Hertog

Review by Dominic Corr

Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s Lear emerges as a bold, unsettling and deeply human reimagining of Shakespeare’s tragedy, shaped by the clarity of Finn den Hertog’s direction and anchored by Maureen Beattie’s formidable presence. The hills of Perthshire have a habit of holding onto storms, and Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s Lear feels as though one has rolled straight through its auditorium.

Under Finn den Hertog’s direction, Alan Cumming’s inaugural season as the Artistic Director brings Shakespeare back to the venue; here his tragedy becoming a clearing, sensational and emotionally charged reckoning with power, family and the slow erosion of self. It’s a production that refuses to sit politely within the canon, instead pushing at its edges with a gender‑defying central performance and a visual language that swings between claustrophobic interiors and the bleak vastness of nature. It signals a theatre intent on revitalising the classics rather than embalming them.

The story remains familiar: an ageing ruler divides her kingdom among her daughters, demanding declarations of love that curdle into cruelty. Cast out by those she trusted, Lear spirals into madness as political and familial betrayals accumulate. Den Hertog’s staging leans into the domestic fractures — the competition for affection, the corrosive ambition, the quiet horror of watching a family disintegrate. It’s a tragedy of intimacy before it becomes one of nations, and that shift gives the production its emotional heft.

Maureen Beattie’s Lear is the axis around which this storm turns. She begins with a brusque, iron‑willed authority, a matriarch whose command feels carved from granite. There’s an inescapable Thatcher‑esque severity to her early scenes, a physical impatience that sees her shove subjects aside as though clearing clutter. But it’s in the unravelling that Beattie becomes extraordinary. Crowned with rotten gorse or flowers, windswept, and later slumped in a wheelchair with lank hair and hollow eyes, she charts the collapse of dignity with devastating authenticity. Her reunion with Cordelia is quietly shattering, words barely escaping her as grief and recognition collide. If grandeur occasionally slips — the early storm scene wig adding an unintended comic wobble — the emotional truth never does.

Around her, the ensemble is sharply drawn. Dylan Read’s Edgar transforms with gripping immediacy, shifting from innocence to the raw, feral edges of Poor Tom; in some of the productions more unearthly moments. Charming; Reuben Joseph’s Edmund slinks through the play with a seductive malice, sparring deliciously with Fergie and Princess Anne, sorry, Jenny Hulse’s Goneril and Lindsey Campbell’s Regan, the latter laying out Gloucester’s torture chamber with chilling calm and a sensual malevolencewhich enraptures the unexpected. Forbes Masson’s Gloucester is both bumbling and heartbreakingly anguished, his blinding staged with a stiletto‑sharp brutality that lands with a gasp. Ailsa Davidson impresses in dual roles, offering a gleaming Cordelia and an acerbic Fool, while Mercy Ojelade’s Kent brings a grounded dignity to the chaos.

Emma Bailey’s designs split the production in two: a decaying interior that traps the first half in oppressive domesticity, and a stripped‑back wasteland in the second, dominated by a fallen branch and blasted earth. It’s a visual metaphor that works — the walls of privilege collapsing into the indifferent sprawl of nature. Mark Melville’s score, all surging strings and wailing horns, tightens the atmosphere until it feels almost suffocating.

Not everything lands. The clifftop scene remains stubbornly silly, and the Fool’s presence – here a jingling jester — still feels like an awkward relic. Davidson does a sterling drive; but the issue lays within the origins more than anything. But these are familiar stumbles in a play that resists perfect modernisation. What matters is the clarity of intent: den Hertog’s Lear understands the tragedy as both political and painfully personal, and it commits to that duality with confidence.

Pitlochry’s Lear is a production of striking intelligence and emotional force, driven by a central performance that lingers long after the lights fade. It’s a reminder that Shakespeare’s storms still have the power to shake us, and that reinvention, when done with care, can illuminate the old with startling new colours. A sensationalist rebuilding of a story in the eyes of the intimate and personal, rather than the Grand, and a profoundly affecting triumph — Lear is a blazing, lucid statement of intent for the theatre’s future.

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