Review: King Lear at Minerva Theatre, Chichester

After all, Lear is the ultimate professional mountain to climb for any actor and McKellen conquered it a decade ago. To reprise the triumph at the age of 78 in a theatre so compact the audience will snatch at a single misplaced hesitation tempts fate more daringly than any Shakespeare plot.

But McKellen does not disappoint. Despite a three and an half hour cerebral and physical workout in the Minerva’s ring, often brutal, occasionally sensual, at one point saturated in rain, he proves that the intervening decade has taken nothing and added much.