IT happens all the time: a father has a falling-out with his daughters and he's too stubborn and irascible to see sense, so the family falls apart. These days, though, you don't usually find favourite daughters banished to France, and if two of the daughters gang up against the third, they can usually get along without one poisoning the other.

King Lear is not a cheery play, and this production makes sure the audience has no sympathy for the King or his daughters - not even the somewhat vapid Cordelia, whose love for her father is supposedly so great she cannot put it into words.

Bright spots in this four-hour marathon are Emily Raymond and Ruth Gemmell as the deliciously awful Gonerill and Regan, the Ugly Sisters of the piece. They manage to stop just short of hissing their rage and hatred of their sister and father as they plot his death, even though he has just divided his kingdom among them. Matthew Rhys is entertaining as Gloucester's bastard son Edmund, having loads of fun discrediting his legitimate half-brother Edgar so Gloucester will disinherit him. He also revels in playing Gonerill and Regan against each other when they both fall in love with him.

But the other characters left me cold; the demonstrations of madness from Corin Redgrave as Lear and Pal Aron as Edgar grew tiresome, and Gloucester's reaction to having his eyes gouged out was the Shakespearean equivalent of "Ow". Plenty of gore, but a bloodless production all the same.

* Runs until Saturday. Booking Office: 0870 905 5060.

Published: 18/11/2004