The word “nothing” is spoken four times in four lines in the opening scene of King Lear, among 30 uses across the play. This feels the key to Titus Halder’s Sheffield Crucible staging, which really makes something of nothingness, crowned by an unusually age-appropriate performer as the “fourscore and upward” English king: 82-year-old Ian McDiarmid.
The dark pit of Richard Kent’s design might be a nuclear after-blast. Like Peter Brook’s mid 20th-century stage and film versions, in a previous era of existentialist international tension, the interpretation radiates terminal uncertainty. Characters address pleas and prayers to “the gods” in the direction identified with heaven but with a growing knowing that nothing is there.
