Video: Lord Larry's Crowning Triumph

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At a mere 2 hr. 40 min., this is tragedy driven at the gallop of melodrama. Brother fights brother to the death; the elder sisters are condemned by their lusts for sex and power; and father sets off fatal rivalries by waving the promise of a legacy before his children. On one level the play is a Dark Ages horror show, with eye gouging, self-mutilation, broadswords creasing legs and dull stakes piercing the heart. On the crucial level, Lear is an eloquent essay on madness: it finds the logic of poetry on those stormy heaths where every character capable of regeneration seizes it. There, Nature reverses hierarchies: only the blind Gloucester can "see feelingly," his disowned child proves himself a prince, the uncrowned Lear fills out the measure of majesty.

Olivier first attempted the king in 1946, more than half a lifetime ago, filching the assignment from under the nose of his co-director of London's Old Vic Theater Company, Ralph Richardson. In perverse retaliation, Sir Ralph never did bring his maundering grandeur to a role he could still play to perfection. Olivier is a shameless romantic of the 19th century, seeking magic in excess. The capacious bag of actors' tricks is there to be plundered. His Lear will roll his eyes, giggle like a naughty child, sniffle and foam in his "mad" scenes. Early in the play Olivier almost convinces that age has domesticated his talent, but once on the heath he becomes regal, extending his height and breadth, flexing the strong cords in his neck to trumpet his rage, shaping his surprising strengths to the outsize demands of the role.

And at the end, Olivier makes sepulchral music, unheard before, out of Lear's last indelible lines. He enters carrying his daughter Cordelia (Anna Calder-Marshall), and "Howl, howl, howl, howooool!" The sound begins as human language and ends in a wolf wail; the king is only a man, and man an animal frightened by the encroaching night. Then he bends over Cordelia and realizes she is dead. He whispers, "Never." Louder: "Never." A bold bellow: "Never!" A pathetic plea to heaven: "Never?" A final quiet reconciliation to despair: "Never." The lunatic vitality that came to him on the heath has seeped away. A kind of reason is his now, an awareness of man's vulnerability and of death.

The Olivier Lear is not only Olivier. There are marvelous performances: from stalwart Blakely, from the doggedly magnificent McKern, from Rigg, sleek and quick as tempered steel, and from Tutin, no longer wearing the "brow of youth" but still a beautiful, commanding presence. There are a few misfires in Michael Elliott's handsome production: Hurt's Fool is too fey, and Threlfall plays Edgar as another Smike, all wheeze and froth.

Just now, the program, broadcast in Britain five weeks ago, is up for bids in the U.S. There may be some resistance to the asking price (more than $1 million) from financially strapped culture outlets like PBS. And the moguls at the networks may prove to be no more hospitable to this Lear than were Regan and Goneril. Still, one hopes that some American TV system will allow the spotlight to shine once more on Lord Larry—and to illuminate us. —By Richard Corliss