It was sad the Fool was hanged...

Up, and to the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, London, to see King Lear by a young playwright called Will Shakespeare.

Well not quite. Virtually.

With Espe & Chris I attended a live HDTV transmission of the play at the Little Theatre in Bath. We've seen National Theatre performances of Hamlet, London Assurance, and the Alan Bennett play about the life of W.H. Auden, The Habit of Art, relayed at the Little Theatre. As before, the auditorium was packed; the performance was sold out.

And just to prove that it was live (though of course it doesn't), the inevitable happened. The previous performances had suffered no technical glitches or drop-outs, demonstrating the reliability of the satellite link. But this time there were three glitches when the actors pixelated (oh, the secret skills of the thespian art!) and during the final act the signal dropped out altogether.

The problem was at t'other end and, interestingly, the theatre management chose to halt the performance with the forbearance of the 250 live theatre-goers in London and sort out the technical problems. I guess the people viewing the play at a distance far outnumbered the audience sitting in the intimate space that is the Donmar Warehouse so it made sense.

The restart reminded me of the déja-vu scene from The Matrix where the cat shakes itself and walks across the doorway not once but twice, though the similarity was limited as no armed police or agents entered the building and the world remained apparently unchanged when we had left the cinema. Though there appears now to be major unrest in Egypt...

For the second time Edgar led the blinded Gloucester to the top of a doubly-imaginary white cliff of Dover (the set decoration was minimalist in the extreme) and allowed him to throw himself off. In all, an excellent production; the characters of Goneril and Regan were superbly and shudderingly well realised by Gina McKee and Justine Mitchell.

But it was the performance of Derek Jacobi that shone; he was superb in his interpretation of a monarch and an old man beset by dementia.

Every inch a King