The Latest Breaking News from Lear

A disco king hits the dancefloor, Beatrice and Benedick’s romcom gets a feminist framing and Lear faces dystopia as the revered rep company returns in full force

Theatre collective Unseemly Women brought King Lear to Prescot's Shakespeare North Playhouse

Fearless, sharply intelligent and sometimes caustic, Glenda Jackson, who has died aged 87, “had a career unmatched by any of her contemporaries”, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. From 1957, she enjoyed huge success on film (she won two Oscars) and on stage; then, in 1992, she gave it all…

There was never anything shrinking about the confidence Glenda Jackson projected on stage and screen in her heyday. Afflicted with an uncommon common sense, her characters were defined by their sharp intelligence, independence and, yes, irritability. They were nobody’s fool, even when they wound up with the short end of…