Expect the canyons of Broadway to echo with shouts and screams this spring — and moaning and groaning and lamentation of an exceptional amplitude and ferocity. And I’m not referring to ticket buyers who have just registered what an orchestra seat will set them back, or not only that.
Rather, I’m referring to two stars, much celebrated for their combustible presences on stage and screen, who will be taking on parts in which being able to generate high dudgeon at high volume is a primary job requirement. That would be British actress Glenda Jackson, in the rage-filled title role of Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” and unlikely American heartthrob Adam Driver, who is portraying what might be described as an emotional arsonist in the first Broadway revival of Lanford Wilson’s 1987 drama “Burn This.”
As is the case with many of this season’s main-stem offerings, the road to New York for this “King Lear” and “Burn This” has hardly been a straight line. They’re each arriving later than was originally anticipated — and in somewhat altered form.
Lear is the part in which the then 80-year-old Jackson, a two-time Oscar winner who had left acting to become a member of Parliament, returned to the London stage after an absence of more than two decades. That production, directed by Deborah Warner at the Old Vic in 2016, reaped such ecstatic notices for its star that it was widely assumed it would be crossing the Atlantic posthaste.
Jackson did indeed show up on Broadway a little more than a year later. But it was not as Shakespeare’s ultimate angry old man but as the angry old woman of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” for which Jackson won a Tony for Best Actress in a Play.
Now, a mere (and one hopes, for her, very restful) year later, Jackson will be reincarnating the most challenging role in the Shakespeare canon, but with a different director and supporting cast. The “King Lear” opening in April at the Cort Theater will be staged by Sam Gold, who showed an original and subversive hand for Shakespeare in starry productions of “Othello,” with Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo, and “Hamlet,” in which Oscar Isaac was the Prince of Denmark. (His “Lear” casts Ruth Wilson as both the King’s Fool and one of his daughters.)
“Burn This,” an intense, four-character study of love and grief in a New York loft, had been expected to come to the Hudson Theater in early 2017. That production was to be headlined by Jake Gyllenhaal — in the role of a foul-mouthed, cocaine-hoovering restaurateur named Pale — and directed by Michael Mayer. It was subsequently announced that because of “scheduling conflicts with the show’s star,” the opening of “Burn This” would probably be “during the 2017-2018 season.”
The version of “Burn This” finally scheduled to open on April 16 will, as promised, be staged by Mayer at the Hudson. But its Pale is now Driver, playing opposite Keri Russell as a dancer in mourning (for her recently deceased roommate, Pale’s brother).
Driver will be competing with cherished memories of John Malkovich, whose scorching performance as Pale 32 years ago sealed his reputation as a dominating star. Theatergoers still talk about Malkovich’s splenetic, warp-speed opening monologue.
Though Driver has appeared on New York stages before — notably in revivals of “Look Back in Anger” (directed by Gold in 2012) and Terence Rattigan’s “Man and Boy” (2011) — it was in supporting roles of relative calm, meant to ballast the showier, fierier leading parts played by Matthew Rhys (in “Anger”) and Frank Langella (in “Man”).
But anyone doubting Driver’s ability to do bad, mad and dangerous need only take a look at his subsequent screen work, including his turn as arch-villain Kylo Ren in the recent “Star Wars” films. Or check out his set-incinerating fight with Jemima Kirke in the Season 5 finale of HBO’s “Girls.” Theatergoers attending “Burn This” might do well to wear asbestos.
As for Jackson, no one has doubted her capacity for delivering annihilating rage since she destroyed the hulking Oliver Reed in Ken Russell’s 1969 film of “Women in Love.” Nor should anyone question this octogenarian’s capacity to “howl, howl, howl” nightly against the bleak and cruel universe of “Lear.”
Speaking last year of her performance as Lear in London, Jackson said matter-of-factly, “I expected to do it eight times a week, because that’s the way I’ve been raised. When the first additional matinee went in, the whole cast was asking me how I was, they were afraid I was going to die in the middle of it.
“The only time I ever felt tired was on Sundays when we didn’t have to do it. Because there’s so much energy in the play,” she said.
Cosmic rage, it would appear, is a great rejuvenator.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.