Keeping the critics at bay: Has Trevor Nunn absorbed too much of King Lear's foolishness?

I yield to no one in my respect for Sir Trevor Nunn. Since his early days at the Royal Shakespeare Company, through his stint at the National to his more recent productions of musicals in the commercial theatre, he has been one of the finest readers of a text, and one of the most clear-headed providers of context, in the theatre. His Nicholas Nickleby reopened a whole aspect of the stage as storyteller, while his Three Sisters was the most affecting and powerful version of Chekhov I have ever seen: at the end the audience stayed silent for a full minute as the three women clutched each other in hope born of desperation.

But with this King Lear, currently at Stratford-upon-Avon and starring Sir Ian McKellen, he seems to have absorbed too much of the old king's foolishness although not - if reports coming out of the RSC headquarters are to be believed - much of his fondness. The performances have started. Indeed, they have already been under way for well over a month. McKellen has been doing his stuff, as have the actors in the leading parts of Gloucester, Kent, Edgar, Edmond and Albany. But because the leading lady, Frances Barber, has had an accident and cannot appear, the director has forbidden all reviews until she returns at the end of the month - a full eight weeks after the first performance. And, to add insult to injury, Sir Trevor has also delayed any reviews of Chekhov's The Seagull, which also stars McKellen (who alternates in the part of Sorin with the excellent William Gaunt) and in which Barber was also meant to star, as Arkadina.

This is not only a discourtesy to the poor understudy, Melanie Jessop, who is having to take on both parts for nearly two months and will never gain a review out of it, but it is also an insult to the thousands of theatregoers who have paid good money for their seats and are now being told that the production they are witnessing is unworthy of presentation to the critics.

Of course, press critics are not the be-all and end-all of theatrical success and judgement. They're certainly not as central as some appear to think. The days so beloved of the Broadway comedies of the Thirties and Forties, when the players eagerly rushed for the first editions of the newspapers to revel in a success or slump in despair at a failure are long over. Many papers no longer even cover first nights on the night. It can take days for a review to appear. Nonetheless, critics are part of the currency between a theatre and its audience, a mirror in which actors can see their performance, and a means by which the theatregoer can judge whether he or she wants to go to a production, as well as providing a view against which they can set their own reactions. Without critics new work wouldn't get known and actors wouldn't get talked about.

The increasing practice of theatres running weeks of previews before the first press night has been a bad enough development. But at least they charge the customers less for what they would claim to be dress rehearsals. But, in Nunn's case, he is charging his customers full rate, yet telling them that what they are witnessing is not what he wants to be judged by. For heaven's sake, why not? Illnesses and accidents happen in the theatre all the time. A good proportion of the opera performances that I've attended have been marked by the dreaded announcement that so-and-so is indisposed. Yet the show goes on and the reviews are written (although it is remarkable how many lead singers seem to manage to hold back their illnesses until after the press night). If Nunn and the RSC really felt that Barber's absence was so important, they should either have cancelled the show or, as some opera companies do (to the chagrin of the stand-ins), offer to pay a proportion of the ticket-price back.

Of course, they haven't, because the part of Goneril, while important, is not crucial to the success of King Lear. People going to it are going to see what McKellen makes of a part that he, like so many of the best Shakespearean actors before him, has fought shy of until now.

His reticence is for good reason. King Lear is perhaps the greatest, and certainly the profoundest, play in the English language and Lear the greatest part. But it is also a part perilously difficult to bring off, particularly for "actorly" actors. Charles Lamb, indeed, concluded that Shakespeare's Lear couldn't be acted at all. It was simply too grim and too pessimistic. Over its three-hour course we witness a man stripped of all illusions and of all the accoutrements that give him presence and authority. The "foolish" king first divests himself of his power, then his dignity and finally loses the one thing that still keeps him human: his mind.

How Shakespeare got away with it, with the censor and his audience, astounds me. In an age of faith, of the divine right of kings, the patriarchal male and the law of primogeniture, he produces a vision of a world without God, without remorse and, finally, without consolation. Where the source-books and a previous play end with his one good daughter saved and the king restored to power, in Shakespeare's version even this happy ending is abjured. Cordelia dies, and there is no reason why the meanest animal should have life and not his daughter. "Simply the thing I am shall make me live," says Paroles in one of the most affecting moments of All's Well That Ends Well (you can play it with resignation or defiance, depending on your whim). But that was a comedy. Lear is a tragedy where the "thing that you are", the "unaccommodated man", which Lear is forced to face on the heath, is not enough to take you anywhere but the grave.

As ever with Shakespeare, you can play the part in any number of ways. But Lear is especially difficult, as the character, as such, of the king is less important than the idea of man divested. Actors such as Laurence Olivier and, indeed, McKellen himself, have had great fun and success in playing the other parts, such as Gloucester or, even better, either of Gloucester's sons, all of which are written with great dramatic force. But Lear has to be both bigger than them and, ultimately, smaller.

Actors have tended to follow one of two approaches. You can stress the pity of it all, eliciting the compassion and the sorrow of the audience at the plight of a man disintegrating before them, a picture of old age as much as kingly folly. Or you can play it as "Man", peeled layer by layer until all is gone, a vision of what it is to be human without any of the trappings of power or even clothing. "Nothing" is the most frequent word in the play and it is the portrayal of nothingness that an actor must aim for.

The main tradition of Shakespearean performance from David Garrick, through Edward Kean and William Charles Macready, has been directed towards portraying nobility tested, the cracked mind of a great man laid low. John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Donald Sinden, Nigel Hawthorne and, ultimately, Olivier, all aimed to bring pity to the onlookers off the stage as on it, as Lear's heart finally gives way.

In contrast, Paul Scofield in Peter Brook's 1962 version and, in one of the most shattering productions of recent times, Ian Holm in Richard Eyre's 1997 production at the National, in which Holm appeared totally naked for a good portion of the heath scene, aimed to produce shock and awe. Here was humanity unclothed, not a character revealed.

Without straying too far into forbidden territory, I think it is fair to say that McKellen's performance is in the "pity of it" tradition, closest in many ways to Olivier's rendering in Michael Elliott's TV film of 1983, particularly in the final meeting with Gloucester. It's a fine performance but not a defining one, not altogether helped by a production that attempts to illustrate the shattering of illusions but does not illuminate them. It's true, as the gossip columns have had it, that McKellen drops his trousers in full frontal nudity at one point, but it is an act of confusion rather than demonstration, neither as off-putting nor as intrusive as Germaine Greer, no lover of old men, seems to have found it.

It's also fair to say, as apparently others won't have the chance to, that Jessop does very well both as Goneril in Lear and the Arkadina in The Seagull. Hers is not an emotional, let alone melodramatic, style in the way that most actresses play Arkadina (the self-obsessed actress in Chekhov), or even the lustful Goneril. But it conveys imperiousness and ambition in a way that gives Goneril real presence and Arkadina a kind of professional self-assurance and determination that works well in an ensemble work. You wouldn't like to cross Jessop's Goneril, let alone roustabout with a hundred knights in her house; while she gives to the part of Arkadina a sense of hard-won professionalism that makes her self-obsession less flamboyant but more understandable - and is, incidentally, in stark contrast to McKellen, who is allowed to overplay shamelessly the part of Sorin.

It's a pity that the critics are not being given a chance to review Jessop's performance. And it is quite wrong, too. If Nunn now finds himself up against a critical corps irritated at the delays, and eager to pull him apart once they're finally at the press night, he has only himself to blame.

The Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (0844 800 1110; www.rsc.org.uk). 'King Lear' runs to 21 June and 'The Seagull' to 23 June