Lear review – this matriarchal monarch’s tragedy is personal not political

Maureen Beattie leads a modern-dress version, which focuses on family dynamics rather than the decline of Shakespeare’s mighty ruler

You know when you walk into a room then forget why you came in? Maureen Beattie does that at the start of this gender-swapped version of Shakespeare’s tragedy. She strides on, catches herself, half wanders back, turns on her heels and goes out another way altogether. A little later, she needs a moment to remember the name of Goneril, her daughter. In the depths of the second half, she is slumped in a wheelchair, talking with painful deliberation and we know where it all started.

Yet this Queen Lear can be sharp, too. Dividing her kingdom between Goneril (Jenny Hulse), Regan (Lindsey Campbell) and Cordelia (Ailsa Davidson), she is an articulate woman who expects respect.

But what kind of respect is it? Her tone when Cordelia lets her down is less regal than obstinate, a disappointed mother offended by an equally intransigent daughter. Played as a man, Lear can romanticise Cordelia; played here as a woman, she is too level-headed for that. For all she calls Cordelia her favourite, you can imagine they have clashed like this before, just as Goneril and Regan are forever flashing each other meaningful looks.

If the family dynamics come out in Finn Den Hertog’s modern-dress production – set in a country pile, designed by Emma Bailey, with the paintings off the wall and the wiring poking out – it is at the expense of the wider public tragedy. This Lear is straight-talking, not grandiose, hardly the type to have a retinue of 100, nor to be bothered about downsizing. Her madness, which comes on quickly, is more a metaphor for her domestic decline than a symbol of a mighty monarch fallen. Even at her most frail, it feels sad and personal more than seismic.

Partly, this is because of a lack of definition in the relationships around her. Forbes Masson relishes the role of the blinded Gloucester, performing with wit and gusto, but his devotion to Lear seems to come out of nowhere, much like the sexual conniving of Edmund (Reuben Joseph) and the scheming of the two older sisters. It is not the clarity of delivery, but the underplaying of plot points that leaves this mighty drama feel more brittle than tragic.

• At Pitlochry Festival theatre until 1 August