ENGLISH Touring Theatre can’t have needed a pantechnicon when it was trucking its revival of Lear about Britain, picking up topnotch reviews. The decor — sloping boards, a throne, a joint-stool for the hovel-on-the-heath scene, little else — could have fitted into a people carrier. And the reward is pace and fluency and maybe something more.

A screen hangs over this spare stage, intermittently showing what might be the Moon but is, I think, meant to be a barren, empty, maybe devastated Earth. It’s as if Shakespeare and his director, Stephen Unwin, are asking us if some of the play’s key words sum up human endeavour on this planet: nothing, nowhere, never.

Unwin’s production aims to combine physical minimalism with emotional and even metaphysical size and scope. That’s a tall order in as reductionist an age as our own, but, thanks to the lead actor, it is successfully achieved. Here’s an exemplary human being’s journey from triviality and arrogance via turbulence of mind to an understanding and depth it wouldn’t be exorbitant to categorise as spiritual.

That actor is Timothy West and that man a Lear who begins by staging a love-auction that leaves him so humiliated he does something he almost instantly regrets. Even when he’s telling Rachel Pickup’s banished Cordelia he’ll never see her face again, he’s fixing his eyes on her face in valedictory desperation. And the line “I did her wrong”, which doesn’t come a lot later, is a flat admission of a mistake that destroys most of the royal family, brings war to England and, you feel, imperils the cosmos itself.

Clearmindedness keeps breaking through the ferocious tantrums and the stumbling, gasping sickness that threatens to crack the shell of West’s squat, turtle-like Lear. “Oh, let me not be mad” is an almost clinical diagnosis of a danger he knows to be real and serious. And with madness comes yet more clarity, this time involving injustice and suffering as it damages others.

So to the great scenes at Dover: one of them all disgust, hilarity, melancholy and gravity as Lear harangues the world’s hypocrites, the other all quiet simplicity as he rediscovers the daughter who is his own world.

This is a rich yet intricate performance, epicentre of a revival that includes some irritating cuts and fiddly changes but never loses its grip. The ugly daughters are well differentiated, Jessica Turner’s Goneril exuding a hard humourlessness, Catherine Kanter’s softer-seeming Regan indulging a giggliness that escalates into sadism. There’s a swaggering, macho Edmund from Dominic Rickhards and, from David Cardy, a taunting, barrow-boy Fool with an East End accent.

Like the late Robert Stephens, West turns Lear’s dying “look there, look there” into an upbeat vision of afterlife.

Don’t know about that. But I do know that when he cradles his dead daughter, wailing “why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all?”, the Old Vic itself shuddered.

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