Let's celebrate one of those actors who, while not the household name he should be, makes the critic's calling a joy. David Calder has played some major roles for the RSC, among them Prospero and Shylock, and brought distinction to many lesser ones. You could call him podgy if you wanted to be rude, yet he moves with the lightness of a dancer and has the same fleet quality when he shifts from feeling to feeling. At 61 he has all the qualities needed for Lear, a performance that launches the Globe's new season and confirms Calder's own place at the theatre's top table.

Though the costumes are medieval, Calder's first entrance reminds one of a majestic Henry VIII. He's big, broad and in a confident enough mood to turn his promise to “crawl towards death” into a genial joke. But, like Henry, he's not to be crossed. A moment later he's angrily pulling down the wonky map of England that hangs from the balcony - the Isle of Wight an apologetic squiggle - and sending Jodie McNee's Cordelia packing. And another moment later he's half-regretting it, injecting a hint of sorrow into: “We have no such daughter nor shall ever see that face of hers again.”

Already you sense that this will be a rich performance, and so it proves. The only problem is that, though Dominic Dromgoole's production is fast and fluent, some actors haven't fully come to terms with their characters, the Globe or both. Sally Bretton and Kellie Bright could bring more psycho- logical complexity to Lear's bad daughters and Joseph Mydell could find more in a Gloucester so mild that you half-expect him to help out at his own eye extraction. I liked the furious resentment that Daniel Hawksford's Edmund feels at being branded bastard, but he doesn't exactly glitter with danger afterwards.

Still, Danny Lee Wynter's fastidious, affectionate Fool gives Calder the opportunity to demonstrate his own capacity for warmth. Indeed, he even hugs Bretton's snappish Goneril before angrily shoving her away. And such paradoxes mark his acting throughout.

You won't see many Lears who rage so robustly at those “unnatural hags”, his daughters, or spoof his own supposed senility so wryly or wail with such disbelief at “filial ingratitude” or discover such sympathy for the world's “poor naked wretches”, here a swarm of vermicular men writhing beside Trystan Gravelle's scratched, scarred Edgar, alias Poor Tom.

And so, via a fierce, tender, disgusted, anguished mad scene at Dover, to the ending that the 18th century found so painful it rewrote it. Never, never, never will the dead Cordelia breathe again. As Calder's Lear flatly repeats the word, we feel it piercingly.

Box office: 020-7401 9919

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010