Early on, Jackson has her moments: Banishing the Earl of Kent (arguably, Lear's one true friend), she concludes her precisely spoken denunciation with 'This shall not be revoked,' each word its own sentence of doom.

From her first entrance, nattily outfitted in a tuxedo, her face a weather map of lines predicting an imminent storm, one expects majesty and malice, the fury of a ruler untethered from the symbols of state and left to rail against an indifferent universe. Indeed, this Lear barely seems to be a king at all. Her characterization in the current production is a dismayingly small-scale creation, stripped of grandeur and only rarely making meaningful contact with the others onstage. The revelation of the revival at the Cort is, surprisingly, its redundancy: We didn't know it at the time, but Three Tall Women, an account of the disintegration from which no amount of wealth and power can provide protection, constituted Jackson's Lear. It was a meeting of role and star that promised the terrors of the earth: An actress of matchless intelligence and fury paired with a titanic role in a tragedy so dark that its corpse-strewn finale seems to adumbrate the onset of twentieth-century nihilism. The answer came, quickly enough, with the announcement that she was set to tackle King Lear, a role that, only just previously, she had played in London to great acclaim. It was the comeback of the season, the decade, and maybe the century so far, and it left one wondering what she could possibly do for an encore. With her marcelled hair, chalk-white makeup, tottering gait, and a bark that all but took the paint off the walls, she was a magnificent ruin, a portrait of grandeur slipping into irrevocable decay.

Long absent from our stages, thanks to a distinguished career in politics, she returned with gale force, offering a pitiless portrait of a vindictive, failing grand dame, raging at her caretakers and reminiscing about her loveless past with icy precision. Quite possibly the most exciting theatre event of last season was Glenda Jackson in a glittering revival of Edward Albee's Three Tall Women. Theatre in Review: King Lear (Cort Theatre)

Satirical theatre stage lighting design