Costume design by Roger Furse for John Gielgud as King Lear, Old Vic, 1940.

Roger Furse (1903-1972) was one of the leading British theatre designers of the mid-20th century. He frequently worked at the Old Vic, in productions featuring some of the great names of British theatre. King Lear, in 1940, was John Gielgud’s second portrayal of Shakespeare’s king. The programme credited the production to Lewis Casson, who also played Kent, but Gielgud had persuaded the eminent Shakespearean, Harley Granville-Barker, to co-direct. Granville-Barker had directed three highly influential productions of Shakespeare at the Savoy Theatre (The Winter’s Tale and Twelfth Night in 1912 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1914) but had given up the stage to concentrate on writing. He only agreed to work on King Lear if he remained unacknowledged.

Furse gave the play a Renaissance setting, and captured the drama of the storm on the heath in his design for Lear in Act 3, scene.2. The performance matched the image. The critic of The Times (16 April 1940) described how Gielgud traced ‘with a brilliant exactness Lear’s progress from worldly to spiritual authority. The Olympian grandeur, the frets, the rages, the madness lit with flashes of savage irony and broken in upon by spiritual illumination – all these phases of the part he succeeded in treating as though they were a spontaneous product of the mind’.