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For Derek Jacobi, Now Is the Time for a Certain Role By SARAH LYALL Johan Persson

Derek Jacobi as the title character in “King Lear.” The play, directed by Michael Grandage, begins performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday.

Johan Persson

Derek Jacobi performing in “King Lear” at the Donmar Warehouse in London. The play opened there in December.

WHAT is the right age to play King Lear, as rich, anguished and demanding a role as any that Shakespeare wrote? Play it in your prime, before the specter of mortality has stared you in the face, and you risk seeming callow and implausible. Leave it too long, as some critics believed Laurence Olivier did when he played Lear in a 1984 television production, and you may have lost the physical stamina or emotional endurance the part demands.

The great British actor Derek Jacobi had been pondering this question for at least a decade, after the director Michael Grandage first suggested that they do a “Lear” together. Over the years, the two talked about the play and how they might approach it. Then Mr. Jacobi decided it was time.

“I just felt too young before,” said Mr. Jacobi, who is now 72. “As an actor, as an adult, as a maturing older man, I needed to be absolutely more centered in myself, because ‘Lear’ is a mountain to climb.”

The result is an acclaimed production of “Lear” that opened at the Donmar Warehouse in London in December, sold out to ecstatic reviews in an eight-week tour across Britain and is to begin performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday. It had critics reaching for new kinds of superlatives. In The Daily Telegraph, the exacting Charles Spencer marveled at Mr. Jacobi’s “blaze of autumnal glory as an actor” and said that the production was “the finest and most searching Lear I have ever seen.”

(more)http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/theater/derek-jacobi-in-king-lear.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&smid=tw-nytimestheater