Frank Langella in King Lear
(©Richard Termine)

Following in Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi’s recent footsteps in playing King Lear at BAM’s Harvey Theater, Frank Langella provides further proof that the Bard’s late classic has become an essential milestone for actors of a certain age. This production imported from the Chichester Festival Theatre seems to have little reason to exist other than as a star vehicle. But when you have as magisterial a performer as this one in the title role, not much more is required.

Angus Jackson’s staging is purely of the straightforward variety, with few directorial impositions. Robert Innes Hopkins’ set, dominated by massive wooden pillars, and period costumes, while handsome, are similarly undistracting. Thankfully, the play has not been updated to the fascist era, nor are there video screens to project an air of modernity.

Thus it falls on its star’s broad shoulders to bear the weight of this play which never quite has the psychological coherence that it should. And Langella handles the load with ease, despite his advanced age (he recently turned 76) and relative lack of Shakespearean experience. His performance is not particularly revelatory, but he touches the character’s myriad emotional bases with consummate skill.

His Lear displays few touches of the senility which many of his predecessors have suggested. Rather, he’s physically imposing and authoritative, his powerful baritone voice lending an innate majesty to his line readings. Fittingly, there’s more than a slight hint of one of his most famous roles, Richard Nixon, in his monarch’s inability to fully grasp how his power is slipping away. Railing at his fate while standing in the midst of a torrential rainstorm, he resembles a prehistoric creature in its death throes.

The supporting cast is solid if unspectacular, with a few weak links, such as Isabella Laughland’s bland Cordelia. Catherine McCormack and Lauren O’Neill are suitably fierce as the scheming Goneril and Regan; Denis Conway invests his Gloucester with a stirring gravitas; and Sebastian Armesto handles Edgar’s disguising himself as a madman with daring physical virtuosity. Best of all are Max Bennett, displaying leading man-style charisma as the treacherous Edmond, and Harry Melling (familiar as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films), whose youthful demeanor provides unexpected dimensions to the Fool.

This is a more physical Lear than most, with Langella frequently physically manhandling his fellow players and Gloucester’s blinding depicted with a brutal intensity that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror film (the splats of his gouged out eyes hitting the floor are particularly squirm-inducing). But for all the intensity on display, the production never quite moves us as much as it should. Perhaps it’s time to retire the play for a little while, if only to gain some distance from it. Oh, never mind, there’s another production by Theatre for a New Audience, just around the corner from BAM, opening this spring.

BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn. 718-636-4100. www.bam.org. Through Feb. 9