Column: London theater forecast after Brexit and Trump: Overcast skies with a chance of apocalypse

Reporting from LONDON —  “Is this the promised end?” Kent mournfully asks as King Lear carries Cordelia’s corpse on stage at the close of Shakespeare’s most harrowing tragedy. “Or image of that horror?” Edgar, more rational but equally afflicted, wonderingly replies.

Doomsday was in the air on a recent trip to London that included two notable productions of “King Lear”; the two parts of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” where evil forces are once again conspiring to erase all of the good the Boy Who Lived has achieved; and “The Children,” Lucy Kirkwood’s intriguing new play at the Royal Court that takes place in the wake of a nuclear plant meltdown.

My marathon itinerary of nine plays in five days (civilians, please don’t try this yourselves) also included the deservedly touted Donmar Warehouse triple bill of Shakespeare plays (performed by an all-female cast) that imagines “Julius Caesar,” “Henry IV” and “The Tempest” brought to life inside a women’s prison. And “The Red Barn,” a new David Hare play at the National Theatre (based on the novel “La Main” by Georges Simenon) that questions whether even America’s boom years were really all that glorious.

It would be tempting to think that the stage was reflecting the roller-coaster ride of current affairs, but these works had to be in the planning stages long before Brexit and President-elect Donald Trump. The truth is that the world the theater is mirroring has been in a state of anxiety for quite some time.

The present fears about climate change, terrorism and globalization’s political and economic fallout have exacerbated our horrible imaginings of the future. It would be unnatural if the theater didn’t register the collective consternation. But an overindulgence of London theater in the dying light of 2016 might persuade you to cash in your 401(k).

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Whenever I’m especially rattled by the parlous state of the world, I take comfort in Frank Kermode’s “The Sense of an Ending,” a little book written by a literary scholar with a prodigious mind. In this now classic treatise on apocalyptic thinking in fiction, Kermode argues that it “is commonplace to talk about our historical situation as uniquely terrible and in a way privileged, a cardinal point in time.”

Every age is convinced that its crises are “preeminent, more worrying, more interesting than other crises.” But the truth, Kermode contends, is that “if we have a terrible privilege it is merely that we are alive and are going to die, all at once or one at a time.”

That is reassuring, though just as the paranoid sometimes have enemies, those crying that the sky is falling may one day be right. No one knows what catastrophic effect today’s melting ice caps and megalomaniacal autocrats will have on human civilization, which (though hard for our species to concede) represents only a blip in the planet’s history. Still, the apocalypse in the forecast is likely to turn out to be a version of the false apocalypse depicted in “King Lear” — not so much the end of history as the end of a historical order.

Theatergoers were surely lining up for the Old Vic production of “King Lear” to see Glenda Jackson bring her fierce political convictions to the title role, just as they have been crowding into the Barbican to experience Antony Sher’s eloquent portrayal in the Royal Shakespeare Company production. Shakespeare’s play is about enduring the worst even if, as Edgar says, “The worst is not/So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.”

The sight of these veteran actors contending with a world that has trashed its moral codes and exhausted not only hope but meaning itself is the ennobling promise of these productions. How will Jackson’s ethical principles inform her Lear? How will Sher’s articulacy illuminate his portrait of a king whose imperious mind shatters under the weight of injustice and grief?

Deborah Warner’s production, which ended its limited run last weekend, strained for modern effects, but Jackson infused the title role with a timeless fury. Her voice wasn’t “ever soft,/Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman,” as Lear says of the dead Cordelia. Rather it was scalding with condemnation and guttural with outrage. Jackson’s Lear refused to normalize aberrant times.

The performance may have called attention to itself with rhetorical and gestural flourishes that seemed more technical than emotional. (Jackson, a two-time Oscar winner who abandoned an enviable acting career to serve as a member of Parliament, made her return to the stage at the age of 80 for this Mt. Everest of roles.) But she memorably conveyed in rasps, hisses, shrieks, roars and moans the unbearable anguish of betrayed values.

Gregory Doran’s production for the RSC may not attain the same agonizing heights, but Sher cuts an impressive path of clarity through the text. Disorder reigns after Lear divides his kingdom between his two grasping daughters, but Sher illuminates the reason in Lear’s madness with exquisite care for the meaning of every deranged utterance. Words may fail, but language is still the only tool that separates us from beasts.

The popularity of “King Lear” right now (one London theatergoer seated near me bragged to a friend that he’d seen seven this year alone) suggests an unlucky correspondence between Shakespeare’s tragic vision and our own tumultuous time. But survival is as central to the play as destruction. We come seeking wisdom on how to persevere in the face of evil and death. Edgar reminds his suicidal father, “Men must endure/Their going hence even as their coming hither./Ripeness is all.” Shakespeare peers into the abyss to fortify us against despair even as his play plunges us mercilessly into the fathomless dark.

“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the latest in J.K. Rowling’s blockbuster series, dreams up a new fantasy dystopia with explicitly modern parallels. This two-part play, written by Jack Thorne from a new story he collaborated on with Rowling and director John Tiffany, conjures a world in which the forces of darkness are on the march, with death camps and torture evoking not just the historical atrocities of World War II but also the escalating dangers of this new era of terrorism.

The saga revolves around Albus (Sam Clemmett), school-age son of Harry Potter, who’s now 37 and working as a high-profile bureaucrat at the Ministry of Magic. In setting out to erase a blot on his father’s legacy, Albus rejiggers history and unleashes malevolent powers thought to be forever vanquished.

The play retains all the suspense and relief one expects from fantasy fiction. But it also delivers lessons on resistance in the face of totalitarian threats, the importance of a clear heart in a “murky” world, the unexpected courage lurking within us and the way one person can make an enormous difference in how the future unfolds. The epic emotion of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” — and, yes, I was fully on board for the long journey — has as much to do with the narrative ride as with the turbulent real-world context. Indeed, the stakes for the characters have never seemed higher.

Kirkwood’s “The Children,” which is receiving an impeccably acted world premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in a production directed by James Macdonald, revolves around an environmental calamity reminiscent of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan. Though kept in the background, the incident (there’s mention of an earthquake, a tsunami and exclusion zones) intensifies the playwright’s fraught picture of a collapsing world.

Set in a coastal cottage that two married nuclear scientists in their 60s have retreated to after a nuclear power plant meltdown, the play twistingly examines the responsibility an older generation has for cleaning up the mess it has left behind.

The three-person cast encourages a close behavioral focus as the play shifts from mystery to ethical dilemma, from sociological survey to psychological study. As soon as you think you understand where the drama is heading, it changes direction.

The plot revolves around the unexpected arrival of Rose (a stunningly enigmatic Francesca Annis) at the doorstep of Hazel (Deborah Findlay, domestically sublime) and Robin (Ron Cook, serving both actresses admirably). Former colleagues (all in their 60s) with a tangled romantic past, they do their best to treat this as an ordinary social call, but neither the abnormal conditions in which they are living nor the reason for Rose’s appearance can allow this pretense to go on indefinitely.

Kirkwood, author of the play “Chimerica” and one of the cleverest in this new generation of British dramatists, never allows the extraordinary situation of the characters to distract from their stubborn individuality. Which is to say, realism is painstakingly cultivated in a scenario that is frightening, though sadly not impossible, to imagine.

The play isn’t entirely satisfying in its dramatic development or culminating tableau but it keeps unfolding in the mind — a portrait of people like you and me caught up in a catastrophe they’d like to pretend isn’t their responsibility but who are too smart to believe such an obvious falsehood.

The link between stage fiction and the world outside the theater is explicitly pointed to in the Donmar Warehouse Shakespeare trilogy. These productions of “Julius Caesar,” “Henry IV” and “The Tempest,” directed by Phyllida Lloyd at King’s Cross Theatre and performed by an all-female cast led by a transcendent Harriet Walter, use the framework of a women’s prison theater program to set in motion each drama.

At the start of each play an actress playing a prisoner tells us what the experience of acting in Shakespeare has opened up for her. Near the end of “Julius Caesar,” Walter mutters (as she switches back from the role of Brutus to that of a convict forced to temporarily stop performing) that she doesn’t understand why no one is taking this demagoguery more seriously. Such a line might sound heavy-handed, but slipped in as a marginal remark in a production that takes enormous care in credibly constructing Shakespeare’s play, it makes us think harder about the intense relevance of a political tragedy most of us first encountered in our school days. (It also helps that Walter’s work is on par here with the greatest Shakespearean player of them all, Mark Rylance.)

Lloyd’s fluid direction, as faithful as it is free, recontextualizes all three of these classics. If her interpretations foreclose more complete readings of the texts, their sharp-angled views nonetheless lead us to the core of each play while proving that gender is no barrier in performing Shakespeare at the highest level.

Hare’s “The Red Barn,” at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre, wouldn’t seem to fit this pattern of the stage setting off societal alarm bells. The play is a tense period piece, given a sensationally cinematic production by director Robert Icke and a team of extraordinary designers.

The general impression is Hitchcockian or, perhaps because it’s at the National, I first thought Pinteresque, though without the metaphysics. But Hare is an inveterately political writer, and this play, set in a country house in a well-to-do Connecticut backwater in 1969, paints a portrait of vintage America that questions the soul-destroying costs of a capitalist dream that privileges security and status over sex. (Simenon, the Belgian-born author of widely admired pulp fiction, lived for a time in Lakeville, Conn., where the novel, upon which the play is based, is located under a different name.)

“The Red Barn” is most notable for its mesmerizing scenic effects and its accomplished cast (including a powerfully seductive Mark Strong as Donald Dodd and Hope Davis as his repressed wife, Ingrid). But for a Californian traveling abroad in the wake of an earthquake election, the play seemed like an elegy for an American era that couldn’t help failing to live up to its own myth.

Something, if the London stage is any judge, is coming to a close. It’s not likely to be the end of the world, but no compulsive theatergoer will be completely surprised if it’s the end of the world as we know it.

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