Cordelia, Does Your Dad Have Any History Of Stroke?

A professor of old-age psychiatry gives his take on Ian McKellen’s King Lear: “When Lear punched Kent, I found myself thinking: ‘This old man is the terror of the nursing home.’ That is a type of character I know very well. … It’s dangerous to make psychiatric diagnoses from plays, but I thought Ian McKellen’s performance was consistent with a vascular condition rather than Alzheimer’s.”