Jonathan Munby's production starring Ian McKellen, first seen last year in Chichester and now transferred to the West End, reflects our everyday anxieties, emphasising in the world of a Trump presidency, the dangers of childish, petulant authoritarianism. And while King James I was keen to promulgate the benefits of a united kingdom - having joined England and Scotland under his rule only three years before Shakespeare's tragedy was presented at court in 1606 - the corrosive nature of divisions within the state is equally clear now in the era of Brexit. The Union Flag features frequently in Paul Wills' design.

Munby is an inspiring director, especially of Shakespeare, mining text and motivation with meticulous care. His Globe productions of Antony and Cleopatra and The Merchant of Venice were especially revealing. Here, in a modern-dress setting, he makes much of the pagan nature of Lear as well as contemporary concerns. This places the action - clear and fast-paced though it is - in a strange world where people in combat gear pay deference to "the gods", showing respect for Apollo with ritualised hand gestures. 

If there are more ideas than the production's frame can easily contain, at its heart is Ian McKellen's mesmerising performance, exploring the vulnerability of old age, the absoluteness of death, the fragility of life and of sanity with such humanity, such a mixture of twinkling mischief, unforgivable cruelty, gentleness and sad acceptance of his failings that it takes your breath away. Much was made last year of the importance of the intimacy of the Minerva Theatre, which seats fewer than 300 people, but McKellen's performance remains unforced, even conversational, in its new surroundings. This is aided by the design, which includes a central walkway through the audience and a panelled wooden curve often limiting the stage area.

To begin with, Lear appears alone for a moment, enjoying the stage-managed surprise he is about to spring. His daughters sweep in dressed in ball gowns and the court sing together. All seems well-ordered, even good-natured, until the fateful fracturing of the kingdom. Sinéad Cusack plays good-hearted Kent, banished for speaking up and soon disguised as an Irish-accented male servant to the king in his homeless wanderings. The gender change makes perfect sense (as a similar casting, of Saskia Reeves did in Nancy Meckler's Globe production last year) and Cusack carries it off brilliantly.

Of the daughters, Anita-Joy Uwajeh as a strong-minded Cordelia and Claire Price as a Sloaney, pearls-and-headscarf, Goneril are new to the cast. Kirsty Bushell's fascinating Regan is unstable, kittenish, manipulative, sexually excited by the blinding of Gloucester. This is especially horrific, carried out with a meat hook in an abattoir. The heads of the dumb beasts - cow and pig - have already witnessed Lear's mock arraignment of his daughters.Lloyd Hutchinson's Irish Fool (above with Sinéad Cusack as Kent) plays the banjo and cheekily mimics his master - rather well. His witnessing of Gloucester's blinding and subsequent encounter with a murderous Edmund seem odd additions, however.

Danny Webb's Gloucester is a fine foil for McKellen and their Dover scene very moving as two old men, in the wisdom and foolishness of age, learn the error of their ways while facing mortality, one blind, the other madly wielding a bunch of weeds like a gun. Luke Thompson visibly grows up as Edgar and James Corrigan makes a clever, sardonic Edmund. But, however good the rest of the cast, it is McKellen who is unforgettable. His career has encompassed many of Shakespeare's major roles, including Edgar, Kent and, in Trevor Nunn's operatic 2007 RSC production, an earlier Lear. If, at 78, this really is his last stage performance in Shakespeare, it makes a stunning finale.

• King Lear at Duke of York's Theatre to 3 November 
• Read more theatre reviews on theartsdesk

@heathermneill

Overleaf: more great Lears

The Fens of East Anglia, and the lonely coasts that skirt them, usually sit well below the horizon of mainstream culture. Yet when England’s flatlands and their maritime margins do find a literary voice – in Graham Swift’s Waterland, say, or WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn – a mountainous achievement can result. If it never quite attains those heights, Stella Tillyard’s assured and entrancing second novel deserves a place of honour on this too-short Fenland shelf.

Streya: New works for solo violin and violin with electronics Olivia De Prato (violin) (New Focus Recordings)

From an early age, Barbara Strozzi would have entertained the guests of her father’s Venetian academy with songs, including her own works. A similarly intimate room at London’s Handel House museum provided a suitable setting for Strozzi’s work to be heard alongside the greatest of late Renaissance vocal composers, Claudio Monteverdi. Monteverdi came out ahead, but only by a nose.

Those who find the Bard tough going – wasn't that one of Emma Rice's admissions back in the day? – should beat a path to The Two Noble Kinsmen, a late-career collaboration with John Fletcher that emerges as Shakespeare lite. Remembered (dimly) as the play that opened the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1986, the play tells of a bromance gone awry when competition for a woman gets in the way.

David Collins: Violin Sonatas Duo Ardoré (Sheva)

Even in its successful early days Wycherley’s 1675 comedy was notorious, but it was considered too lewd to be staged at all between the mid-Eighteenth Century and 1924. Although the play has found an affectionate place in the canon in more recent times, it makes a kind of sense to transpose the goings on of louche Restoration aristocrats to the era of the Bright Young Things, the time of its rediscovery.

Mortality inflects commemoration. So it is with portraiture: the likeness – particularly those which celebrate lives of status and accomplishment – will always be limned with death.

The power of music solves every problem, at least when as bewitchingly performed as it was here. With the great mezzo Christine Rice voiceless for at least a night, and rising star Caitlin Hulcup singing for her from the midst of the instruments in the pit right at the centre of the Roundhouse, how could faithful Penelope's final acceptance of her long-lost husband Ulysses (Roderick Williams) achieve transcendence?

The “concert drama” is on the up, offering audiences a mingled-genre means to experience music and its context simultaneously. The author and singer Clare Norburn has an absolute peach of a story to tell in the "imagined testimony of Carlo Gesualdo, composer and murderer," the legendary musician who knifed to death his wife and her lover upon catching them in flagrante.