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Hot on the heels of teen drama "O" comes another reworking of a Shakespeare original. But where director Tim Blake Nelson recreated Othello in an American high school, Don Boyd's drama transplants King Lear to modern-day Liverpool.
Richard Harris plays Sandeman, the head of Merseyside's criminal underworld and, like Lear, the father of three daughters. In a city ravaged by poverty and corruption, Sandeman is undisputed lord of all he surveys. But his kingdom starts to crumble when his wife (Redgrave) is killed in an apparently motiveless mugging.
Sandeman thinks otherwise, though, and resolves to take revenge - a decision that sets him on a collision course with eldest daughter Kath (Lombard), a ruthless brothel keeper, and her no less ambitious sister Tracy (Pilkington).
Like the recent Michael Caine vehicle "Shiner", "My Kingdom" tries to find a modern context for Shakespeare's tragedy, with mixed results. Harris is suitably imperious as the much abused patriarch and touchingly conveys his mental disintegration. But a lurid plot involving a paraplegic pimp (Colin Salmon), a psychotic Sikh (Mistry), and some drug-smuggling cows strains credibility and leads to an almost farcical orgy of mutilation and bloodshed.
Even more damaging, Boyd's screenplay (co-written with Guardian hack Nick Davies) has a florid turn of phrase that owes more to Guy Ritchie than the Bard of Avon. Somehow you can't imagine the latter describing Lear's youngest daughter Cordelia (played in this version by newcomer Emma Catherwood) as having "a smack habit the size of Kilimanjaro".
