It was fascinating to catch up with the Grammys the other night. There was the cheering sight of Miley Cyrus winning awards and the enigmatic spectacle of what Taylor Swift was doing when she appeared to be giving short shrift to Celine Dion when she gave her the best album award. Then Melbourne’s MCG, the ancestral home of Australian Rules Football, seemed to become the centre of the universe as Taylor’s empire of fans became obsessed by the fact that there were no parking facilities to speak of in the vicinity of great football and cricket grounds – unlike their much smaller American equivalents.

The Grammys, though, had their moments of high gravity. Billy Joel, the piano man himself, performed his first new song for thirty years and then there was Joni Mitchell at 80. She had had a brain aneurysm and she had to re-learn how to walk and talk. At the Grammys she sang in a  remarkable contralto, so the voice seemed deepened and darkened with age but it remained tuneful and intensely musical even though overall the effect was deeply poignant as this very grand woman used the great plangent lyrical anthem of her youth as the signature tune of her age as if the worlds of experience could duplicate those of lyrical youth.

Judi Dench, who is kicking 90, and nearly blind, says in her riveting book about playing Shakespeare, The Man who Pays the Rent, that she has no particular enthusiasm for King Lear which is widely thought of as the greatest of the tragedies. It comes to mind now because one of our most notable actors (and one with a very strong classical background) Robert Menzies is going to play the role for Bell Shakespeare starting in June. Menzies was a notable Hamlet as a young man and a rather Hamlet-like Macbeth for Jean-Pierre Mignon of Anthill Theatre when the local council tried to close the production down as a fire risk. It was round then too that Menzies did Shakespeare’s romance Pericles, the play Shakespeare only half-wrote himself, though when Shakespeare does come on the style is dazzling in its exoticism and depth of feeling. And Robert Menzies played the title role with extraordinary grace and power.

The play has its connections with Lear because there is that moment in King Lear when Lear says to Cordelia that, ‘We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage… / And take upon us the mystery of things, / As if we were God’s spies’. The play could have been a tragicomedy like the romances encompassing a parade of sorrows but ending in happiness. So much so that Nahum Tate revised Lear and gave it a happy ending and you can see why Doctor Johnson said that he had not reread the ending of King Lear until he came to edit it.

Remember Lear enters with the body of Cordelia in his arms and gives his great reiterated ‘howl’. A child in 1963 could see John Gielgud do it and visibly from the front stalls the tears pouring down his face. It took a while given this to see why it was Paul Scofield’s Lear directed on stage by Peter Brook in 1963 and as a film shot by Sven Nykvist in 1971 who was thought of as the great Lear of his generation: you can hear him on the old complete Caedmon recording and the performance has a power way beyond eloquence. And that’s true of the greatest Lear of Gielgud’s and Olivier’s generation, Sir Donald Wolfit. The Living Shakespeare recording (containing most of Lear’s great speeches in its hour or so) has a tremendous ravaged buoyancy so you can see why Kenneth Tynan loved it. It’s also palpably the model for the scenes from King Lear in The Dresser and Albert Finney does a flawless imitation of Wolfit’s Lear that is prima facie evidence of its greatness. Olivier’s 1980s TV version has a peerless supporting cast – Diana Rigg as Regan, John Hurt as the Fool, Leo McKern as Gloster – but, as with reports of Larry’s stage Lear (which left André Gide unmoved) and Tynan talking about unpredictable moments in the life of Justice Shallow, it wasn’t his greatest work, though it may be the best introduction for kids given the starkness and the horror of the play in the hands of Scofield and Peter Brook.

It’s easy to forget how ghastly the elements are in King Lear. The massive horrific rage of Lear’s denunciation of Goneril wishing a child who is ‘a thwart, disnatured torment to her!’.

The experience of seeing an actor of the first rank play Lear can be a revelation. Ian McKellen did it in Melbourne in 2007 directed by Trevor Nunn and Geoffrey Rush did it in 2016 in Sydney with Neil Armfield. Many years earlier he played the Fool to the Lear of Warren Mitchell in Brisbane in 1978. Richard Burton threatened to do Lear first to the Fool of Harry Secombe (Seagoon) and later Peter Firth. He was also tempted by the idea of playing it in phonetic German.

What Robert Menzies makes of the role is anybody’s guess but there is the distinct possibility that he might triumph in it.

Peter O’Toole, younger than Burton, never played Lear though from his youth he was good at playing old men and and, opposite Katherine Hepburn, looked every inch her contemporary. His one appearance on the Australian stage was a 1976 Sydney preview of a one-man show Dead Eyed Dicks about sleuths: Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.

The other night we watched Robert Altman’s 1973 film of The Long Goodbye. Elliott Gould is better than you’d think as Marlowe (even if you’re a Robert Mitchum loyalist) and there is a dazzling central performance by the great Sterling Hayden, one of those actors who could create characters newly minted with a staggering authority and originality. The whole film is a marvellous evocation of the cruelty and confusion of Nixon’s America and it is absolutely one-off, a masterpiece with a Mexican climax which has an emotional reality like a body blow and is also for all its depicted schadenfreude a homage to a great entertainer.