Jonathan Kent certainly bows out at the Almeida with a bang rather than a whimper. In his valedictory production of King Lear, the rain is the rainiest, the storm is the stormiest and the thunder the most thunderous you will encounter. As an evening it makes up in vigour what it lacks in subtlety.

I have seen two truly radical productions of Lear: Peter Brook's which discovered an unsuspected moral neutrality, and Nicholas Hytner's which explored the text's nonsensical contradictions. Kent's, which takes a black-and-white view of the characters, is not in that league.

What Kent does is create an exciting theatrical event. And if there is a clue to his vision it lies in the Fool's prophecy that the the realm of Albion shall "come to great confusion": what we see is a kingdom, literally, falling apart.

The first shock comes when you walk into the Almeida and discover that stage and auditorium are all part of one mahogany-panelled room. The besuited Lear's division of his kingdom becomes a public charade arranged for the benefit of the TV cameras.

Gloucester is a faintly Churchillian clubman who bases his vision of disorder on Old Moore's Almanack. And Lear, in a Brookish touch, travels around with a group of jodhpured rowdies. But just when you think the production is too hermetic - with the stocks appearing in the middle of a drawing room - the walls of Paul Brown's set disintegrate under the impact of the storm.

It is even more stunning than the Kent-Brown Tempest and it certainly shows how the dissolution of familial bonds is echoed and magnified in nature.

But the play is interpreted visually as much as textually in a way that detracts from Oliver Ford Davies's Lear. He has a commanding presence, a resonant voice and is every inch the patriarchal bully confronting his own moral blindness.

But the production's visual and aural panache force him to compete on their terms and allow him too little inwardness.

When they come, Ford Davies's moments of calm are stunning. His sudden reflection on Cordelia that "I did her wrong" stops the heart. His "let me not be mad" is delivered movingly to his own reflection in a mirror. In the final scene, he finds variety in his wracking repetitions of the word "never". He is a highly intelligent actor and if his performance is too fortissimo and lacking in internal contradiction it is because the production itself demands a raging Lear.

But there is good support from David Ryall as a credulous Gloucester, and Anthony O'Donnell as the Fool, and Suzanne Burden and Lizzy McInnerny make a stylishly sinister Goneril and Regan, even if the production denies them moral complexity.

This is not a life-changing Lear; but what it does capture is the way individual actions breed national disintegration and cosmic disorder.

· Until March 30. Box office: 020-7359 4404.