Glenda Jackson previously played King Lear in a 2016 London staging of the play—which marked her return to the stage after serving 23 years as a member of the U.K. Parliament.

Though Shakespeare wrote King Lear as a tragedy, audiences in the mid-17th to the early 19th centuries saw a radically different version of the story. In a now discarded happy ending imposed on the play, Lear survives and is restored to the throne; Cordelia lives and marries Edgar.

The first known performance of Shakespeare’s tragedy took place before the court of the English King James I at Whitehall in December, 1606. It has previously been produced on Broadway many times, though never before with a woman in the title role.