Lost Lear review: Layered retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy set in a nursing home

Lost Lear

Project Arts Centre, Cube

★★★☆☆

In this layered retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy of madness and old age, the “foolish fond old” king is recast as Joy (Venetia Bowe), an actress living out her final years in a nursing home. With the collaboration of her carers, Joy spends her days rehearsing for her role as the ousted, ailing majesty; her nurses (Manus Halligan, Clodagh O’Farrell and Em Ormonde) stepping in as sidekicks and set dressers. When her estranged son, Conor (Peter Daly), comes to visit, a real-life generational drama begins to unfold. Conor is not sure about the therapeutic ethics of Joy’s care. Is it right, he wonders, to encourage her to live in memory? After a lifetime of abandonment, he needs her to acknowledge him in the present moment, and to own up to the failures of her past.

Dan Colley’s ambitious, visually stimulating production — created in collaboration with the company — layers several realities on top of each other. The nursing home setting is represented allusively by designer Andrew Clancy with a large cushioned chair and a nurse’s station, which become Lear’s throne and the technical director’s control box, from which projected silhouette backdrops can be mounted and changed. As the performance reaches its climax, a gauze curtain allows us to step inside Joy’s mind, too. Lit from behind, it becomes a veil through which we can witness Joy’s frailty in the haunting physical form of an uncanny puppet.

The competing storylines of Joy as patient and Conor as her son is underdeveloped, resulting in an unsatisfactory and unresolved conclusion

The dramaturgy of dementia is — perhaps inevitably, perhaps appropriately — going to be confusing, and Colley almost manages to harness that disorientation for his purposes. However, the competing storylines of Joy as patient and Conor as her son is underdeveloped, resulting in an unsatisfactory and unresolved conclusion to the 80-minute piece.

King Lear is the monarch’s tragedy, not his daughter’s, and Lost Lear would be a stronger piece if it embraced the opportunity to offer up its heroine in her “unaccommodated state ... [as] no more than a poor, bare, forked animal”. Bowe, who gives a heart-crushing performance of emotional power and physical prowess as Joy (and Lear), is certainly up to the task. Her dying actress is both “a ruined piece of nature” as well as “every inch a king”.