How do staff at a nursing home facilitate the care of an ageing actress facing the inevitability of dementia? They play along with her delusions to explore her happy memories of rehearsing for a performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear of course.
This is the premise behind Lost Lear by award-winning theatremaker, Dan Colley which opens at Galway’s Town Hall Theatre on Wednesday, November 8. It tells the incredible story of a family dealing with dementia, but from the viewpoint of the dementing matriarch, within the framework of a Shakespearean classic.
Following the national and international tour of A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, Dan Colley and his company have turned their sights on a very – he says “very, very” - loose adaptation of King Lear.
Shakespeare had Britain’s elderly King Lear divide his power and wealth between two of his three daughters in anger. Colley produces a darkly comic remix of the Bard’s play told from the point of view of Joy, a person with dementia, who is living in an old memory of rehearsing King Lear. Joy's delicately maintained reality is upended by the arrival of her estranged son who, being cast as Cordelia, must find a way to speak his truth from within the limited role he's given.
Using puppetry, projection and live video effects, the audience are landed in Joy's world as layers of her past and present, fiction and reality, overlap and distort. Lost Lear is a thought-provoking meditation on theatre, artifice and the possibility of communicating across the chasms between us.
Starring Venetia Bowe, Peter Daly, Manus Halligan, Em Ormonde and Clodagh O’Farrell, the play’s unusualness is reflected in the praise it has won from its critics, many of whom are not the usual theatre reviewers: "This is a captivating journey, from an energetic and rambunctious beginning to the poignant and gentle end, it portrays the bewilderment of someone who wants to care, trying to have the shared experience with the person living with dementia, struggling and sometimes failing. I am delighted to hear that Lost Lear is on tour and many more people will have the opportunity to see it for the first time - or again" says Susan Crampton, of the Dementia Carers Campaign Network.
The play has won rare, five star reviews, and was nominated in the Irish Times Theatre Awards’ Best New Play category for 2022.
Tickets €16/€18 from www.tht.ie for Wednesday, November 8, at 8pm.
