Review: Lost Lear
In the experience of sense, the question arises what happens when we dead awaken? There is; however, another question: what happens when awakening, it goes unnoticed? Lost Lear is a lament to the creeping grief witnessed by most families: dementia.
Before the play starts, an enlarged face is projected onto a gossamer curtain. She is forever powdering her face. We come to learn this face belongs to Joy (Venetia Bowe) who maintains a façade to ward off encroaching decline. Helping her do this is care worker, Liam, played by Manus Halligan. Liam conjures a performative veneer; a production of King Lear. The care workers at the home are participants in this activity: wardrobe, props, and stage-managers. Through it all, Joy characteristically recites passages from King Lear whilst being supported by her ‘carers’. It is implied she has spent a lifetime on the stage. This pretence, which clearly has been going on for some time, is perturbed only when Joy’s son, Conor (Peter Daly), turns up. In order to speak with his mother, Liam directs him to play the part of Cordelia. However, Conor, is no actor and reads his lines like an uninterested school-boy. These exchanges provide the light-hearted moments of Lost Lear. Has Liam really cast him as Cordelia? It’ll be alright on the night, Joy is assured, in a play where life is forever a rehearsal.
Written and directed by Dan Colley, Lost Lear is beautifully staged – invoking a mode of looking where the delaminated elements of the performance are a representation of what has been going on in Joy’s fragile mind for some time now. In a call to Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, Lost Lear shows the art of staging a play within the construct of a performance. Lost Lear is dramaturgically precise. In searching for another world, the audience instinctively know not to trust this one. The distanciation between Joy’s self-perception and the truth of her health expertly frames the denialism experienced by anyone who has witnessed a loved one fall prey to dementia. Although anticipated, the moment when the façade slips – when Joy witnesses that her ‘performance’ no longer convinces - is truly affecting.
Dramaturgy often carries with it the power of transformation: the magic of dreams. Lost Lear is the opposite – the loss of an illusion. This is an amazing play. Bowe’s performance is mesmeric. Halligan and Daly are excellent too. If there is a criticism, it is to be found in the writing. Occasionally, I felt jolted by contrivances. The formative-years gap in the mother/son relationship seemed specifically designed to create the ‘storm-of-letters’ scene. However, the all-encompassing curation of effect so successfully engulfs as to recede all else…leaving the audience in contemplative silence.
Lost Lear ran at The Traverse, Edinburgh, 27th July - 24th Aug.