It makes sense…to try and sort out your will before the big bell in the sky tolls. No surprises. No disappointment. A mere segue from this world to the next whereupon all parties concerned know their place when you depart centre-stage. And therein lies the problem: you are still very much centre stage, taking up time, taking up resource and now commanding emotional commitment. What makes the source text King Lear so riveting is that we can all imagine being an other-worldly presence at the reading of our will. How grateful do your offspring appear to be? is it at all commensurate with the bounty before them now? Has the miscreant finally learned their lesson? This is what lends Shakespeare’s totemic play such potency: family, betrayal, legacy, and madness…and all of it avoidable had Lear simply followed the normal course of events and shuffled of this mortal coil first. But Lear being Lear (the man that he usually is) instead watches in real time the deflation of his manifest eminence. By refusing to go to his grave first, his grave comes for all of them.

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