King Lear is a big house, full of locked doors and strange sounds. It's an uncomfortable family dinner. It is, as they say in the theatre, intimate. It's warm, oddly so, like it might be alive, like it's breathing, or is that just the storm? It's downstairs at a pub on St James Street - it always has been, rimming the glasses, dripping from the taps, glaring from the lights, eating away at the carpets. You know it. It's not unfamiliar to you. You have always known it.
The king is ready to split his kingdom between his daughters in preparation for his old age, but not for them to defy his expectations. Directed by Katya Schwarz, this production of Shakespeare's masterpiece is an eerie pitch-black tragicomedy all about family. For some difficult conversations, a little murder, and a lot of rain, join us in the haunted world of an abandoned basement theatre, where the houses of Lear and Gloucester are just beginning to crumble...