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Lost Lear

 
Alec Martin Review by Alec Martin 5 Published: 9 Aug 2025 Traverse Theatre Show Dates: 27 Jul 2025-24 Aug 2025

If memory is theatre’s most treacherous stage, then Dan Colley’s Lost Lear treads it with mesmerising assurance. Joy is a retired actor living with dementia, her memories teased out and tended to by carers who encourage her to live in a world where she is still preparing King Lear – the people around her “playing along” to steady her existence and allow the one-time blazing star of the theatre some level of engagement and stimulation as the condition strips away her memories.

A production which resists tidy catharsis - rightly so - but the emotional clarity never blurs

When her estranged son Conor arrives, the game casts him – devastatingly – as Cordelia. The piece shifts and swirls between present-tense caregiving, shards of Lear, and memories of a life of dramatic transcendence and familial abandonment. This bleed is the point: memory misfires, repeats, dazzles, collapses. Live video, projection, puppetry and tight lighting cues make those shifts visible without ever forcing the metaphor; the show’s form behaves like Joy’s mind.

Venetia Bowe as Joy gives a performance of astonishing tact. Imperious in her imagined world, she does not hunt for pity; she lets thought arrive late, or sideways, and you feel the cost of the correction. When a line of Shakespeare surfaces, it is not a show-off trick but a flare in a raging storm – poignant because it risks not landing. There is wit here too, and a stubborn performer’s instinct that refuses to shrink Joy to mere diagnosis.

Playing off this is a superb Gus McDonagh as Conor. He is tightly clenched, bewildered, resistant to the dramatic premise and torn between an irresistible urge to manifest love for his mother, and the deeply held bitterness of a spurned child. He carries the unglamorous truths of estrangement: the petty defensiveness, the reflex to say “that’s not how it happened”, the dawning realisation that playing along with the dramatic tragedy might be the only honest thing left in a long-broken relationship.

Manus Halligan’s Liam is the hinge that keeps everything humane. Deft and unfussy, he finds the dry humour and practical tenderness of care work – the rhythm that allows the production’s bigger ideas to breathe. Together, this trio make the meta-theatre feel earned; this is not cleverness for its own sake, but a working method for humans to stay close and relate to each other, breathing a powerful, intensely recognisable personal pain into the grandeur of Shakespearean tragedy.

This is a production that resists tidy catharsis – rightly so – but the emotional clarity never blurs. What remains is pathos without mawkishness, intelligence without chill, and a hard, resilient sort of hope. If there is a whisper of Beckett in the pauses, there is also exuberance in the playfulness – the swagger of performers keeping a fragile world intact, line by stolen line.

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The Blurb:

A moving and darkly comic remix of Shakespeare’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 piece 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. A thought-provoking meditation on theatre.