Lost Lear at the Traverse Theatre – Edinburgh Fringe review

For a long time, it’s hard to know what is going on in Dan Colley’s devastating drama. Before a billowing curtain, a man explains the plot of King Lear in layman’s terms. A woman sits in a white leather chair that looks like a throne. People dance attendance, slipping on various costumes as they adopt their roles. A storm rages. Someone, in agony, cries “Mum”. 

Gradually it becomes clear that Joy, the figure around whom everything revolves, is suffering from dementia. Part of the disorientation that Colley’s own production deliberately encourages springs from the fact that she is played by an actress (Venetia Bowe) who is much younger than her character; later, as she looks back on her life, she is replaced by a life size puppet. Manipulated images of an older woman appear across the curtain, making the point that in her shattered memory she is young. 

Not only that, but she is trapped within the world she felt happiest – as a star actor, playing Shakespeare’s King Lear. The experimental medical facility that is caring for her, run by Marcus Halligan’s smoothly conciliatory Liam, believes it is best to let her rest in her own “memory theme”, going along with her whims, pretending to rehearse the play.  

But there is no role for her estranged son Conor (a wonderfully uncomfortable Gus McDonagh), who has his own unhappy memories of childhood to resolve. “I was never near this part of her life,” he says. “I hated it.” 

The astounding quality of this richly-layered production is the way that it lets its story unfold in fragments of highly theatrical storytelling that ultimately build a complete picture. Daniel McAuley’s evocative music, Kevin Gleeson’s sound design, visual and lighting effects that include cloud scenes made on a projector and beamed onto the back wall, even Andrew Clancy’s set, all build a slippery sense of a world that is at once concrete and emotionally real, and not quite how it seems.  The physical environment seems permeated with sadness and loss.  

Satisfyingly complex, the entire play constantly throws Shakespeare’s words and view of another set of familial relations into a new light. Bowe’s diva-like Joy, alternating between doubt and high-handedness, has a habit of ending her endlessly rehearsed version of Lear with the line “All is forgiven. And it was”, thus avoiding the tragic deaths of Lear and his abused daughter Cordelia. It represents her longing for reconciliation. 

But for the neglected Conor, carrying his own burden of loneliness, of a sense of never being anybody, it’s not enough. He wants an apology, not just to “forgive and forget”. 

As they circle each other inside their own worlds of pain, that sense of nothingness that lies at the heart of Lear is constantly turned to the light, raising questions of what personality means, what obligations mothers have to sons, fathers to daughters, even an actor to an audience. Night after night they create something out of nothing, a character and a thought where there was none before.