LOST LEAR at The Everyman, Cork

Riverbank Arts Centre and Mermaid Arts Centre present Lost Lear, a moving and darkly comic remix of Shakespeare’s play told from the point of view of a person with dementia.

At once fast-paced and thought-provoking, Lost Lear lands us into the world of Joy, a woman with dementia, who is being cared for through a method whereby people live inside an old memory.

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.

Lost Lear is a thought-provoking meditation on theatre, artifice and the possibility of communicating across the chasms between us.

Following the national and international tour of A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, Dan Colley and his company have turned their sights on a very (very) loose adaptation of King Lear, examining the self and that part of us that is inaccessible to others.

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?” — King Lear, Act I, Scene IV

This show contains references to dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Supported by the Arts Council | An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Fishamble: The New Play Company New Play Clinic.

“Brilliantly conceived and executed… a remarkable achievement” – The Examiner

“Devastating stuff, deftly done…Colley is a theatre maker of remarkable imagination and insight” – The Stage

“Bravely visits painful places to tenderly illuminate them” – The Arts Review

“In a role demanding a wide physical and emotional range…Bowe is remarkable” – Irish Mail on Sunday