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Lear

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Five stars 

 

Shakespeare’s Lear is a man at war in Ramesh Meyyappan’s radical reworking of one of the bard’s mightiest plays. Standing shell-shocked in a mini arena circled by sandbags, Meyyappan’s Lear is cast adrift from both his faculties and family, in conflict with himself as much as the three daughters who tend to him. Possessed with the overbearing anger of a parent whose children have learnt to stand up to him, Lear’s own increasingly infantile nature comes to the fore as his psychic wounds get the better of him.

 

All this is brought to life, not with soliloquies and verse, but with barely a word spoken over the show’s hour-long duration. As Lear shelters from the blast, Orla O’Loughlin’s exquisite production wraps an already moving depiction of a family at war inside David Paul Jones’ score. This moves between propulsive piano patterns and string based brooding to give the performance its emotional pulse. Derek Anderson’s lighting design adds even more drama to the action played out on Anna Orton’s dirt-laden set. Nicole Cooper as Goneril, Amy Kennedy as Regan and Draya Maria as Lear’s much loved Cordelia navigate their way round it as casualties of the fallout. 

 

In execution, Meyyappan and O’Loughlin’s construction recalls the wave of underground East European theatre that came up throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. Its lack of dialogue lends it a similar global appeal by way of an international language of empathy in response to extreme political adversity. There is a richness and depth as well to its depiction of sanity, madness and the family and the scars of battle that wound all.

 

O’Loughlin’s production is presented by producers Raw Material in association with the National Theatre of Scotland and the Singapore International Festival of Arts, where it premiered prior to its all too brief Scottish run. The moving silences left in the play’s wake should see it go a whole lot further in a mesmerising depiction of one of the world’s great tragedies that is as intimate as it is epic.


The Herald, June 7th 2025

 

ends

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