Théâtre Elisabethain, Chateau d’Hardelot 2024

Lear? is an imaginative and expressionistic journey through the world of theatre, with Shakespeare as the starting point. The setting is a hospice for actors, but we are not in a precise reality, as everything stems from the disoriented mind of the character Jeff King, the actor who imagines playing Lear. Starting from improvisations, we traverse the play very freely, without temporal or logical constraints. Along the way, fragments, dreams, and memories of great classics emerge—the plays I have directed at different times with these actors: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, The Tempest, and Romeo and Juliet.

The common thread that always brings us back to King Lear is the unanswered questions about human fragility, mortality, and the existential questions of our lives as artists, and thus, of all our lives. The question mark in Lear? is central to our exploration. Why Lear today? Why theatre? Why Shakespeare? For me, this play becomes the starting point for an exploration of what it means to be an actor, and of my intimate experience of a life in theatre—a life surrounded by actors and Shakespeare’s words since childhood.

In 1963, my mother played Cordelia with Orson Welles for British television. Today, in 2024, my daughter Maia takes on the role. I have spent my life, with love and pain, observing the daily life of actors—their search for work, their hopes, their disappointments. I have myself felt the emptiness, the endless wait for a call from the agent, and at thirty, I stopped.

I have closely witnessed the joy and obsessive passion of actors, throwing themselves body and soul into rehearsals, the camaraderie, the touring life, followed by that “nothing”—the nothingness of an actor without a role. I have seen the sadness that comes with advancing age, and the disappearance of engagements. Then the fading memory, the difficulty in learning lines, the terror of forgetting.

I have a friend whose mother is in a retirement home for performers near London. She told me about a resident, a great actor, a former star of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who sits every day at the reception with his little bag. When asked what he’s doing, he replies: “I’m waiting for my agent.” For me, this image is as tragic as that of a king without a kingdom.

Lear? reflects the fragility of human nature and the timeless questions posed by Shakespeare, while also drawing on my intimate connection to the theatre and the actors who bring it to life.