Lear? is an imaginative, 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 Jeff King, the actor who imagines himself playing Lear. Starting from improvisation, the play moves very freely, without temporal or logical constraints. Along the way, fragments, dreams and memories of great classics emerge — productions I have directed at different times with these same actors: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet.

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

In 1963, my mother played Cordelia opposite Orson Welles for British television. Today, my daughter Maïa takes on the role. I have spent my life, with love and pain, observing actors at close quarters — their search for work, their hopes, their disappointments. I have myself felt the emptiness, the endless wait for the agent’s call, and at thirty, I stopped.

I have 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. The sadness that comes with age. The dwindling engagements. The fading memory, the difficulty learning lines, the terror of forgetting.

I have a friend whose mother lives 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 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.