★ ★

Reviewer - Aimee

*Disclaimer: Gifted tickets in return for an honest review

LEAR is one of the many plays written by William Shakespeare. It is a tragedy that follows the story of King Lear who in preparation for getting older, divides his power and land between his daughters. This production was produced by HER Productions and so featured an all-female and non-binary cast.

Christine Mackie played the leading role of King Lear and delivered a passionate performance. As the King slowly descended into madness throughout the show she conveyed the emotion and insanity brilliantly. At this performance, we had a last-minute cover on for the role of Goneril, who wasn’t rehearsed in and so had to perform with script in hand for the whole show. Whilst I didn’t catch the performer’s name I was stunned by how they didn’t let having the script in their hands distract from their performance, which was great.

Unfortunately, I found the rest of the show to be not as great. The plot itself I found very confusing to follow, and I still don’t understand the majority of what I saw. This could be due to the fact we speak differently now to how they did when Shakespeare wrote the play. However, I felt they didn’t do enough visually with the staging to distinguish what was actually happening, which caused a lot of confusion throughout for me. If you are aware of the story prior I could imagine it may have been a lot easier to understand. This production doesn’t lend itself to anyone who doesn’t have prior knowledge of the story, or those who may not have seen or read much Shakespeare before.

The set remained very bare for the whole show, consisting of some background curtains, a table, and occasionally a few chairs and some rubbish. Now whilst this is a smaller production so I didn’t go in expecting anything mind-blowing, but it just seemed like we never went anywhere within it. At times it was hard to actually tell where the scene was taking place. Quickly you became increasingly aware that you were in one room, without much to make you believe you were somewhere outside of that.

In between scenes, there was this transition music sound that kept getting repeated. The audio didn’t sound clear for this, and the way that it was used made each scene feel like they were very clunky and chucked together, rather than the story flowing smoothly. After a while of hearing this noise repeated it started to get grating and a little bit annoying.

Overall, whilst the performers were clearly doing their best with the material, it was ultimately very confusing to follow. I wouldn’t recommend seeing this if it’s your first experience with Shakespeare. However, if you really love Shakespeare or the King Lear story, and are looking for a different take on the material then this show may be for you.