De Toneelmakerij
Music and sound design for a new take on Shakespeare’s classic for a young audience.
About
“Lear brings together the full power of Shakespeare’s mastery: a language of which you want to remember every word. Tragedy and humor in perfect balance. Characters who, with both their smallness and grandeur, immediately get under your skin.” Liesbeth Coltof
Coltof’s version of Lear begins as a reality soap, filmed live on stage. Cameras everywhere, no privacy anywhere. Lear, old and tired, divides his kingdom among his three daughters. The daughter who shows the most love gets the biggest share. But the youngest daughter Cordelia refuses, she abandons the make-believe world in which she has lived all her childhood. Lear repudiates her and divides his kingdom between his two other daughters.
Only when the movie screen falls and the cameras are turned off does he see how he has allowed himself to be blinded and sacrificed his children to selfishness and overconfidence. His loneliness is shared by Gloster. He too happily prefers the feigned love of his bastard son to the genuine love of his youngest son.
Credits
text: William Shakespeare
direction: Liesbeth Coltof
actors: Roel Adam (Lear) Tine Cartuyvels (Goneril) Tjebbo Gerritsma (Kent) Rogier in ‘t Hout (Gloster) Myrthe Huber (Regan) Sarah Jonker (Cordelia) Jesse Mensah (Edgar) Chiem Vreeken (Edmond)
scenography: Guus van Geffen
costume design: Carly Everaert
music & sound design: Jorg Schellekens
dramaturgy: Paulien Geerlings
assistent director: Rosanne Geerdes
Première
4 March 2017, Theater Bellevue (Amsterdam, NL)