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Directors’ Note
“King Lear is often described as a play about old age, family conflict, or the struggle between generations. All of that is there. But what fascinates me more is the play’s obsession with nothing.
The word appears almost immediately:
“Nothing will come of nothing.”
Lear believes that nothing exists. Shakespeare spends the rest of the play proving him wrong.
If you look at nothing long enough, it turns out not to be nothing at all. It is emptiness. And emptiness is very different. Emptiness can divide. Emptiness can change. Emptiness can fill.
Again and again the play seems to move towards absence. Lear loses his authority, his household, his certainty and eventually his reason. Gloucester loses his sight. Edgar loses his name. The world appears to be stripped bare.
Yet what looks empty keeps revealing itself to be full.
Cordelia’s “nothing” is full of love. The heath is full of human beings. Poor Tom, who appears to possess nothing, carries an entire world within him.
This is why I have never found King Lear nihilistic. Nihilism depends on the belief that there is nothing there. Shakespeare keeps discovering the opposite.
Every loss reveals another connection.
Every subtraction reveals another dependency.
Every emptiness fills with human presence.
Perhaps this is why the play remains so moving. Paradise promises a world without loss. But without loss there can be no love. We matter to one another because we can lose one another.
The tragedy of King Lear is not that everything disappears.
It is that Lear discovers too late how much was there.
The play strips away certainty after certainty until only one thing remains: our dependence on encounter, our dependence on each other.”
Declan Donnellan
“Declan Donnellan offers a proposal that is pure theatrical play, in which he has created a highly original language where poetic elevation and the most ridiculous prosaicism harmoniously converge.”
La Razón, on The Two Gentlemen of Verona