Somehow, over four hundred years, King Lear is a play that gets adapted again and again with new variations and different perspectives to offer every time. The premise of the story dates back far before Shakespeare’s time, apparently when the real King Lear ruled over England in 800BCE and divided his kingdom up between his daughters - two of whom later abused him and forced him to find refuge with his other exiled daughter, whose love supposedly wasn’t enough to deserve a third of the kingdom. Building on this, King Lear then grew to fit the Jacobean times, taking something old and making it new, as modern productions do the same. 

There seems to be no better moment for King Lear, considering it was a play that emerged right after the plague in London, killing over 30,000 people, not unfamiliar to the times we live in now. And coming from such a period of instability, this is perhaps the right time and place to recognize the direct correlation between wealth, power and privilege to violence, betrayal and madness. So, through this production we question why violence is chosen when it only begets more violence; what forces us into madness; what truly blinds us; and how far we’ll go for power.