★★ The all-female Lear at the Shakespeare North Playhouse is disappointingly conventional
’s great play about inter-generational power dynamics. It is the kind of lament uttered by mothers of teenage girls everywhere.
That very particular relationship between a matriarch and her self-confident and independence-hungry daughter as she reaches adulthood is a fascinating and fraught one. It is one of the reasons why this all-female and non-binary production ofby Her Productions, Unseemly Women and Girl Gang Manchester promised so much.
The cast’s gender is almost incidental to director Kayleigh Hawkins’ adaptation, though there are a few nods to it. Cornwall is in red stilettos, Oswald a short-skirted power suit. But other actors playing traditionally male roles are dressed, essentially, as men and there is little sense of any of them bringing a novel perspective drawn from lived experience to their parts. It is in essence a surprisingly – disappointingly – conventional rendering of the play.
The inconsistency in costume and staging don’t end with gender, leaving confusion about when or where this iteration of Lear is taking place. Castle walls and a heavy wooden table as Lear doles out his kingdom ingive way to the cardboard boxes of the modern, urban homeless as he is later banished – slighted by the daughters he had endowed – to face the elements. The king is in a tartan suit while Kent is in a black puffer jacket and baseball cap.
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