Writer: William Shakespeare
Director: Mark Prince
There have been some excellent and memorable female Lears both in big West End productions and in smaller, fringe venues, demonstrating that the travails of age, ambitious children and a fading rule are equally shared regardless of a monarch’s gender. Alas, while Mark Prince’s production of Lear for Theatro Technis claims to offer a reimagined version of the play, it amounts largely to a couple of gender swaps, including Erin Costello’s title character and a summary text. The result offers little insight into making King Lear a woman or into what this production would like to say about Shakespeare’s great tragedy of mental decline.
Prince’s approach to the text is fairly brutal, condensing what can be nearly four hours of performance into just over half that time, jettisoning vast amounts of character context and development in the process. This Lear is genuinely hard to follow, and what may make sense to those rehearsing the play repeatedly is less successful in conveying the basic story to an audience who may not be familiar with all the overlaps, machinations and interweaving plots. The variability of the cuts makes it hard to discern anyone’s motivation or how they all relate to one another – even with the vastly reduced number of characters – and Prince has no specific perspective on the play that the reductions or the performances are shaped to.
Making Lear a woman is a worthy exercise, and doing the same with Gloucester offers the chance to consider what forms of motherhood look like with Gloucester the softer of the two. But Lear’s banishment of Cordelia and preference for her flattering elder daughters are rather gabbled away, as is Gloucester’s rejection of Edgar, with little opportunity to consider whether a mother rejecting a child is far worse than a man, more pointed and unnatural in a society that deifies motherhood, pushing the audience to think about their own assumptions and prejudices. Alternatively, by retaining the original gender of all the adult children, this adaptation also misses an opportunity to investigate whether mothers behave differently or expect more from sons than daughters, and the show could have more directly compared Lear and Gloucester had one set of offspring been repositioned.
Although uncredited, the costume designer (presumably Prince) is by far the strongest of the creative contributions to this simply staged Theatro Technis production, conveying the world of the court really well with silk dresses at the opening raucous party and a country pursuits vibe as Lear pursues her daily life while living with Gonerill and Regan. The latter also sports a very stylish wardrobe of fitted, glamorous outfits and very high shoes until her own beloved husband is slain, and her style changes in her grief and rage. The attention to detail in the look of the show is far more successful than the close reading of the text itself.
The Jester Collective provides a platform for aspiring and returning creatives, so the chance to play some of the great roles in drama is welcome, although a little more rehearsal is probably needed here to slow the pace, manage projection in this three-sided space and help the cast to better understand not only what they are saying but the natural rhythm. However, it is clarity and purpose that are really missing from this female Lear and, beyond its sparky opener, as the beleaguered Gloucester rues, “we have seen the best of our time.”
Reviewed on 28 June 2026
