A play remains a classic for as long as it continues to yield new meanings. Shakespeare’s King Lear, for example, remains open to interpretation. Its story of a retiring king bequeathing his lands to his daughters before descending into madness can, in the right hands, engage with many themes in the modern day including dementia.
It was not really necessary for writer-director Dan Colley to construct a whole new play about it, but that is what the Irish theatre-maker has done in Lost Lear. Venetia Bowe plays a retired actor, now resident in a care home, whose memory has faded in every respect apart from a word-perfect recall of Shakespeare’s play. To keep her relaxed, the staff take on the parts of Goneril, Regan, Cordelia and the Fool as she loops repeatedly through her favourite scenes of parental regret.
The idea recalls Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, in which a family protect themselves from the outside world by endlessly performing a shaky comedy, and it has a similar interest in mental decline.
The difficulty with plays on this theme is that dementia is a mental state, not a dramatic question. You can evoke the dislocation it creates, as well as the sense of loss and frustration it leaves for loved ones, but you cannot resolve it.
In a classy production, Lost Lear evokes it well. Joined by Peter Daly, Manus Halligan, Em Ormonde and Clodagh O’Farrell on Andrew Clancy’s institutional set, Bowe is the youthful woman trapped in an elderly body that we see only as the show progresses. First, we know her for her exacting standards, her brusque disregard for anyone but herself and her facility with language. Only later do we see her as a fragile old woman. Nothing can change, but the play has a sentimental appeal.