ARCHIVES 2013 / Lear is in Town

Intentionally stripped of his royal prerogatives, the old Lear comes back to haunt Avignon. Today, with Lear Is in Town, he reappears in a tightened version proposed by Ludovic Lagarde and his companions, the writer-translators Frédéric Boyer and Olivier Cadiot. A play that will see this mythic figure of the theatre cross the desert-like terrain of the Carrière de Boulbon, accompanied solely by his fool and his daughter Cordelia. A rereading with three voices of the story of this king who constantly poses questions on his life until he goes mad. If the Lagarde-Boyer-Cadiot trio venture into this Shakespearean play, it is to grasp this man's traumas, linked to old age, kinship, war and the wearing effect of power. As in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, the Lear they imagine listens to the key scenes of his past again to attempt to understand what played out in them. Awkward and impotent, he invokes the demons to conjure up the dire fate in store for him, attached as he is to this old world permeated with magic and occult procedures from which he has come. A blend of cruelty and tenderness, of lyricism and pathos, of horror and dazzling visions, the play constantly shifts the glances that can be caught on it. In focusing their work on a paganism that ceaselessly calls on the forces of evil that must be fought by exorcisms, the translators remained entirely faithful to a text that presents all the names of demons, large and small, all the magic formulas evoked since time immemorial. It will therefore not be Lear that will be presented in the Carrière de Boulbon, but a view on Lear, an auscultation of this character through a respectful compression of the text, done through cuts and not rewriting. A play that extracts the quintessence of this Shakespearean tragedy that goes beyond any historical framework, any psychological framework, to touch the heart of the enigmas that humanity has attempted to solve since the dawn of time. JFP

It was on 26 November 1606 that this True Chronicle of the History of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters was performed for the first time in London, more precisely at Whitehall before King James I. Once again, Shakespeare (1564-1616) did not invent either the name or the story of his hero since, in 1597, the figure of Lear was present in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles and various other narratives in verse. All of them were inspired by the life of this king who supposedly lived in England in 800 B.C. according to the Historia regum britanniae, published by the historian and bishop Geoffroy de Monmouth.