Dementia care show Lost Lear coming to Mayo stage

LOST Lear, by award-winning theatremaker Dan Colley, tells the incredible moving story of dealing with dementia in a family and everyday life context, but told from the viewpoint of a person with dementia - through the familiar lens of Shakespeare’s King Lear character.

The play opens at Westport Town Hall Theatre as part of Westival 2023 on October 27 (8 p.m.) and 29th (2 p.m.) as the show tours 10 venues nationwide

Following the national and international tour of A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, Dan Colley and his company have turned their sights on a very (very) loose adaptation of King Lear, examining the self and that part of us that's inaccessible to others.

This moving and darkly comic remix of Shakespeare's play is told from the point of view of Joy, a person with dementia, who is living in an old memory of rehearsing King Lear.

Joy's delicately maintained reality is upended by the arrival of her estranged son who, being cast as Cordelia, must find a way to speak his piece from within the limited role he's given.

Using puppetry, projection and live video effects, the audience are landed in Joy's world as layers of her past and present, fiction and reality, overlap and distort.

Lost Lear is a thought provoking meditation on theatre, artifice and the possibility of communicating across the chasms between us.

“A captivating journey, from an energetic and rambunctious beginning to the poignant and gentle end, it portrays the bewilderment of someone who wants to care, trying to have the shared experience with the person living with dementia, struggling and sometimes failing. I am delighted to hear that Lost Lear is on tour and many more people will have the opportunity to see it for the first time - or again.” - Susan Crampton, Dementia Carers Campaign Network

Co-produced by Mermaid Arts Centre and Riverbank Arts Centre, funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and supported by Fishamble’s New Play Clinic, the cast features Venetia Bowe, Peter Daly, Manus Halligan, Em Ormonde and Clodagh O’Farrell.

Tickets for the Westport shows are available at https://westival.ie/collections/preview-events/products/lost-lear-1.