Aspettando Re Lear

Shows

In King Lear, both the medieval and the Renaissance order of values disintegrate. All that remains at the end of this incredible carnival pantomime is the empty and bleeding earth. On this apocalyptic earth, the King, the Fool, the Servant and the Madman endlessly continue their "distracted dialogue."
The show focuses on the key moment of the whole tragedy represented by the storm that hits Lear just as he wanders in the wasteland to get away from the disaster caused by his "beloved" daughters. Lear accompanied by the Earl of Kent, (in the guise of a servant) and by the faithful Fool (who plays here almost an alter ego of the exile of his faithful daughter Cordelia), helplessly witnesses the upheaval of the natural order.
In The Invention of the Human Harold Bloom writes: "We go weeping into our birth, knowing with Lear that creation and the fall are simultaneous." Lear loves only himself and the lack of love that drove him mad. But during the storm that poor king undergoes a metamorphosis, in the presence of nature's fury he becomes humble, he doesn't need to seek refuge, he doesn't perceive pain, he understands that his true pain is deeper. The storm is the culmination of the chaos to which Lear must finally surrender, returning as a man among men, weak, embittered, tired, but finally stripped of that crown that led him to destruction. The consequences of the parents' "blindness" will be paid by the children.

The tragedy of King Lear has always been recognized as a perfect representation of the human condition. Especially in the 20th century, the drama's popularity grew exponentially. With the rise of existentialism in philosophy, Lear's considerations of being and "nothingness" seemed strangely appropriate and, in fact, works such as Beckett's Waiting for Godot could be seen as a form of rewriting of King Lear. Just like Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot the characters in "Waiting for King Lear" seem to inherit and inhabit the void that remains after the sublime tragedy of Shakespeare's foreboding King Lear.
When all is lost in Lear's unstable world, nothing remains, and it is precisely this nothing that Edgar, first of all, he will have to deal with. Lear is the embodiment of the patriarch, monarch and glory of the European era at the same time. His death will denote the transience of those systems of power whose ruins our characters now inhabit, as if plunged into nothingness.
"Nothing" is an unusually ubiquitous word and concept in both King Lear and Waiting for Godot. It is as if King Lear foresaw the inevitable nothingness that awaits us as a result of the crumbling permanent order, just as Waiting for Godot reveals what happens after "the old man falls".