Lear's Daughters

Title

Lear's Daughters

Department

Theatre

Genre

Drama

Production Type

Fourth Year Acting Student Production

Description

In the tragedy of King Lear, his older daughters are two of the most diabolical female characters in the Shakespeare canon, while the youngest daughter Cordelia, is one of the most truthful and steadfast. Lear’s Daughters, a play created in 1987 by the Women’s Theatre Group (UK), imagines Goneril, Regan and Cordelia as young girls with potential for becoming women of creativity and substance. But locked up in a nursery under the care of a nurse and sometimes nanny, with little but her stories and fantasies of their father’s benevolence to sustain them, the girls flounder.

Lear’s Daughters asks ‘what if the alpha male King Lear is all – powerful, his ego a prison, outside of which his daughters may not venture; that these energetic and imaginative young lives, kept in the shadow of their father’s desires and whims, deprived of light and nurture, twist into knotted characters we meet in Shakespeare’s King Lear?’ Yet the play does not set out to join the psychological dots between the deprivations of the sisters’ youth and their evil ways as adults but rather attempts a stand-alone story, complete in itself, with a focus on the broader, topical theme of young women striving for their personal identities under a strict patriarchy. What resources do they have for this battle? Should they internalize shame and infantilization or strike back with the weapons of their father and master? Do they have alternatives and what are they?

Lear’s Daughters is a feminist fantasy which imagines a time before Goneril and Regan were the toxic antagonists of their father and king and Cordelia was his forgiving and stalwart warrior-protector. Manipulated by a child-like, self-interested, Shakespearean ‘fool’, and an ambiguously caring ‘nanny’, the play emerges as an Eldritch-like fable of gothic intrigue and extravagance with a contemporary twist.

Cast:
Cordelia - Tyra Abt See
Regan - Jade Butcher
Goneril - Kylie Fisher
Nurse/Nanny - Frances Sholto-Douglas
Fool - Celeste Loots / Kaylee McIlroy

Language

English

Script Type

Scripted

Year Created

2019

Opening Date

3 April 2019

Closing Date

6 April 2019

Start Time

19h00

Ticket Price

R70 / R50 (students/pensioners)

Performance Venue

Geographic Location of Performance

Cape Town

Producer

CTDPS

Director

Clare Stopford

Text By

Women’s Theatre Group
Elaine Feinstein

Set Designer

Bridie Bird

Lighting Designer

Richard White

Costume Designer

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