Lear's Daughters
Title
Lear's Daughters
Department
Theatre
Genre
Drama
Keywords
Theatre
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Shakespeare
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Feminist
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Production Type
Fourth Year Acting Student Production
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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
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
Cast
Tyra Abt
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Jade Butcher
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Kylie Fisher
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Frances Sholto-Douglas
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Celeste Loots
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Kaylee McIlroy
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Set Designer
Bridie Bird
Lighting Designer
Richard White
Costume Designer
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