“Alas, I do not wear my heart on my tongue and my love on a tray”, Cordelia dares to tell her father, King Lear. He had requested his three daughters to assure him of their love so that he could distribute land, power and responsibility among them according to the extent of their affection. Now, with his vanity badly injured, he decides to entrust only Regan and Goneril, who had served a veritable battle of love declarations, with his legacy.
Cordelia and the loyal Countess of Kent are banished and soon enough, Lear begins to feel the consequences of his decisions. Meanwhile, Goneril and Regan have agreed that it is high time for their father’s power, property and land to be transferred to them and play everyone else off against each other. In his adaptation, Thomas Melle exacerbates the conflict over power and its renunciation in the battle between the generations. He stays close to Shakespeare’s original but focusses on one question: Is change possible or is power a system that everyone must succumb to, no matter what age or gender?
After Platonowa, Dance Nation, Amphitryon, Ein Volksfeind, Szenen einer Ehe, Das Fest and Fremd, King Lear will be Stephan Kimmig’s ninth production at Schauspiel Hannover since 2019.