King Lear

Lear’s destiny unfolds when the king and the man collide. Blinded by his symbolic status, Lear makes a wrong decision, because he chooses the king, not the father. And not in the monarchic sense, which would dictate the kingdom not to be split and Lear not to trust flatterers but in the sense of judging his daughters from the position of a king rather than that of a father. Those two daughters who flatter most to his majesty will receive half of the kingdom each. The one who says she loves Lear so much as a daughter can love her father gets nothing because she was expected to say that she loved him more than herself. Lear must stop being a king and become a man so he can cleanse himself of the toxic position of a sovereign. Only at the end he correctly chooses the daughter who loves him most and who is pure nobility, and realises his mistake, the consequence of the realm of arrogance and vanity. The mighty King Lear must experience his daughters Goneril and Regan rejecting him, he must become a vagabond, survive the night of a terrible storm in which he experiences a sudden temporary eclipse of the mind. Lear’s regal persona collapses entirely when he is faced with a liminal situation so the path towards death is simultaneously the path to self-realisation, and also to recognising events that are so tragic that death is indeed salvation. In the end, there is very little overlap between Lear's conscious dream of a peaceful death and his unconscious, which led to an excruciatingly painful death – precisely in death.

Philosophically, the fate in King Lear unravels between Lear the king and Lear the vagabond with a dimmed mind. Just like in Hamlet, the kingdom after the king’s death belongs to those who are not related to Lear by blood. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” and in the dramatic world of King Lear the question is whether the king or the man dies. The renowned director Ivica Buljan will tackle this question for his debut at the SNT Nova Gorica where he will stage, also for the first time in our theatre, this great work the world classical theatre.

Reprises on 16 April, 17 April and 18 April with English subtitles.

Outside of Koltès’s adaptation of Hamlet – The Day of Murders in the Story of Hamlet – I only directed Shakespeare once: Julius Caesar at the national theatre in Tirana. In addition to these two plays, I’ve always been interested in King Lear. The experience I’ve gathered throughout my thirty years of directing finally justifies my desire to stage Lear and try to reach his secret, together with the actors.

_{Ivica Buljan}