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 when elements of nature interfere and in which he experiences a sudden temporary eclipse of the mind. And he has to stay alone with Fool because Fool is the only one in the kingdom who has challenged his royal power. 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, but also to recognising events that are so tragic that death is indeed salvation. In the end, the level of awareness, that dream about a peaceful death and the level of the unconscious that led to the insanely painful death only slightly overlap with the death itself.  

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.

Outside of Koltès’s adaptation of Hamlet – The Day of Murders in the Story of Hamlet – I only directed Shakespeare once. It was at the national theatre in Tirana. I staged Julius Caesar which we performed in the square in front of the Ministry of the Interior and in the pool of a former theatre which they tore down soon after the première and replaced it with a shopping centre. 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