Some theatre companies embrace the Silly Season. Belvoir gets serious, ending its 2025 season with what is arguably the most chewy, gloomy and forbidding of the Bard’s tragedies.

Why pop corks when you can pop eyeballs?

Colin Friels and Peter Carroll in The True History of the Life and Death of King Lear & His Three Daughters. Photo © Brett Boardman

Director Eamon Flack hefts a longer version of Shakespeare’s title to the billboards in what we should probably read as an attempt to force open the play’s lens on issues of dynastic succession and patriarchy. In his program note, Flack quotes the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” 

The staging, however, refuses any direct allusion to monarchs or ‘monsters’, past or present, or to contemporary would-be kings. The grandeur (or otherwise) of Lear’s realm must be constructed in your imagination for Bob Cousins’s set is a study in austerity: raw plywood sheets underfoot on which Lear (Colin Friels) draws a chalk circle at the very top of the play, with a...