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“it’s the early picture, painted by all in this production, of Goneril and Regan as potential caregivers, women who might yet do the right thing by their suffering dad, alongside Cordelia, that makes this “Lear” so moving and, despite its unfussy Elizabethan setting, so present.”
Read Full Review“Feore has consummate technique, a commanding stage presence, a dextrous facility with the language…It’s all show, bombast and grimacing. This works if you believe that the whole thing is just so much playacting, that that is how Lear has conducted his life….But what do we make of the scenes on the heath, when he loses his mind, gains wisdom and is supposed to have a sense of humility and humanity? Again, I think it’s all technique with no heart.”
Read Full Review“Cimolino also brings into deeper focus one of its most unsettling themes: the inhabitants of this little world have indeed become playthings of the deity. Or as Scott Wentworth’s blinded Gloucester puts it: “As to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”
Read Full Review“…the real depths are plumbed here not by Lear but by his parallel deluded sufferer Gloucester. Scott Wentworth, playing the role for the second time, strikes a new note at the beginning, describing the “good sport” at the begetting of his bastard son with unusual relish.”
Read Full ReviewFeore’s Lear is a dragon who, while declawed and humiliated, continues to rage against the dying of the light, even as the dark curtain of madness descends in a storm on the heath that evokes all the fury of post-Katrina nature at its most vengeful.
Read Full Review“fine performances [but] with its bulky Jacobean costumes, this down-to-earth production can look and feel a mite musty and Shakespeare-y;”
Read Full Review“not only a superb production in its own right, delivering every element this great dark dramatic poem by Shakespeare has to offer us, but it does two other very important things: it unquestionably catapults Colm Feore into the ranks of the world’s greatest living actors”
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