Lost Lear

Winner of a Scotsman Fringe First Award 2025

You have to look at me now and tell me I’m

good, that this is good . . . That the bits of

you that I can’t see are changed, charged,

churned by the bits of me that you can’t see.

A moving and darkly comic remix of Shakespeare’s play told from the point of view of Joy, a person with dementia, who is living in an old memory of rehearsing King Lear.

Joy’s delicately maintained reality is upended by the arrival of her estranged son who,

being cast as Cordelia, must find a way to speak his piece from within the limited role he’s given. Using puppetry, projection and live video effects, the audience are landed in Joy’s world as layers of her past and present, fiction and reality, overlap and distort.

Lost Lear is a thought provoking meditation on theatre, artifice and the possibility of communicating across the chasms between us.

This edition of Lost Lear was published to coincide with the production at Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Festival Fringe in July 2025.