Lear’s Shadow by Colin Hurley. The Brockley Jack Studio Theatre, 410 Brockley Road, London SE4 to 24 February 2024.

4✩✩✩✩ Review: William Russell.

“Colin Hurley’s Lockdown Baby illuminates King Lear and delights.”

Solo performances demand a lot of any actor and with this interesting monologue about an actor creating something out of King Lear’s speeches Colin Hurley, who also devised the work. Certainly rises to the demands made on him. He shambles on, bare of foot, wearing impeccable long johns under a drab dressing gown, clutching a box of what look like toys, wonders where to place it, eventually choosing the table centre stage which he has failed to notice, and the show begins. Hurley uses the audience a lot – the daughters are selected from the front rows – the Jack has altered its seating so he is surrounded on three sides – and the recipient is given a scarf to show who she is while thepaper hat from a cracker becomes his crown. Then he distributes tambourines and gets the recipients to use them on command, removing one from a would be player who fails to bang it properly, followed by buzzers distributed widely which when collectively played create the sound of rain and we are off, with the rest of the audience drumming its feet all at the same time as the storm rages. It is great fun, and he has shaped what Shakespeare wrote for his own ends so that the tale of how Lear ends up on that heath in a storm comes over perfectly. He says in his programme note that we are not watching Lear but an old fool of an actor sniffing around the play with an eye and an ear to spending a bit more time with a few of the words that don’t always get much space in a full blown production. “This is dream-time, playtime, clown-time, maybe holding a few of these gens up to the light,” he adds. He also says it is fun, and he is quite right. It is. But he still manages to present someone abandoned on a blasted heath by ungrateful children pondering his fate. As a contribution to all the celebrations of the Bard taking place at present this his Lockdown Baby is probably the most unusual and none the worse for that.

Colin Hurley – Not Lear.