Chalk Lines and Fault Lines: Belvoir St Theatre's King Lear at the Edge of Knowing.

Colin Friels begins Belvoir St Theatre’s The True History of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters with an action rather than a proclamation. He kneels, chalk in hand, and draws a circle on the bare plywood floor. It is tentative, imperfect, and faintly theatrical. This fragile boundary becomes the production’s governing image - a symbol of power imagined as stable, moral order mistaken for permanence.

Shakespeare’s King Lear is often framed as a domestic tragedy magnified by crowns and storms. Eamon Flack’s production insists on something more unsettling. This is not simply a story about a father undone by poor judgement, but about systems that fail once authority confuses itself with entitlement. Lear’s mistake is not only emotional but architectural. He treats sovereignty as divisible, loyalty as guaranteed, and love as a resource to be audited. The chalk circle marks the space where those assumptions begin to collapse.

Power, carefully measured. Authority, sketched in chalk. Everything else… waits just outside the circle.

Friels’ Lear is strikingly unsentimental. He is not softened by age or diminished by infirmity. Instead, he arrives fully charged, a ruler stepping aside while still intoxicated by command. This choice recalibrates the tragedy. Lear’s rage does not read as senility but as the fury of someone encountering resistance for the first time. When he erupts into “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth…”, the line lands less as Shakespearean thunder and more as the exposed nerve of wounded authority.

Belvoir’s stage offers no refuge in spectacle. Bob Cousins’ set consists of little more than plywood underfoot and a line of black chairs against a dark wall. They accumulate meaning slowly, eventually resembling a tribunal, a morgue, or a waiting room for the inevitable. James Stibilj’s costumes are contemporary to the point of anonymity. Suits, shirts, boots that would not look out of place outside the theatre. This refusal of period detail collapses historical distance. The implication is clear - this is not another kingdom, but ours.

The chalk circle does the heavy dramaturgical lifting. Characters skirt its edge, hesitate before crossing it, and enter only when something irreversible is about to occur. It functions as throne room, moral boundary, and psychological threshold all at once. In a production stripped of ornament, this single image gathers extraordinary resonance. Power here is not inherited or sanctified - it is drawn, tested, and easily erased.

The daughters shape the production’s emotional geometry. Charlotte Friels’ Goneril is chillingly procedural, her cruelty expressed through control rather than excess. Jana Zvedeniuk’s Regan is volatile, charming one moment and feral the next. Together, they embody power stripped of obligation. Ahunim Abebe’s Cordelia stands apart not because she is purer, but because she refuses performance. Her honesty is untheatrical, and in Lear’s world, therefore unforgivable.

The Gloucester subplot emerges with unusual force. Alison Whyte’s Gloucester carries an innate authority that makes her humiliation devastating rather than merely shocking. Her blinding is staged not as spectacle alone, but as an epistemic rupture - knowledge arriving only once vision is destroyed. Tom Conroy’s Edgar charts a compelling transformation from feigned madness to moral clarity, while Raj Labade’s Edmund is sleek, musical, and ruthlessly adaptive. He understands the system completely and exploits it without hesitation.

Peter Carroll’s Fool is deliberately disconcerting. Part jester, part prophet, part irritant, he operates outside hierarchy altogether. His toy instruments and fractured songs flirt with absurdity, but they sharpen his function. He is permitted to speak truth precisely because no one is required to listen. In this production, the Fool is less comic relief than structural indictment.

Sound and violence operate as parallel forces. The live score, built from percussion, voice, and electric guitar, responds to the action like an exposed nervous system. It tightens, fractures, and erupts in tandem with the drama. Nigel Poulton’s fight direction is uncompromising. Violence is prolonged, graphic, and exhausting. The blinding of Gloucester is staged with such intensity that audible gasps ripple through the audience. Some do not return after interval. That attrition feels honest. Lear is not meant to be endured comfortably.

Flack’s decision to restore Shakespeare’s longer title gestures toward scale rather than novelty. This is not simply the fall of a king, but the unravelling of a regime. His invocation of Gramsci’s “time of monsters” hovers quietly over the production. The staging avoids direct contemporary reference, yet the parallels are unmistakable. Power unmoored from wisdom, succession without accountability, institutions hollowed out by ego. The mirror is held steady, not angled.

At over three hours, with two intervals, the production demands sustained attention. It resists condensation and refuses reassurance. Duration becomes part of the argument. Staying with confusion, cruelty, and grief long enough for them to accumulate into something recognisable.

By the final act, the chalk circle is smeared, the floor stained, and the chairs occupied by the dead. Nothing is repaired. Much is revealed. Belvoir’s King Lear is neither radical reinvention nor dutiful revival. It is an excavation of authority, family, and the stories we tell ourselves about order.

Lear lives. Lear dies. And in between, the lines we draw to keep the world intact prove just how fragile they always were.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Brett Boardman.