On the wooden floorboards of a bare and slightly raised stage, a king draws a chalk circle: perfect, empty, unbroken. Behind him, twelve empty seats wait and watch. Before him, the audience. 

The empty circle is Lear’s kingdom, but it is also a diagram of a disastrous decision to carve up his family alongside his lands and wealth. The circle haunts the play: it remains fixed and outlined in the centre for the duration as lands are fought on and over, loyalties are twisted and tested, and that king rages back against a howling storm. 

This is Belvoir St Theatre’s King Lear, or The True History of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters, director Eamon Flack’s tackling of the tragedy. This name is a nod to the play that inspired Shakespeare’s own take on the troubled king, and to the tradition of which Flack is here a part: re-adapting, configuring, and shaping an old story for new audiences and their times. 

Just as Shakespeare wrote his plays with the preoccupations of reigning monarchs and their histories in mind, Flack leans hard on current anxieties: fickle and emotionally volatile leaders; cyclical familial wounds; and the great strength – and great cost – of integrity. 

Flack taps into a career of classical adaptation to find rhythms in the language and structure that move with contemporary wit and pace. The live Carnatic music co-composed by Arjunan Puveendran and Steve Francis acts as an additional interpreter: it eggs Edmund on, suggests a change in Lear’s moods, and barrels the action forward. Because of this keen initial structural and translational focus, the play’s first act comes startlingly and sparklingly clear, aided by the hands of strong actors.

Ahunim Abebe as Cordelia and Colin Friels as King Lear in Belvoir St Theatre's King Lear (photograph by Brett Boardman)

Raj Labade makes winking villainy irresistible as Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Countess of Gloucester (Alison Whyte), enriching the material and connecting centuries-old jokes with modern delivery as he schemes himself into power and his good-hearted brother Edgar (Tom Conroy) out of it. Brandon McClelland instils loyal Kent with a steadfast watchfulness – we can look to him to process the stakes of scenes dense with archaic language – and an appealing openness. His performance, aching and full of feeling but still clever (his transformation into Caius, a ‘stranger’ who serves Lear after Kent’s banishment, is played for surprisingly enjoyable laughs) holds the production together – and this is a production that desperately needs an anchor.

Flack has refashioned the five-act play into a three-hour-and-fifteen-minute running time with two intervals. The first section – which ends within Shakespeare’s Act Two – finishes with Kent in the stocks (he’s still there when we shuffle back to our seats), put there by Regan and Cornwall, and is the most successful. These scenes – critical for establishing character, tone, and desire – move briskly, thoughtfully, and sharply: there’s real danger fuelling these exchanges.

But then we move into the storm, and its force shakes the play – and the production – onto unstable ground. Colin Friels is our Lear, and he rages the play’s famous ‘Blow, winds and crack your cheeks’ monologue into a strobe-lit, thunderous wash of blue over the stage (the lighting is by Morgan Moroney and the sound by Steve Francis).

His Lear is defiant, self-sabotaging in his arrogance, unable to resist a righteous dig even when the alternative is just love, peace, safety, or compromise. His rage is shot through with injury: why and how should this happen to him? Why should he be cast out by ungrateful daughters into a storm that seems to work on their behalf? Why has age made him unsteady physically and mentally but not, as his Fool – played here by Peter Caroll – points out, wise? Friels is formidable, and his Lear is compulsively watchable. 

And yet, when Lear shrinks in the face of the storm, so does the production. Motivations become muddier, and the action loses its adaptive focus: there is less commitment to clarity, more concern with small scenic showpieces. Conroy is a committed Edgar whose transformation into Poor Tom feels less of a disguise and more of a break. Poor Tom is meant to remind us that Lear never cared for the impoverished in his kingdom. But when the production treats Poor Tom only as this, some of the ambiguity in his later, touching scenes with Gloucester is not delivered.

The cast’s words are swallowed up and lost by the trenchant thundering weather, making it hard to follow these critical interactions. Luckily, here we have McClelland’s Kent and Whyte’s exceptional Gloucester, two ballasts for Lear and for the action, guiding the act towards its end – and the audience, by extension, into safer harbours.  

After the second interval, things get grimmer for the characters, and for all of us. The political intrigues and war become harder to track, and Goneril (Charlotte Friels) and Regan (Jana Zvedeniuk) grow more ghoulish. We leave for that second break after Gloucester’s eyes have been horrifyingly gouged (the production does not shy away from gut-twisting violence). Cordelia’s re-introduction lands quietly, and we are not given much of her, despite Ahunim Abebe’s deep-welled performance. Her death lands softly, too, and, as that row of seats behind the stage fills up with the cast of characters now dead, the feeling is one more of weariness than loss. 

It is difficult to maintain the momentum and promise of Flack’s first act, but this is a dense and challenging play that requires we trade palaces for buffeted heaths and hovels. It dips between cogitation and decline; it inexorably bends towards death despite its characters fighting for life, both honourably and dishonourably. It is a world of emotion, politics, and human nature, stuffed with age and ambition and love and the question of whether we can blame it all on the stars or just ourselves. It is so easily made unwieldy. Flack’s King Lear is exhausting and exhausted and, by the end of the production, so are we.

The True History of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters continues at Belvoir St Theatre until 4 January 2026. Performance attended: November 20.