"Nothing can come of nothing: speak again," the King declares after his youngest daughter, Cordelia, has refused to follow his other two children in making grand proclamations of love.
Lear is making a mistake of course, one which he will soon come to regret.
The stubborn monarch divides up his kingdom between the two daughters who don't love him and banishes the one who does. The two un-banished daughters then banish him and he starts to go mad and wanders into a storm. You know the rest, and if you don't - suffice to say it doesn't end well. Can you have spoilers on a four hundred year old play?
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A new version of King Lear has landed at the Hope Mill Theatre, a collaboration between HER Productions, Unseemly Women, and Girl Gang Manchester. It's an all female and non-binary show directed by Kayleigh Hawkins. It may be the first ever all female and non-binary production of King Lear.
In the lead role is Christine Mackie, who is most famous as Coronation Street’s Dr. Gaddas, a role she's played since 2014. Mackie is also no stranger to Shakespeare having played a variety of roles including Titania, Elizabeth in Richard III, and Lady Macduff in Macbeth.
As Lear, Mackie is a charismatic stage presence. Diminutive, with a shock of black grey hair and dressed in a tartan suit, her King is a wiry, jittery, spidery presence, all nervous energy - forever distracted. At once raging and bombastic and then full of self pity and vying for sympathy. It is a tremendous performance and an uncommonly sympathetic reading of Lear.
This Lear seems less power-mad, more fragile, devastated by the state of things in both their family and their kingdom. Where the performance is subtle and measured in the early scenes, all hell breaks loose, as it should, on the Heath, as Mackie’s Lear goes from troubled, confused and worried to a hurricane of raging emotions, one minute shrieking and screaming the next puzzled, scared and lost. It’s an exhausting thing to witness. Mackie’s glorious northern tones can shift from comforting and compassionate to knife-edged vengeance in the space of a line.
There were numerous moments throughout the play where the performance was so raw it was difficult to watch. This is not a criticism, there’s a wonderful truth and directness to this Lear. It’s a performance far removed from the shouty posturing Shakespearean leads you too often see.
The final scene is beautifully played. As Lear cradles Cordelia, Mackie gives a harrowing demonstration of utter unrestrained grief. The rest of the cast looking on are believably reluctant to approach. Driven mad with grief and anguish Lear is terrifying and heartbroken - all the lessons learnt too late.
The King is the thing with Lear, and if you get that performance right much else follows. However, the show is not perfect. At times the story was difficult to follow and some of the performances were a little uneven. There was also little new in the interpretation. But these are minor niggles and it seems churlish to fault the production given the scale of the ambition and commitment.
The cast generally do a great job of keeping everything on track. Haylie Jones in particular is a superb Edmund, a swaggering, thrusting psychopath forever engaging in nods and winks with the audience - duplicitous and charismatic in equal measure. Also notable is Fiona Scott giving an excellent and tender Gloucester.
The staging is minimal in keeping with the space, there is just a table and a few props and some clever use of lighting. Music and sound are minimal too - there are repeated refrains of David Bowie songs (never ever a bad thing), but I didn’t get the relevance.
At the end of the show a cast member made an appeal for support for the Hope Mill Theatre, a venue that receives no public funding - but consistently puts on interesting theatre and supports the local community.
This excellent Lear is an independently funded production. Theatre of this quality and ambition embedded in our communities is rare and precious, so go and see it and put your hands in your pockets. After all, nothing comes from nothing.
Lear runs at the Hope Mill Theatre until June 18th and then transfers to Shakespeare North from 21-24th June.
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