CASTING LEAR

From the Teatro de La Abadía we get an extraordinary success: a self-directed piece by Andrea Jiménez from Shakespeare's Lear, improvised every night with a different actor. Fatherhood, love, listening and forgiveness.

My father is Lear, but he has never been in a theatre. I’m Cordelia, and I’m a theatre director. Like her, I will search for Lear, I’ll dare to look at him and I’ll try to forgive him. And I’ll do it onstage. Every night, a different actor will play Lear; he’ll be my father, one possible father, one that does want to sit in a theatre and talk.
This simulation-version of King Lear aspires to open a door to thinking about how we interact with our fathers, both our biological and metaphorical ones, beginning with William Shakespeare. It is autofiction based on a classic, or an autofictional classic, and hopefully both. It’s a play about our origins, about how everything that happened before us hounds us, even if we prefer to ignore it. It’s about how we are fashioned by those who came before us. About how to invent a life that belongs to you without forgetting the past. About how to imagine other possible endings. It is also a recital, or an essay; it is what happens before everything happens, the place just before something takes on its exact form, the precise moment when everything is still possible.
— Andrea Jiménez


On the critic's...
"Game, set, match for Cordelia
You have to go live the experience of Casting Lear and, if you have the opportunity, to repeat with different actors because it is already seen that the experience can change subtly in each situation (Pep Cruz who was the actor in the first performance at the Lliure, was spectator yesterday). The theatre is never the same; love is never the same and it is never lived with the same intensity." (Jordi Bordes, Recomana.cat)

"It is like attending an act of creation at the instant it occurs. An artist composing a character before our eyes and showing what usually stays in the rehearsal room: doubts, impulses, intuitions, fleeting revelations. That alone is worth it." (Raquel Vidales, El País)

"That the theatre, like all performing arts, is an unrepeatable art, acquires a new meaning in this montage. Casting Lear is a leap into the void in every role. Andrea Jiménez explores the limits of dramaturgy and presents a risky, provocative, and in some way cathartic work, aimed at surprising and making us reflect." (Diana Rivera Miguel, En platea)

"Casting Lear is bold, daring, it risks everything to the minimum expression, it subjects the actor to the director and the director to his own biography by dismantling the concept of theatre. ( ) It’s a game of tennis where the ball hits the net and hesitates before knowing which side it will fall. Match Point. Then Andrea Jimenez wins the set, she wins the match. And the theater wins." (Enrique Llamas, Publico.es)

"Don’t miss it, Casting Lear is amazing and moving, it’s magnificent, brilliant and captivating." (Diego Doncel, ABC)


COMPLEMENTARY INFO
Shakespeare and Feminist Theory by Arianne Novy (The Arden Shakespeare, 2019)