Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Low Down
Parallels with Lear and the repetition of performance provide the spark into a wonderfully sensitive and theatrical exploration of dementia.
Review
Dementia and its effects on families, loved ones and friends is a subject often explored in contemporary theatre, but here it achieves a higher level of theatricality through the use of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Joy, a former, highly successful, actress, a bit of a diva and difficult to work with, is stuck in the rehearsal of a production she starred in, one in which she played Lear. The staff in her nursing home seem to support this, one carer in particular playing many parts, the Fool, Regan and Goneril among them, and staff help with costume changes. Her delicately structured reality is shattered by the arrival of her son, Conor, forced into playing the Cordelia role, his estrangement from his mother causing a rift in her world.
Dan Colley’s script plays beautifully with meta theatre and reality. Liam, the carer, (excellent Manus Halligan), begins the play with an amusing summary of the plot of Lear, “so then he kicks off, he tells Cordelia she’s disinherited. That she was his favourite and how is heart is broken now.” Gradually it is revealed that he is explaining the plot to Conor, Peter Daley’s complex and compelling performance conveying confusion, despair, and eventually stubbornness as he moves his mum away from the rehearsal room scenario. Joy is played by the outstanding Venetia Bowe, capturing perfectly the diva behaviour, controlling each scene, treating Conor as the understudy. Her confusion reaches the surface occasionally, and the audience may be confused as to why Joy is being played by a much younger woman.
Then a brave and stunning coup de théâtre takes place during the storm scene, where Joy is moved from her home and safe environment, and the parallels to living in confused squaller is revealed. For me to explain what happens will rob the viewer of the thrill of the flip in the production that suddenly shines a light of clarity on the confusion. “Nothing will come of nothing” is the oft repeated phrase in the play, and it lands beautifully as Joy/Conor and Lear/Cordelia struggle towards the end of the play(s). Colley wrote the play after visiting his grandmother’s care home, where there was a row of fake shops, made to look like a stereotype of an Irish High Street from the Twentieth Century. It provided the residents with a comforting environment from their childhoods. The excellent design by Andrew Clancey reflects the rehearsal room, Joy’s chair also being Lear’s throne. Sensitive to its subject matter, this is a production outstanding in its theatricality, staged to perfection, surprising in its revelations.
