INSPIRED BY THE BARD
King Lear echoes in new play
INSPIRATION(S): “There were two starting points and King Lear was one of them,” said Daniel Macdonald. “The other angle is what if the mother is beginning to suffer with dementia, just as King Lear is doing ? What if that becomes a factor in decisionmaking and what if some of the siblings are pushing an agenda based on their fears that the farm ends up somewhere else, if it’s in someone else’s hands, if there’s no will, if the decision-making has been vague or not made at all?”
CONFLICT: It wouldn’t be a drama without it. “I struck upon the idea of the Cordelia character from Lear being the one who is looking at this situation slightly differently from the other siblings and wanting to treat the mom in a way that the siblings don’t really understand or recognize as really being valuable,” says Macdonald.
REALITY?: Some elements of the play are as meat-and-potatoes as it gets — siblings sitting around a kitchen table talking. But Macdonald is also known for thinking outside the box. One of his plays, Velocity, takes place as a father falls from a great height, pushed by his daughter. Here, “we play around with realities and memories, we move back and forth in time. We jump into the mother’s imagination or her memories and the actors become other characters and things like that,” he says.
TONE: In another of his plays, McGregor’s Hard Ice Cream and Gas, the body of a father is kept chilled by containers of ice cream because the ground is frozen and he can’t be buried outside. “McGregor’s was very gothic in a lot of ways. This is very far away from that. It’s more folkoriented, there’s a folk feeling to the play, there’s a lot of direct address to the audience.”
THE TITLE: Macdonald chose it early, then changed it in a later draft. “But Angus said, no way,” he laughs. It serves the King Lear reference and the fact that the wind is almost a character itself in the play.
CAST: Darla Biccum, Cheryl Jack, Marcel Petite, Kate Herriot, Mark Claxton and Nadia Mori. Eileen Laverty performs original songs she wrote for the play.