The Cordelia Dream
Wilton’s Music Hall
Sunset Boulevard
Comedy
Marina Carr is a writer of enormous distinction which isn’t quite the same as being a writer of enormous talent. She’s been given chairs by so many universities that she could probably open a furniture shop. However, a certain snippet of advice — don’t invite comparisons with Shakespeare — seems to have escaped both her, and the RSC, who have commissioned a play from her which explicitly sets out to re-configure the Lear–Cordelia relationship. A different writer might have disguised her artistic ambitions with more guile but, no, here comes Professor Carr to conquer Everest in her flip-flops and T-shirt. The play opens with a peaky young woman paying a visit to a truculent snowy-bearded old fool who lives in a filthy hovel where he sleeps on a grand piano.
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