Belvoir’s King Lear draws us in but refuses to let us sit safely in the dark, forcing us to confront the tragedy before us and to recognise ourselves—and our own age of egoists, cowards, and sycophants. The raw humanity of lessons unlearned is laid bare.

Director Eamon Flack’s astonishing direction rips away all artifice to reveal the starkness of hubris and the juxtapositions of human struggle: ambition devours fragility, tenderness conquers rage, innocence invites violence. He hangs it suspended in time, untethered to any specific place or politics. 

Belvoir’s Lear unfolds on a bare pinewood floor against black walls, where a row of chairs waits in shadow- a space charged with possibility. That restraint is this production’s strength: the emptiness is a canvas of simmering rot and sudden shocks. Nothing is oversignalled, nothing is padded; the design trusts the audience to feel the weight of what happens, when it happens.

Threaded through this spareness is the live musical presence of Hilary Geddes, Jess Green, and Arjunan Puveendran. Their interplay of vocals with percussion, strings, and guitar is not decorative but elemental, adding just enough nuance to stir momentum, to quicken pace, to signal arrivals or departures. A single strike can tilt the atmosphere, a rhythm can summon urgency or passion. It is music as a pulse, not a soundtrack.

The ensemble are a collective storm, each voice charging the same electric air, and while every role stood out, their unity left space for Colin Friels’ Lear to emerge as the gravitational centre. Friels is restrained and revelatory. He knows precisely how to make Lear startlingly accessible, removing all pretence so his words rise organically from the gut, immediate and unvarnished. This is not a king preoccupied with the trappings of reign, but a man wrestling with mortality, fumbling through the fragile illusions of vanity and legacy. Every actor should study his performance: the pauses that land like verdicts, the stumbles that feel prophetic, the oxymoronic blend of brittleness, vulnerability and authority. 

The male characters are incisively performed and charismatic, their force serving as a counterpoint, embodying a cycle of manipulation, capitulation and insecurity that people the plot and sharpen the commentary. Yet the true fracture at the heart of Lear is women’s power – how it is wielded, and how it breaks. And, the women here are exceptional.  Charlotte Friels’ Goneril is razor-edged and coolly ambitious, her presence cutting through the air with ruthless clarity. She has a magnetic quality in both voice and posture and you find yourself watching her, watch others, a predator circling the room. Jana Zvedeniuk as Regan coils with cold calculation, her youth masking casual cruelty, chilling in its reveal. Even when expected, her command to tear out Gloucester’s eyes is a visceral shock. 

Cordelia, played by Ahunim Abebe, is granted rare agency in Belvoir’s staging. No longer merely the daughter who speaks “nothing,” she rises as guide and ally. Abebe embodies truth with unyielding conviction, political in its resonance, revealing with devastating clarity the cost when it is silenced.  Alison Whyte’s gender swapped Gloucester shows that a mother’s love and failings are just as a father’s, her gravitas and intuition making the choice seamless and powerful.

King Lear done well, denies all resolution – it unsettles, it corrodes. We all live in a storm of lies and ambition, where chaos spreads like contagion and power shields the corrupt. This is theatre as rupture, without the dressings of pageantry – piercingly of this moment. It leaves us not with answers, but humbled with questions: how do we truly matter, what defines who we are, and what remains when we all confront the inevitable. 

Fierce, unflinching, and utterly human, Belvoir’s Lear is essential theatre. This is Shakespeare in it’s purest truth. That’s why it works. 

King Lear runs from 15 November 2025 – 4 January 2026 at the Belvoir Street theatre, Upstairs Theatre. See : https://belvoir.com.au/productions/king-lear/

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