Lear is Not Okay: meta play explores what happens when teenagers rewrite Shakespeare’s tragedy
Youth theatre encourages actors to connect with characters of canonical plays, but the trajectories of young women within them can make it hard to find redemptive or empowering touch points.
Lear is Not Okay, which played at London’s Almeida Theatre this month, was something of a meta performance. The show tells the story of a youth theatre company as they rehearse a new play that responds to William Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear.
King Lear, currently showing at The Almeida, is about an ageing king who divides the kingdom among his three daughters, leading to betrayal and chaos as his sanity shatters. Lear is Not Okay (directed by Germma Orleans-Thompson and written by Benjamin Salmon) is a satirical piece about issues that also reverberate throughout Shakespeare’s play – the burden and dispossession of youth, and the uncertainty of the future. Making a comedy out of tragedy asks questions about what we laugh at, and why.
The director characters within the play (played by Alexander and Evie*) are broad stereotypes of phoney drama group leaders. The actors’ depictions of identity anxiety and awkward social interactions in a youth theatre group, although set up to provoke laughter among an enthusiastic first night audience, cut close to the bone.
In one scene, the actor Sarah (played by Josephine*) performs a posthumous speech she has written for Lear’s daughter, Cordelia. She explains that she sees Cordelia as a powerful woman, but the monologue she delivers sounds more like a sulky teenager.
Cordelia, banished to France by her father, has been forced to invade her own country to restore political stability and is somewhat disgruntled to have ended up dead. Sarah’s Cordelia concludes with the evergreen adolescent retort: “Whatever.”
Youth theatre encourages actors to connect with characters of canonical plays, but the trajectories of young women within them can make it hard to find redemptive or empowering touch points. Here Sarah’s attempt to find “empowerment” in the story of Cordelia is absurd, while the collapsing of high political tragedy into teenage soap opera inevitably prompts laughter.
Themes of fairness
We don’t see much of Lear himself. Each time someone playing Lear goes to speak, they are interrupted, or the scene cuts away. We hear more from Shakespeare’s young villain, Edmund. Kelly (Shadia*) delivers a compelling rendition of Edmund’s first monologue in a classical acting style to contrast with Sarah’s devised Cordelia speech.
In the monologue, Edmund is bitter and vengeful about his status as the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester and reveals he has a plot to undermine and replace his legitimate brother Edgar.
Edmund’s evocation of the arbitrary unfairness of the world and assertion of the necessity to fight for your place – to the detriment of others if necessary – resonates ambivalently throughout this play. Another actor, Dylan (Yee*), concludes that while we’d like to think everyone had equal rights and opportunities, we know the dice are loaded from the start.
This cynical insight follows an altercation in the play about private and comprehensive schools, a lottery the youth cast are very conscious of. In 2019, Nottingham Playhouse chief executive Stephanie Sirr said theatres “had never witnessed a bigger gap in the cultural opportunities open to those in private schools compared to those in state education”. The subsequent five years are only likely to have widened the gap.
When I asked the cast how they found out about the Almeida’s Young Company, they said by word of mouth. These things depend on their school, or which youth groups they attend (though the Almeida also announces opportunities clearly on its website).
Reviews of youth work are almost nonexistent, which also affects the visibility of these theatre opportunities for young people and makes the chance to write about this production all the more important.
The legacy of COVID
The age group represented by the Almeida Young Company (14-18) has endured deprivation as a result of COVID that has affected their personal, educational and social growth and development. In addition, 14 years of sustained public service cuts to education and the arts mean they inherit a landscape as bleak as that of Lear’s demise.
The numbers of students taking drama at GCSE has dropped by 39.6% since 2010. Specialist drama staff have dropped by 18%.
Giving evidence at the House of Lords inquiry into education for 11-16 year olds in May 2023, National Drama chair, Geoffrey Readman said “few subjects have been so consistently undervalued” or “marginalised” as drama.
While youth programmes run by theatres might help to stem the drain in creative arts in schools, opportunities remain overly focused on London. Theatre critic Lyn Gardner has argued recently that “the performing arts are no longer available to many children in today’s hard-pressed, underfunded schools”, describing them as a potentially “lost” generation.
Redman quoted the words of Noah, a 15-year-old boy who spoke to ministers at the House of Lords: “Drama holds a mirror up to life” and in doing so, it makes us “think, explore, communicate, challenge and even change things for the better”.
The Young Company at the Almeida do exactly that. The crisis point of their play arrives with the results of their auditions for the final show. Malicious comments about race-led affirmative casting made by Zara (Eleonora*) when Kelly secures the leading role prompt “circle time” to talk it through.
Racism and discrimination is another key area of complexity for young people to navigate and this scene plays out clumsiness and inefficacy in the handling of racist speech that reflects the young actors own fraught experiences in the rehearsal room and beyond.
In this youth theatre production, drama creates an environment for young people to collaboratively play out the things that matter to them, the things that are hurting them and the things that are “not okay”.
*Only first names have been given for safeguarding reasons.
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Penelope Woods does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.