23-25 October, Pontine Theatre presents The Independent Eye’s two-actor staging of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Performances are Friday @7:30, Saturday @4 and Sunday @2. Tickets are $24 and may be purchased online at www.pontine.org. Pontine’s West End Studio Theatre is located at 959 Islington Street, Portsmouth NH. Contact Pontine: info@pontine.org / 603-436-6660
Two actors. Twenty puppets. Shakespeare’s fiery text. Lear is the puppeteer of his own puppet show, the solo human in his motherless kingdom of pwer and commodity. Like Dante’s damned souls, caught in a perpetual hell particular to each, Lear obsessively plays out his loss of power, friendship, shelter, sanity, and at last even hope. The Fook is his withered soul, an acid clown who torments Lear, stage-manages his story, and finally disappears into Lear’s madness.
Sprung from the Independent Eye’s series of landmark actor/puppet stagings— Macbeth, The Tempest, Frankenstein, Descent of Inanna—this King Lear features Conrad Bishop as Lear, Elizabeth Fuller as the Fool, with Fuller’s music score in a warm inviting setting that offers some shelter against the storm.
