La Reine Lear • Queen Lear Tom Lanoye, Christophe Sermet / Cie. du Vendredi • Théâtre National

Six years after the success of Mamma Medea, Tom Lanoye and Christophe Sermet join forces again to revisit a Shakespeare classic: King Lear.
The Flemish author turns Lear into a woman and places her in a contemporary setting, international high finance in a virtual world that lays waste to the corporeal.

At the head of an enormous empire, Queen Lear calls her three sons together to bestow an inheritance that is too huge to be the product of honest labor. A suffocating mother, she requires a verbal proof of her children’s love before deciding on a division between them. One of them, Cornald, refuses to play his mother’s flattery games and flees to an emerging country to develop a micro credit program.

It’s the beginning of the tragedy against a backdrop of climatic and financial storms. It will take Cornald’s life and witness the Lear family devouring each other as the assets of the company reel under the assaults of the competition.

Tom Lanoye doesn’t attenuate the strength and violence of Shakespeare’s King Lear. He adapts it by making language the heart of the piece, not the text, but the language. A carnal baroque language that puts the bodies in movement.