Review of Learlike premiere by Greensleeved: York International Shakespeare Festival
Brooke Rooney is a third year student. She reviewed LearLike for her Shakespeare: Perspectives assignment, a portfolio of blog posts. As the winner of the annual international ShakeSphere competion, LearLike premiered at York St John in May 2025 as part of the York International Shakespeare Festival before touring through Europe’s summer Shakespeare festivals in Verona, Ostrava, Gdansk and Craiova.
King Lear’s Shadow casts deep over Learlike by Greensleeved. Focalising his daughters, the play which bears his name keeps his hollow space at its centre, as a puppet-prop given lines by distorted voice-over.
Lear’s Hollow Presence
It even took me a full minute to realise that what I was seeing was in fact King Lear — so off-put was I by the strange appearance. Portrayed as a being of animated grey cloth on sticks, the effect is inhuman and disturbing: a figure whom you recognise as unreal, and yet you cannot bear to look away from the swishing of his draped limbs. He is both an empty prop, kept up by his daughters, and a presence that cannot be ignored.
Born of the minimal-prop criteria of the ESFN ShakeSphere competition (four members, and all their stage props carriable in two suitcases), this Lear is utilised not as the lead or heart of the play, but rather as an absence at its centre. A father who is not really there. Not a King, but the King’s shadow. We feel his simultaneous presence and un-presence in his inhuman visage.
Visual Representation and Semiotics
The dynamic of Lear’s strain on his family is enhanced in his visual representation: his extreme age, his intemperate self, his strangeness capturing his depiction at the “tragic intersection of being and non-being” (McFarland, p. 99). We can develop our understanding of this choice with this idea: by existing at this crossroads of not-quite-being, he unnerves. He is himself and yet an imposter. We see him hanging at the fringes of life as his daughters do — not the aged man that he is, but the inhuman caricature of age itself: loose, ragged, and flapping, held up by the young. He is less of a person and more an effect in and of himself.
Semiotically, we can say that all that we associate with the concept of “King Lear” — the bundle of information we recall about the character when we see it signified — is reinterpreted by the way the symbol of Lear is depicted. Lear is cloth. Lear is a man. Lear is a distant voice. Lear cannot speak. How does all this new visual and textual presentation of a familiar character recontextualise our interpretation of what they signify?
In the case of Learlike, our Lear becomes very much that: a Lear-like, a hollow parody of himself, the very epitome of age-demented “madness” and irregularity. He is no longer himself as we remember him from other productions of King Lear, and yet the play asserts indeed it must be him. We are therefore forced to reconcile this idea — this Not-Quite-Lear as Lear. He is gouged, emptied out, and yet here fills the space of Lear entirely. He is not Lear, but Lear as experienced by his daughters: a demented, ragged, empty rage, a far-off father. This is another deliberate tool of the focalisation at work in Learlike. We share in the strangeness of the abuses of Lear’s age as his daughters do.
The Daughters’ Focalisation
Of course, this visual metaphor is extended when his cloth body is torn apart and adorned over the bodies of his daughters as symbols of office/royal prestige. Goneril, who acquires more of his body than any other, becomes very much like Lear — quick to judge, capricious, spiteful, and anxious. This is, to me, a depiction of her inheriting familial issues, be they traumas or personality traits. She acts with his suspicion, his heavy-handedness. She is who the others in the play call “Learlike.” The director herself stated that the daughters’ story is about “their father’s legacy of abuse” (Thoden van Velzen, 2025), demonstrating that this was very much part of the process of designing this visual effect.
Visual Metaphor and Symbolism
The focalisation of the daughters is ultimately defined by the dehumanisation of King Lear. The division of characters — the human cast against an inhuman prop — sets up the conflict very quickly. The editing of the outcome of Cordelia serves this end too: she remains with the sickly cloth Lear throughout his descent into madness, and we see her reunite with her sisters in the ending. In this play, the sisters do not die. Lear dies, but the sisters remain, to linger instead in the wake of the tragedy, rather than be its fodder.
The Story of Family
This is the fateful change of focalisation — we are left with new questions, threads undone at the play’s end. Goneril is captured, and Regan and Cordelia are left behind. Cordelia is alive, but we are left with questions as to how this new version of the ending plays out.
The story of family goes on, and that is the tragedy. There lingers still resentment, familial wounds, and King Lear’s cloth, awaiting the next Learlike to take it up…
