Lear

Lear is a project created and delivered by English Touring Opera and Dartington Hall Trust in collaboration with HMP Channings Wood in Devon. A week-long residency with two groups of men in September 2010 will lead to performance in the Prison for an audience of inmates. The week will consist of creative and devising workshops, in which songs and music will be written, design made, and a story created. The artistic team includes composer Andy Smith, director Tim Yealland, singer Abigail Kelly (as Cordelia), actor Steve Jacobs (as Lear), designer Jude Munden, and musicians Miguel Tantos, Adam Mackenzie and Rory Dempsey. With the king as a focal point and catalyst the workshops will explore themes of cruelty and forgiveness. Singing, drama, artwork, movement will constitute the elements of the resulting work, all underpinned by a musical world influenced by the surrounding heath of Dartmoor.

The autumn of 2010 sees ETO performing a new work based on Shakespeare’s King Lear: Promised End is the title of Alexander Goehr’s new opera, and its world premiere takes place this season. The production was workshopped in Dartington last January. Most of the play is set on a heath not unlike Dartmoor, and its themes of offending, guilt, self-knowledge and redemption make it the perfect platform for creating new responses to the issues that confront the characters.

An exciting strand of the project includes also a new collaboration with Kevicc (King Edward VI Community College) in Totnes. Working with designer Jude Munden students will devise the set that will form the visual structure of Lear in Channings Wood. Backdrops will go into the prison, and visual documentation and sound recordings of the performance will be shared between prison and school.