Lost Lear Is a Theatrical Tour
de Force That Turns an Old
Story into Something New

Carolina Performing Arts' Nov. 19th and 20th presentation of Lost Lear was the rare touring production from Ireland that feels both formally dazzling and deeply humane. Dan Colley's "moving and darkly comic remix" of Shakespeare's King Lear takes a story that many theatergoers think they know and refracts it through the fragile, shifting world of the mind, with results that are frequently funny, often unsettling, and finally quite moving.

As the lights grew dim, a strange and eerie world opened with a hypnotic pulsing beat and the projection of a very large face of a woman putting on make-up. These first trance-inducing moments set the stage for the disorienting journey through the mind of a woman living with dementia.

The play's central figure is Joy, a former actor who believes she is back in her 30s rehearsing the title role in an avant-garde Lear. In reality, she's in a care facility, where her caregivers gently collude with her reality, sustaining the fiction in hopes of giving her comfort.

When her estranged son arrives and is folded into the fantasy as Cordelia, the story fractures: Joy's past and present, Shakespeare's text and her own life, blend, blur, and sometimes clash.

Carolina Performing Arts presented Dan Colley's Lost Lear on Nov. 19th and 20th in UNC's Memorial Hall (photo by Ste Murray)

What makes Lost Lear so arresting is the way that it uses theatrical tools to put the audience inside Joy's mind. Puppetry, projection, and live-video effects turned the stage of UNC-Chapel Hill's Memorial Hall into a dreamy space -- part rehearsal room, part hospital ward, part memory palace -- where scenes from King Lear shimmer over and through Joy's reality. A life-size puppet double, close-up camera work, and gauzy curtains that catch drifting images give visual form to the instability of memory. We are never entirely sure which layer of time or story we're in, and that uncertainty is precisely the point.

Joy's actor (portraying a woman significantly older than herself) plays the character's shifts in age and awareness with an astounding depth -- one moment diva-ish and commanding, the next suddenly lost, her bravado crumbling into panic. The actor playing her son finds a painful tension between resentment and need; he's both furious at the years that dementia has stolen and desperate to claim what little connection remains.

The main caregiver and sometimes Fool brings a lightness and playfulness to this heavy theme as he attempts to connect Joy with her son. Around them, the caregivers -- half nurses, half scene partners -- embody the play's central ethical question: Should we "play along" with a loved one's altered reality?

Carolina Performing Arts presented Dan Colley's Lost Lear on Nov. 19th and 20th in UNC's Memorial Hall (photo by Ste Murray)

Dan Colley and company lean into the weird, playful, and sometimes absurd possibilities of the premise. Repeated "takes" of famous King Lear moments -- the love test, the storm, the reunion -- accumulate both humor and heartache as their Shakespearean lines pick up new meanings inside Joy's story.

The production has earned rapturous critical acclaim abroad, including a 2025 Scotsman Fringe First Award and five-star reviews from major news-media outlets; and it's not hard to see why: it's a piece that combines intellectual rigor with an unusually tender heart.

Carolina Performing Arts frames the work thoughtfully within its broader 2025-26 season about memory, care, and connection, and Lost Lear feels perfectly at home in that context. The relatively short, intermission-less runtime (about 80 minutes) helps sustain the intensity. (Once we enter Joy's world, we're held there without relief until the final image of a brain scan with synapses firing and exploding behind the woman in the dark.)

For Carolina Performing Arts, Lost Lear is a powerful reminder of what contemporary theater can do at its best: use artifice to tell the truth, and use an old story to help us face one of the hardest realities of modern life. It was a quietly stunning evening -- one that lingered long after we stepped back out into the Chapel Hill night.

Carolina Performing Arts presented Dan Colley's Lost Lear on Nov. 19th and 20th in UNC's Memorial Hall (photo by Ste Murray)

Dan Colley's LOST LEAR (In Person Nov. 19th and 20th) (Carolina Performing Arts in UNC-Chapel Hill's Memorial Hall). TRAILER: https://carolinaperformingarts.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Lost-Lear-industry-trailer-v2.mp4. PRESENTER: https://carolinaperformingarts.org/, https://linkin.bio/carolinaperformingarts/, https://www.facebook.com/CarolinaPerformingArtsUNC/, https://www.instagram.com/carolinaperformingarts/, https://www.tiktok.com/@carolinaperformingarts, https://x.com/UNCPerformArts, and https://www.youtube.com/@UNCPerformArts. 2025-26 SEASON: https://carolinaperformingarts.org/current-season/. VENUE: https://carolinaperformingarts.org/venues/. PARKING & DIRECTIONS: https://carolinaperformingarts.org/parking-and-directions/. LOST LEAR (2022 Dublin Theatre Festival play): https://www.dancolley.com/theatre/lostlear. DAN COLLEY (Irish theater and film maker): https://www.dancolley.com/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/dancolley/, https://www.instagram.com/dangcolley/, and https://www.fieldarts.ie/dan-colley/. SUBSTACK: https://dancolley.substack.com/p/coming-soon. INFORMATION: 919-843-3333 or carolinaperformingarts@unc.edu. PLEASE DONATE TO: Carolina Performing Arts. [RUN HAS CONCLUDED.]

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