Lear Dreaming

Ong Keng Sen has been haunted by Shakespeare's ghost for some time now. Since the late ’90s, the Singaporean director has staged a string of plays that offer strange, oneiric reimaginings of the Bard's works; his latest, 'Lear Dreaming', is no exception. Half-sung, half-spoken, and all delivered in an alphabet soup of East Asian languages (Indonesian, Japanese, Korean and Mandarin all feature; subtitles in French), this version of 'King Lear' is more gamelan than Globe – though going by Ong's canon, it should remain faithful to the complex themes at the heart of the play.