King Lear’s Daughters Successfully Performed by The Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw, Poland

On the afternoon of October 23rd, 2017, King Lear’s Daughters was successfully performed by The Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art at the proscenium stage in Changping Campus of the Central Academy of Drama. King Lear’s Daughters was co-composed by Women’s Theatre Group and writer Elaine Feinstein. The theme of the play is no longer to present the audience a tragedy that a fatuous and oppressive old guy unfortunately came to his death. However, the play will re-deconstruct the traditional King Lear from the perspective of his three daughters and the fool by using a method of "jigsaw".

The three daughters' state of life on stage suggested that Lear was a "long-absent" father. And the absence of their mother exacerbated their suffering. However, what the audience saw on the stage was not the self-pity and solitary of the three daughters. It is a tragedy of the three girls living fairytale lives tales, which was performed through actresses’ extreme physical actions. Bergson said: "When you start to observe life indifferently as a bystander, many tragedies come to life like comedies". "King Lear's Daughters" is one such play to conceal the connotation of tragedy in a comic atmosphere, whose fairytale story is a form of pain and hardship presentation. Three girls would laugh, dance spontaneously, tell others about their dreams and even envy each other because of their father's discriminatory treatment. However, when we calmly see through the appearance to perceive the essence, we find that the so-called fairytale life of three girls would always have an insurmountable boundary, the long-absent King Lear in their speech and deportment. In addition， three daughters’ attitude to King Lear is also worth pondering, from longing for love, gradually resisting to the final ambiguity. The changing process was exactly the main line of the play.

Director Daria Kopiec said that what she hoped to show was not the woman's subjection to such suppression but their resistance ability when she was asked about her plot setting on the attitude change of the three daughters.

The play also presented many elements of "Meta Drama". For example, the performers introduced everything on the stage, their identities as well as the stories at the very beginning of the performance. And then it was the reinterpretation on the Fool. The Fool character was a combination of the pianist and singer, the Fool and King Lear as well as the fourth person for helping to boost three daughters’ memory of King Lear. Such a character, set aside from the three sisters, could also keep the audience calm and thoughtful.