Discussion on dementia stories to follow UK premiere of Lost Lear at Traverse on Sunday evening
The new show by award-winning Irish theatre maker Dan Colley is a moving look at living with dementia, told through the familiar lens of Shakespeare's characters
Following the preview performance on the 27 July, Dan will be joined by Alex Howard and Gus Harrower from Capital Theatres dementia-friendly programme and Magdalena Schamberger, who specialises in creating theatre for those with dementia
Lost Lear will run on the main stage at the Traverse from 2 to 24 August
Following its first-ever UK performance at Traverse Festival on 27 July, the hit Irish theatre show Lost Lear will host a special public discussion around telling the complex stories of dementia in theatre.
The discussion will feature Lost Lear's award-winning creator Dan Colley, who will be joined by Alex Howard and Gus Harrower from Capital Theatres Edinburgh's dementia-friendly programme and Scotland-based theatre-maker and consultant Magdalene Schamberger, who has over 20 years experience working with people living with dementia. The discussion will look at the initial creation of Lost Lear and its collaborations between Dementia Carers Campaign Network and the Alzheimer's Society of Ireland. The play itself, a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear, examines how we know ourselves and who we are to each other, amidst the complexities of dementia. The discussion will also be a chance for audiences to talk about how the show has resonated with their own experiences of living with and caring for those with dementia, with an invite being sent out to people from local dementia communities.
'Dan collaborated with the Dementia Carers Campaign Network (DCCN), an advocacy group supported by The Alzheimer Society of Ireland, in the early days of writing this play.' says Judy Williams, Advocacy, Engagement and Participation Officer for The Alzheimer Society of Ireland. 'Through focus groups, carers shared their experiences, shaping Dan's approach to the play. For the DCCN, the project was compelling, inclusive, and in some ways, healing. It also provided new opportunities for carers to share their stories, while raising awareness about the challenges they face.
We were very grateful for the opportunity to have this engagement with Dan and Matt, and we wish them all the best at the Edinburgh Fringe 2025. We hope as many people as possible have the opportunity to see this sophisticated and thought-provoking play.'
'Lost Lear is a captivating journey, from an energetic and rambunctious beginning to the poignant and gentle end, it portrays the bewilderment of someone who wants to care, trying to have the shared experience with the person living with dementia, struggling and sometimes failing.' says Susan Crampton of the Dementia Carers Campaign Network. 'I am delighted to hear that Lost Lear is going to Edinburgh and many more people will have the opportunity to see it for the first time – or again.'
Lost Lear is a moving and darkly comic remix of Shakespeare's play told from the point of view of Joy, a person with dementia, who is living in an old memory of rehearsing King Lear. Joy's delicately maintained reality is upended by the arrival of her estranged son who, being cast as Cordelia, must find a way to speak his piece from within the limited role he's given. Using puppetry, projection and live video effects, the audience are landed in Joy's world as layers of her past and present, fiction and reality, overlap and distort. Lost Lear is a thought provoking meditation on theatre, artifice and the possibility of communicating across the chasms between us.
Following rave reviews for its Irish premiere, where it picked up nominations for Best New Play, Audience Choice, Best AV Design and Best Supporting Actor at the Irish Times Theatre Awards, Lost Lear will have its UK premiere at the Traverse Festival in Edinburgh this August.
Following its Fringe run, Lost Lear will tour to North America in Autumn 2025.
Co-produced by Mermaid Arts Centre and Riverbank Arts Centre. Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and supported by Fishamble's New Play Clinic. Part of the 2025 Culture Ireland Edinburgh Showcase.
Traverse 1
Preview 27 July 7.30pm and 2 August 9.30pm
Then 3 – 24 August (not Mondays) Times vary.
Run time: 1 hr 15 min
Tickets: £5 – £25
traverse.co.uk
Like this:
Like
Related
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
4 hours ago
- Times
Grumpy Britain needs the Geldof treatment
America's summertime invasion is well under way. The commander-in-chief is leading from the front, touring his golf courses in Scotland. His vice-president is reportedly preparing to establish a beachhead in the Cotswolds. Protected by their entourages, the Britain they will encounter resembles the Hollywood fantasy of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. But if they really want to understand their ally, the Britain they need to meet lives next door to the grumpy, miserable Victor Meldrew of One Foot in the Grave. That's not on anyone's schedule right now. The wedding of Eve Jobs, daughter of the late Apple boss, took place in the church of St Michael & All Angels, near Chipping Norton, on Saturday. A former vice-president, Kamala Harris, and a stream of liberal multimillionaires mingled with a Springsteen or two and at least one Kardashian. Even if we don't matter that much any more, we remain irresistibly cute to our transatlantic cousins. • Eve Jobs and Harry Charles marry in 'quaint corner' of the Cotswolds The Hollywood landscape of Merrie England, with its kings, queens, thatched cottages, rolling hills, baffling titles, jolly peasants and strolling troubadours (Elton John played the wedding party) is the stuff of countless movies. No wonder Americans are confused by the reality. As far back as 1942, US troops stationed in Britain were cautioned not to be misled by the British 'tendency to be soft-spoken and polite… the English language didn't spread across the oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps of the world because these people were panty-waists'. A generation of American friends whistled along to Bing Crosby, William Bendix and Cedric Hardwicke tramping along the lanes whistling Busy Doing Nothing in the film version of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee… This, perhaps, is the Britain for which Mr Trump feels most affinity; a world of wise and virtuous monarchs, of chivalrous heroes and moustachioed villains, of valiant knights and, above all, of a deferential, complaisant people. His periodic visits to Turnberry and his other properties must feel in some way like a replay of the 1954 Gene Kelly movie Brigadoon, about a bewitched Scottish village so perfect that its inhabitants contrive to ensure it only appears to the rest of the world for one day every 100 years or so, lest its dreamy heaven be changed by cold reality. Sequestered in his own personal Brigadoon, the president is unlikely to come face to face with the true mood of our nation. Just as well. As the old saying goes, the peasants are revolting. And so are the apprentices. And the apothecaries. And the squires. Even the knights are uneasy. Britain is in a sour state: angry and disillusioned — less Camelot, more Meldrew's Tresillian Way. Living standards are declining, public service productivity plummeting, utilities unreliable and expensive. Our waterways are filthy. The public's faith in the health service is failing; and even though crime is falling, citizens say they feel no safer. A Sunday Times survey of the nation's mood published at the weekend makes unhappy reading for Sir Keir Starmer's ministers. The burning fuse of small boats in the Channel remains smouldering, with record numbers crossing this year. Six in ten of us think the French government simply isn't keeping its side of the very expensive bargain. Sixty-nine per cent share Trump's view that we, like the US, should forget about the deal and deploy our own troops to stem the tide. He sent the Marines and cut crossings by 90 per cent; both the Reform leader Nigel Farage and the Blue Labour guru Maurice Glasman want the Royal Navy to blockade the Channel. The protests against the siting of asylum hotels in Epping, Norwich and Diss have been disturbing, though not yet on the scale of those triggered by the atrocity in Southport a year ago this week. But the admission by a senior Labour MP that the Home Office and local authorities are competing for accommodation to house healthy, young, male asylum seekers and homeless single-parent families is a powder keg waiting to explode. The unrest comes against a deeper background of disillusion. The generation now leaving university is the first in perhaps 200 years who cannot expect to have a higher standard of living than their parents, even though their educational attainments are dramatically greater. The totemic British adult milestone, the purchase of your own home with a mortgage, has now become unattainable for many, even for the children of middle-class parents. In 2004, more than half of us owned our own homes by the age of 32. That age is now 36, and climbing. The decision last week to announce a pensions review signals that the actuaries have done their work and retirement age will increase for those at work. People in their twenties are now contemplating working well into their seventies. Or forever. Anger, of course, does not have to be a bad thing. It is often the catalyst for action. But that transformation demands leadership, vision and poetry. We've seen it happen before. A brilliant three-part documentary series produced by one of the great film-makers of our time, Norma Percy, recounts the way in which Bob Geldof's explosion of rage at the fate of children in Ethiopia galvanised a generation and created Band Aid and Live Aid. The old campaigner has once again entered the lists, this time on behalf of the starving children of Gaza. Interviewing him over the weekend, I was reminded that sometimes words can make a difference, especially when put together by a poet like Geldof. You do not have to take sides to be moved by his vivid evocation of 'the IDF… dangling food in front of starving, panicked, exhausted mothers' or 'children … taking a teaspoonful of salt and as much water as they can drink to fill their bellies'. It is hard to contest Geldof's dismissal of the demand by 200 MPs for recognition of a Palestinian state as virtue-signalling. I have little doubt that his sheer moral authority will have contributed to the Israeli decision to allow more aid into Gaza and to agree to 'tactical pauses' in the fighting. But Geldof's righteous anger is a rare thing in British politics. Instead we get the bluster of government which comes down to little more than noise-making in the hope that something will turn up; and the grandstanding opportunism of opposition manoeuvring to escape responsibility. And I cannot right now name the poet in our politics capable of summoning up the words to turn our nation's rage into a positive, uplifting vision. Nor, I suppose, can you.
Times
4 hours ago
- Times
Cancelling Jewish comedians is capitulation
The cost of bunking down in an Edinburgh August overtook our family resources a few years back, so not for me the exhilarating Fringe ordeal: six shows a day and falling asleep in the small hours with haggis-pizza in hair and keyboard. But exiled fans like to learn by proxy about occasional brilliance, embarrassing idiocies and streaks of perilous bravery. So far, though, the most downheartening news is about cowardice. Two Jewish comedians were taken off the Fringe listings and told by the Whistlebinkies venue, at two weeks' notice, that they were not performing there. Apparently its staff might feel 'unsafe', though the risk of antisemitic demonstration was recognised and security discussed. Seemingly there had been regular 'Free Palestine' graffiti left on toilet doors, needing to be cleaned. Obviously, it can't be worth standing by freedom and equality if it might cause inconvenience, can it? • Doctor who called for abolition of Israel allowed to keep her job Neither show was about Gaza, Israel or war. Rachel Creeger's 'Ultimate Jewish Mother' is, she says, a 'warm hug' about all mums. Philip Simon was to host a 'Jew-o-Rama' of comedic talents (and it is worth remembering how much poorer all showbiz would be without the Jewish contribution, comic or otherwise). His other show has been cancelled too. Creeger, incidentally, observed that she doesn't find 'Free Palestine' slogans a threat and mildly says, 'It's a common thing to see in places. It's people's political statement.' But as Simon says, 'We are cancelled and often silently boycotted. This would not happen to any other ethnic minority; there would be absolute outrage.' Shocked and destabilised, both say it's hard to sleep, and not only because of the financial and professional blow. Simon notes a change in the past year: 'I think people have perhaps got braver in what they feel they can say.' Indeed: last year Jewish audience members were booed for objecting to a Reginald D Hunter joke, and this did not cause the rest of his audience to walk out in contempt. A similar insult from the stage to Jews in the audience at the Soho Theatre did at least get that perpetrator banned. Routine antisemitism is getting easier, less shocking. Public entertainment is a canary in the cultural coalmine, but this is not just about fringe comedy. It is about the visible creep of raw, uncivilised, general contempt for Jews, notably in a generation too young either to feel disgraced by such attitudes or to bother studying the hideous complications of the Middle East. • Pro-Palestinian protesters are threatening me, says MP It is notably within higher education that this easy hate has increased four times faster than anywhere else: students and academics are more likely to commit verbal or physical attacks than the general populace. It is about the easy fashionability of flinging on a keffiyeh to denote that you are one of the good guys, lining up unthinkingly with Hamas's clear mission to destroy the state of Israel and all Jews everywhere. It is in tearing down pictures of hostages, and the laughable idiocy of waving banners saying 'QUEERS FOR PALESTINE'. As if the priority of a Hamas-led regime would be to facilitate Pride marches and transgenderism, rather than execute the lot of them. After the murders and kidnaps of October 7, attacks on Jews in the UK doubled extraordinarily fast: businesses and synagogues have been damaged, Jewish schoolchildren minding their own business have been threatened. Big organised demonstrations week after week are manipulated by leaders keener on ruckus than discussion. Hysterical, deluded individualism erupts, as in that young Irishwoman all over social media screaming 'I am a Palestinian and I am being silenced', when neither is the case. Or the one who last week trashed a table outside Reuben's Café in Baker Street (she was, at least, arrested). When one of the kosher diners, Yael, protested that the group didn't support the Israeli government's action the woman 'said she didn't care and that I was Jewish, so that's all that mattered to her'. • Does Israel's concession on Gaza aid bring a ceasefire any closer? Britain cannot be complacent about this. Warped, childish and moronic though much of it is, antisemitism is too ancient and toxic a rash to be allowed even a millimetre's spread. It is enraging that our government should be contemplating some probably ill-written and illiberal blasphemy law against 'Islamophobia' rather than spending its energy instructing public forces to give no quarter to routine insults against British Jews. One might even cynically point out one difference: extreme Islamist calls for sharia law are commonplace and shruggingly tolerated, while Judaism does not proselytise or demand public concessions but rather the opposite: traditionally resisting converts with care and questioning doubt. As the gentle rabbi Lord Sacks once said to me, 'Over centuries in many lands Jews have learnt to harmonise in a minor key', while the centuries-newer faith has yet to achieve that. It is right — inevitable — to care about the people of Gaza. Inevitable to wince and weep at the immense scale of torment and starvation of its people, near-unbearable to hear daily about innocents caught between Hamas ruthlessness and Binyamin Netanyahu's remorselessness. It is increasingly hard to look away, and reasonable to beg western governments forcibly to relieve the suffering at any cost. Right also to insist, as many Israeli citizens do and its candid friends have done in these pages, that Israel must bend to mercy and reconciliation. But it is not tolerable to convert your shock into cheap, enjoyable, hysterical hatred. No civilised democracy can delude itself that attacking Jews for Jewishness, or pigeon-heartedly discriminating, is forgivable. Or should go unpunished.
The Sun
5 hours ago
- The Sun
Horoscope today, July 28, 2025: Daily star sign guide from Mystic Meg
OUR much-loved astrologer Meg sadly died in 2023 but her column will be kept alive by her friend and protégée Maggie Innes. Read on to see what's written in the stars for you today. ♈ ARIES March 21 to April 20 Changing your attitude towards work can come from inside rather than outside – and Mars urges you to make a start. Even when the future seems fixed, you can find a way to make your own part in it bigger and bolder. Believing in your skills may have taken a knock, but now you can get back to 100 per cent. 2 ♉ TAURUS April 21 to May 21 Instead of leaving a daring love idea to fade away, you can bring it into the light. If you're with a partner, surprising each other, even in the smallest way, can unlock something special. Single? You are ready to stop preparing and start putting yourself out there. A trusted family member has strong advice. Get all the latest Taurus horoscope new s including your weekly and monthly predictions ♊ GEMINI May 22 to June 21 It can feel a struggle to keep saying or writing certain words if you feel you are not being heard. But you have strength in your chart to keep trying. Mercury's current retrograde may challenge you but is also a key learning tool to try another path to a study goal. In fitness, don't be tempted to quit, apply yourself. Get all the latest Gemini horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions ♋ CANCER June 22 to July 22 You have Jupiter joy all around – the trick is to access it. You can meet someone who can help this process by helping you see your own comedy or entertaining ability in clear, forward-facing ways. Even an audience of one person is enough to show you where you should be heading. The luck factor circles 'P'. Get all the latest Cancer horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions ♌ LEO July 23 to August 23 The sun in your chart is welcoming and supports you to be the same. So even if an event is not turning out the way you expected, you can make the most of it. Letting your smile lead the way in a room of strangers can attract a love interest. Asking what you can give to a group, rather than get from it, is a smart move. ♍ VIRGO August 24 to September 22 Your chart is a one-off blend of moon insight and Mars energy and this promotes your personal brand. A team, or a boss, can realise you are the missing part of a puzzle. If you're single, making a casual first move comes easier when you let your heart lead. Virgo couples are ready to compromise, at last. Get all the latest Virgo horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions ♎ LIBRA September 23 to October 23 Keeping a secret for a friend or family member is fine as long as it's your own choice – if this feels forced, do revisit this decision. As for your own heart, you know you have locked feelings away for too long, so set them free. In love? Reveal your true desires. Single? Admit 'G' attraction, even just to yourself. ♏ SCORPIO October 24 to November 22 When you are the kind of friend, or colleague, who leads by example rather than expectation, others start to warm to you. So put your money where your mouth is and make a move. As for love, goals mean most when they are shared, but you can also follow solo pursuits if you have strong feelings. Get all the latest Scorpio horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions ♐ SAGITTARIUS November 23 to December 21 Too many ambitions can keep your energy levels low – when you choose just one to follow with your whole self, this can change. The right one is right there when you let your mind relax. In love? Strong Venus connection power can cut through any silence. Single? That Leo is keen to get closer. Get all the latest Sagittarius horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions ♑ CAPRICORN December 22 to January 20 When your mind is open and so is your communication style, what has seemed like an obstacle can melt away. So do try to soften your approach and see what happens next. Your family chart may feel like it's looking back too often, but there's so much to learn from the past that could feed into a better future. Get all the latest Capricorn horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions 2 ♒ AQUARIUS January 21 to February 18 It's not easy to suggest or style a complete turnaround – but your current chart shows you are ready for this. Just make sure you have the right research done and the right answers to hand. Saturn's reversal can keep certain words stuck, but the Mars effect can counteract this. Only say words that you truly believe. Get all the latest Aquarius horoscope news including your weekly and monthly predictions ♓ PISCES February 19 to March 20 Family time may feel squeezed but can still be significant – so don't give up on reconnecting with or reassuring someone special. It's better to do a little well than to do nothing. A cash deal that's been delayed could suddenly switch into fast-forward so make sure you have all the figures.
