Postmodern 'King Lear': A study of four 'King Lear' productions (William Shakespeare, Giorgio Strehler, Suzuki Tadashi, Mabou Mines, Robert Wilson)

In the last two decades of the twentieth-century, not only all the major British theatre institutions—the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, and BBC—but also some of the most renowned avant-garde film and theatre directors have staged King Lear. King Lear, having been habitually dismissed as unstageable, became the Shakespeare text for the postmodern stage. The dissertation explores the phenomenon of the proliferation of King Lear productions on the postmodern stage through extensive analyses of four King Lear productions produced by the renowned avant-garde directors and a theatre collective. Rather than reconstructing a complete, totalizing picture of each production as a model representative postmodern King Lear, this study attempts to locate symptomatic postmodern which King Lear participated in and negotiated with postmodern cultural and aesthetic concerns about power, patriarchy, gender and identity politics, representation, and the crisis of the Author and the Director.; Chapter one provides an overview of the contemporary Shakespeare performance criticism that establishes new relationship between text and performance, performance and reception, and Shakespearean performance and reproduction of ideology. It also examines the complicated issues involved in directors' challenge to the authority of Shakespeare's text. Chapter two analyzes Giorgio Strehler's eclectic, intertextual Re Lear production at the Piccolo Teatro. Chapter three analyzes Suzuki Tadashi's intercultural The Tale of Lear production with an all-male American cast. Chapter four focuses on a New York avant-garde theatre collective, Mabou Mines's Lear production with Ruth Maleczech as Lear. Chapter five focuses Marianne Hoppe as Lear. The final chapter assesses implications of the postmodern reinvention of King Lear.