Anybody currently dealing with a daughter or sister who is a bloody nightmare may take some comfort from the knowledge that Shakespeare understood.
He understood the exhausting family politics. The strategic silences. The conveniently revised version of events. The ability of one relative to enter a perfectly manageable situation and, within minutes, turn it into something requiring maps, armies and a storm on an exposed heath.
He also understood that parents are not always the innocent party.
King Lear is what happens when a powerful man decides to divide his assets between his three daughters according to how convincingly they can praise him in public. It is not a succession-planning model generally recommended by financial advisers.
Goneril and Regan tell their father what he wants to hear. Cordelia refuses to perform. Lear rewards the first two, disowns the third and discovers rather too late that flattery is an unreliable basis upon which to distribute a kingdom.
Families become enemies. Loyalty is mistaken for insolence. Power begins to rot. By the time everybody has explained their position, Britain is descending into war.
This autumn, the Royal Exchange Theatre brings Shakespeare’s monumental family tragedy back into its famously intimate auditorium, led by one of Manchester’s most recognisable actors.
David Threlfall will return to the Exchange after 27 years to play Lear in a new adaptation directed by Matthew Dunster. The production runs from 2 October until 15 November and forms the fifth part of the theatre’s 50th-anniversary programme, A Homecoming.
For Threlfall, the description is particularly apt.
Long before his award-winning performance as Frank Gallagher in Channel 4’s Shameless, the Manchester-born actor built a substantial relationship with the Royal Exchange. His previous appearances at the theatre include Peer Gynt, Present Laughter, The Count of Monte Cristo, Your Home in the West, Macbeth, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Riddley Walker.
His career beyond Manchester has included an Olivier Award for The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby and a Tony nomination for his performance in Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen on Broadway.
Lear, however, presents a particular kind of challenge.
He is a man accustomed to having every decision obeyed, slowly discovering that authority and love are not the same thing. His tragedy begins not because his daughters seize his kingdom, but because he gives it away while attempting to retain all the privileges attached to it.
He wants retirement without diminishment, devotion without question and power without responsibility.
This is not simply the story of an old man mistreated by ungrateful children. It is also a study of what happens when a father demands that love be demonstrated on his terms — then punishes the only daughter honest enough to refuse.
The production’s three sisters will be played by Nadine Shah, Lisa Diveney and Isobel Akuwudike.
Mercury Prize-nominated songwriter and musician Shah takes the role of Goneril, combining it with another significant responsibility as the production’s composer. Her presence suggests that sound will be integral to the world Dunster is constructing, rather than applied politely once the principal decisions have been made.
Shah appeared in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare North Playhouse, but is best known for music in which personal experience, political anger and dark humour are held together by a voice of extraordinary force. Her albums have explored grief, mental health, migration, marriage and the hostile scrutiny experienced by women.
As Goneril — too often flattened into a straightforwardly monstrous daughter — she has formidable material to work with.
Lisa Diveney, whose stage credits include The Homecoming at the Young Vic and The Seagull at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, plays Regan. Isobel Akuwudike, recently seen in The Lady from the Sea at London’s Bridge Theatre, is Cordelia: the daughter whose refusal to exaggerate her love is interpreted by Lear as an absence of it.
Jonathan Slinger returns to the Exchange as Gloucester, whose own catastrophic inability to distinguish loyalty from deception runs alongside Lear’s. Tom Varey plays Edgar, with Paddy Stafford as Edmund and Jason Done as Kent.
The cast also includes Nicholas Karimi, Ed Coleman, Gabin Kongolo, Anwar Russell, Ryan Pope, Grace Jabbari, Jessica Mannion, Harry Clarke and returning Exchange performer Rupert Hill.
Dunster’s adaptation describes a country in which prosperity collapses into conflict and language, identity and meaning begin to fail. That breakdown is central to the play. Once Lear’s authority has been surrendered, the words that once secured his position no longer work. He can issue commands, invoke his title and rage against disobedience, but the world has stopped rearranging itself around him.
The storm outside becomes inseparable from the one within.
Dunster has directed extensively across British theatre, including work for Shakespeare’s Globe, the Young Vic, the National Theatre and the West End. At the Royal Exchange, he will be working inside a space that offers Shakespeare few places to hide.
The theatre’s configuration places audiences around the action, close enough to see political power become domestic cruelty and domestic resentment become national catastrophe. In King Lear, whispered decisions can prove as consequential as battlefield declarations.
The creative team includes set designer Anna Fleischle, costume designer Cat Fuller, lighting designer Lucy Carter, sound designer Holly Khan and movement director Charlotte Broom. Maisie Carter is fight and intimacy director, with Emma Baggott as associate director.
The production arrives during a season in which the Royal Exchange is consciously examining its own history and its relationship with Manchester. A Homecoming celebrates 50 years since the theatre company was founded and brings artists with meaningful connections to the Exchange back into the building.
Threlfall’s return carries real weight. This is not simply a celebrated actor arriving to play one of Shakespeare’s great roles. It is an artist returning to a theatre that helped shape his career, in a play preoccupied with age, memory, belonging and the unsettling distance between the person we were and the person we have become.
There will be crowns, betrayal, cruelty and the complete collapse of civil order.
And if you happen to be attending with a sister, daughter or parent whose recent behaviour has tested the limits of human endurance, the production may provide useful perspective.
However difficult Christmas was, at least nobody divided Britain during the starters.
Where: Royal Exchange Theatre, St Ann’s Square, Manchester
When: 2 October–15 November 2026
Press night: 8 October
Tickets: From £12
Adapted and directed by: Matthew Dunster
Featuring: David Threlfall, Nadine Shah, Lisa Diveney, Isobel Akuwudike and Jonathan Slinger
Header image: David Threlfall
