Over the course of his long artistic career, Glauco Mauri has played twenty-four Shakespearean characters. Directed by Andrea Baracco, this is his third time performing King Lear, the most Titanic of the Bard’s tragedies, a drama that examines the love between a father and son, and madness.

“Here I am again, for the third time, at my venerable age, playing Lear - he says -. I have never felt to be worthy of this sublime melting pot of humanity. In this difficult task of mine, I am convinced that trying to play Lear demand not only the techniques developed over time, but also the human great richness that I have gained over years of, at times wearing, study. I can only hope that the magical setting of the stage can come to the aid of our limitations. What is more poetically suited to representing life than a stage? In King Lear, life itself needs to become theatre in order to find expression”.

According to the director: “The thing that has always struck me about this tragedy, one of the darkest and, in some ways, the most enigmatic of those of the English writer, is that beneath this darkness, something of incredible brightness seems to shine, and it is this light, smothered by the shadows, that renders it all so fascinating. Unworthy fathers and inept children, unworthy fathers that have raised inept children, their mothers absent and excluded from the drama. None of the characters are capable of reigning, of taking power. None of them appear to be of suitable stature, no head seems to be the right size for the crown, either due to excess, as is the case of Lear, or for shortcomings, as is the case with all the others. In this universe created by Shakespeare, they are all giants or dwarves”.