Queen Goneril

Directed by Weyni Mengesha
Presented by Soul Pepper Theatre
Playwright by Erin Shields
Featuring Breton Lalama, Damien Atkins, Helen Belay, Jordan Pettle, Jonathon Young, Oliver Dennis, Nancy Palk, Philip Riccio, Sheldon Elter, Vanessa Sears, Virgilia Griffith

  • Set: Ken Mackenzie
    Lights: Kimberly Purtell
    Costumes: Judith Bowden
    Sound: Thomas Ryder Payne
    Assistant Director and Intimacy Choreographer: Aria Evans, Dramaturg: Guillermo Verdecchia, Stage Manager: Robert Harding,

THE AWARDS

3 Dora Award Nominations including including Best Direction by Weyni Mengesha

Dora Award winner Vanessa Sears for Outstanding Performance in a Featured Role

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Lear’s daughter in a man’s world.

Set seven years before Shakespeare's legendary play King Lear, Queen Goneril is seen through the eyes of his three daughters fighting a patriarchal system at odds with their aspirations. In Goneril we find a natural-born leader, a boundary pusher and a reluctant peacekeeper trying to survive and find her voice in her father’s kingdom. But how can she when no one is listening? Queen Goneril brings the background into focus, and a previously deafening silence to an irresistible crescendo.

World Premiere

 

THE REVIEWS

Awe-inspiring and mesmerizing

Broadway World

 

Soulpepper’s Electrifying Queen Goneril [and apocalyptic King Lear] create a conversation worth having

Sesa Arts Magazine

 

Powerful performances fill the stage and the plot unspools with horror after horror, occasionally leavened with humour

My Gay Toronto

Delicious Plot Twists

The Globe and Mail

 

It is intense theatre enriched by a stunning production directed expertly by Weyni Mengesha at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre. This is theatre that challenges our thinking and awakens our spirits as all really important theatre should.

The Hamilton Spectator

 

Queen Goneril is a smart, deeply thought feminist view of how Goneril, King Lear’s eldest daughter, keeps her own identity, advocates for herself and finds a place in that world, while navigating the world of powerful men who run things.

The Slotkin Letter

Queen Goneril is exhilarating.

Weyni Mengesha’s majestic, passionate production for Soulpepper is playing in repertory with King Lear.

Istvan Dugalin, Theatre Reviewer

 

Queen Goneril had this exceptional way of feeling old and new at the same time; while clearly set in days gone by, the lens through which these characters are being viewed and the ways they expressed themselves was decidedly modern and handled with great care and expertise.

A View from the Box

 

A bold and definitive recrafting

Times Square Chronicles

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