King Lear is a play about the disintegration of a world where blindness is sight and madness is wisdom. A play that conveys to us explosive revelations on love, power and (individual and social) justice. At the start, Lear believes that power is limitless, and so divides it among his three daughters. But he ends up discovering that suffering is the only thing that is truly limitless, something that deeply strikes nearly all of us, for the pains of the conflict between parents and children are inevitably universal. It is said, and rightly so, that in King Lear certain human wrecks manage to recover their humanity. But that recovery does not imply redemption, it just means that they refuse to accept suffering, torture and death. When Lear enters, bearing Cordelia dead in his arms, someone noticed that even Shakespeare seems to fall silent before this death, and the babblings of a mad old man will have to do as the eulogy of his “loved” yet “forsaken” daughter.

Actor Jorge Pinto is Lear, after having played Claudius in 2002 staging of Hamlet by Ricardo Pais. In the year of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Ensemble Company returns to an author who writes of a time “when madmen lead the blind,” now in the company of stage director Rogério de Carvalho, another wise and restless master.