Before The Daughters of Lear at Deer and Rabbits Theatre begins, director and co-writer Joseph Sherlock welcomes everyone personally with a drink and a reassurance: you do not need to know King Lear to follow tonight’s performance. “Every seat is a good seat,” he says warmly, encouraging the audience to lean into the closeness of the space rather than fear it.
That intimacy becomes central to the experience itself. Deer and Rabbits Theatre — the home of Københavns Shakespeare Kompagni — was built largely by hand over the past three years, transforming an empty basement into a unique storytelling space designed specifically for this kind of emotionally immediate experience. You can still smell the freshly cut wood of the set, also designed by Sherlock. The room carries the texture of something personal and deeply cared for; less like attending a traditional Shakespeare adaptation and more like being invited onto a film set — close enough to catch every flicker of tension, every loaded silence, every calculation.
For anyone whose memory of King Lear is buried somewhere in a high school English classroom, the original story follows an aging king who decides to divide his kingdom between his three daughters based on how passionately they declare their love for him. When his youngest daughter, Cordelia, refuses to flatter him performatively, Lear banishes her — setting into motion a tragedy shaped by pride, manipulation, political instability, and the collapse of familial trust.
The Daughters of Lear, written by Joseph Sherlock and Sarah Dahl Hasselgren, unfolds in the tense, private spaces surrounding Shakespeare’s tragedy rather than retelling it directly. The play imagines the inner lives of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia — three sisters divided not only by age and temperament, but by their vastly different experiences of the same father.
On the balcony outside the throne room, the sisters gather after learning that Lear intends to divide the kingdom and crown them queens. The premise sounds celebratory at first — until the uncertainty beneath it begins to emerge. Is Lear’s decision generosity, madness, or something far more dangerous? Before they are summoned inside, the sisters must decide how to respond, though they are operating from profoundly different understandings of the man who raised them. A united front quickly begins to fracture. Each daughter is left confronting the same impossible question: do you protect yourself, or risk everything for each other? What emerges is not simply a reinterpretation of King Lear, but a contemporary meditation on conditional love, family loyalty, survival, and the quiet calculations demanded by power. Even for audiences who don’t know Shakespeare particularly well, the stakes feel high and deeply relevant.
Survival in the Shadow of Power
The play opens in near silence with a pacing Goneril, establishing an atmosphere of suspense that never fully dissipates. Performed by Christina Hildebrandt alongside Sarah Dahl Hasselgren as Regan and Josephine Due Feit as Cordelia, the trio moves with remarkable precision and emotional intensity. The language pays homage to Shakespeare while remaining modern and accessible, full of sharp one-liners. Speaking about their father, one daughter observes: “He hunts not to eat but for the prey to know it is hunted.” Elsewhere, Goneril dryly references the “conversations of wives of important men,” a line that carries unmistakable political resonance.
Though King Lear never steps onstage, his presence permeates the plot. The play captures the destabilizing force of megalomaniac rulers and how everyone around them is forced into constant reaction: strategizing, appeasing, maneuvering – which is eerily familiar in today’s fraught political climate. Power seeps into private relationships, sisterhood, intimacy, and self-preservation.
What makes The Daughters of Lear so compelling is the way it reframes Goneril in particular. Traditionally flattened into ambition and cruelty, here she becomes something far more complicated: a woman seasoned by years of deftly managing chaos behind the scenes. Beneath her sharpness sits exhaustion — and a brutal understanding of how power functions. “Kindness and strategy live in different countries,” she remarks at one point. Slowly, throughout the play, Goneril begins removing the wool from over Cordelia’s eyes. Cordelia, often positioned as Shakespeare’s moral center, appears here less naïve than protected — still clinging to the belief that goodness will ultimately prevail. “There is no way to move through this love except honesty,” she insists.
One of the evening’s most affecting moments arrives when Cordelia returns wearing a torn dress, visibly altered by the world she has encountered beyond the idealism she once clung to. The atmosphere in the room shifted almost instantly. In such an intimate theatre, there is nowhere for either actor or audience to hide. You watch faces fall. You see breathing shift.
Costumes by Sarah Dahl Hasselgren reinforce this balance beautifully: period-inspired without feeling museum-like, grounding the production in Shakespearean texture while allowing the emotional stakes to feel pressing and alive. The result is a play that remains accessible even for audience members who might normally feel intimidated by Shakespeare’s language or legacy.
Why The Daughters of Lear Feels So Urgent Now
What lingers most after leaving Deer and Rabbits is how human the sisters feel. The Daughters of Lear refuses to reduce them to symbols of virtue or corruption. Instead, the production treats each daughter as a different response to power, fear, and love. The sibling dynamic feels less like a literary exercise and more like watching three people navigate a family system that shaped them long before this particular story begins.
That nuance is what makes the production resonate so strongly now. Across politics and public life, many people are reckoning with systems built around spectacle, ego, and instability. The Daughters of Lear asks what it costs to remain kind, honest, or human inside. It understands that the people orbiting powerful men often become experts in survival.
As the final installment in Københavns Shakespeare Kompagni’s “Patriarch Trilogy,” the production shows care and enthusiasm that extend beyond performance itself — a trust that audiences are willing to sit with ambiguity and emotional complexity without everything needing to be explained outright. In the end, the production succeeds not by superficially modernizing Shakespeare, but by unfolding the emotional wrinkles hidden within the text — revealing how urgently relevant these daughters still are.
See The Daughters of Lear
The Daughters of Lear is running at Deer and Rabbits Theatre in Copenhagen until 30 May. Tickets and show information are available via Teaterbilletter.dk.
