Now... A Queen Lear

Prior to joining the cast of MTC's Queen Lear, David Paterson, who's playing Edmund (the Bastard), had only seen Lear on stage once – over ten years ago, with Barry Otto in the titular role. “I think it was the first time I ever cried in the theatre,” he says. “It's such a dark and affecting play. It's huge in its themes but it still manages to poke at those very fragile parts of us.”

Paterson, who made his MTC debut earlier this season in Tribes, is tackling the role of Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester and the play's principal antagonist. Desperate to become Earl in his own right, his actions contribute to the ultimately tragic outcome. He's easy to hate, which is why Paterson has had to try to understand him. “He's always called 'Edmund the Bastard' and you can take that either way, obviously,” he says. “It's really easy to judge your character. If you're looking at them from an objective point of view, it's easy to go, 'Oh yeah, they're an arsehole.' But you have to kind of climb into that – nobody goes around thinking, 'Oh, I'm such a bad person.' They feel justified in what they do, so you have to look at them from that perspective.”

Queen Lear has asked a particularly heightened amount of psychological engagement from its cast. While the gender reversal of the main character has been nothing short of a delight for all involved – “It's been wonderful to watch someone as truly incredible as [Robyn Nevin] take this on,” says Paterson – it does require the cast to ask how their characters would feel about a queen, rather than a king. “A lot of the rehearsal time is spent in debate, especially when it comes to interpretation,” explains Paterson. “When you're surrounded by that many clever minds, the conversation can get quite exciting. There are a lot of amazing ideas floating around.”

Aside from Robyn Nevin herself, the transformation of King Lear to a Queen has the strongest effect on Alexandra Schepisi's performance as Cordelia, the favoured daughter whose ineloquent expressions of familial love provide the catalyst for the play's downward spiral of events. “A mother-daughter relationship is very delicate,” says Schepisi. “There's a much finer line to tread than with a father-daughter relationship.” In understanding Cordelia, Schepisi has explored the idea of a mother who is both loving and, in her professional life, terrifying. “[Queen Lear] is a vicious and fearful woman… that [Cordelia] has always been quite scared of, despite knowing comfortably that she was the favourite.”

While many productions have played Cordelia as the perfect daughter, a wronged Cinderella figure, MTC's Queen Lear is rejecting that concept in favour of a more complex reading. “We're not playing it that simply,” says Schepisi. “Cordelia is honest, but not perfect. There's nobody perfect in this play. Although she speaks the truth, she certainly could have handled herself better.”

Lear's daughters will take on a strange twist in Queen Lear: the three actresses will share the role of The Fool. “It's kind of been reconceived so that it's not a human being, as it's written, but as an imaginative friend of Queen Lear – it's kind of the niggling voice of reason, or her subconscious talking to her,” explains Schepisi. “It's a very discreet, personal relationship that she has with The Fool, that nobody else on stage is privy to.”

Schepisi, who has previously appeared in MTC's A Doll's House and Ray's Tempest, loves working on Queen Lear, partly because of the complex, dark world created by Shakespeare's text. “[The characters] live in a dangerous and quite violent world, where people can be violent physically and psychologically, and it's never safe,” she says. “Nobody's ever safe.”

Queen Lear runs from Thursday 12 July until Saturday 18 August.