Grzegorz Bral said he's trying to represent the crucial points of Lear's tragedy through small musical poems.
"Song of the Goat" is the literal meaning of the ancient Greek word for tragedy. It's also the name of the theater company from Wroclaw, Poland bringing a new adaptation of "King Lear" to New Haven this weekend.
In Polish, that's "Piesn Kozla."
Grzegorz Bral, the artistic director of the theater company, said he doesn't see "King Lear" so much as a story about a father and his three daughters, but rather a "tragedy without a mother."
"The greatest absence of the play is mother," Bral said. "But I chose 'King Lear' not only for the particular emotional strength of the play. I chose it because it represents some of our most important human emotions. When we get trapped into the world without values, and when we are living in the world without values then the world of our emotions, of our losses, sufferings, becomes very apparent."
Bral said he's trying to represent the crucial points of Lear's tragedy through small musical poems. In "Songs of Lear," actors use music, vibrations, and dance to tell the story. He said this theater style isn't particularly Polish, but more central European.
Bral is especially influenced by old Albanian music. "They have a particular division of the voices when they are singing," he said. "They call voices the one who weaves, the one who gives, the one who takes, and the drone. And also they have different voices who are representing different realms of the world they were living in," like animals, melodies of human emotions, the sound of the universe. "So this is pretty much what we do," he said.
"Songs of Lear" premiered at the fringe festival in Edinburgh in 2012, where it won three awards. The performances this weekend at Yale Repertory's Iseman Theater are part of the "No Boundaries" series, exploring the frontiers of theatrical invention through cutting-edge and thought-provoking performance from around the world.
