This rehearsed reading of The Cordelia Dream, by Marina Carr is part of Play It by Ear, a programme of shows for The Everyman stage and available on live audio broadcast.
‘I was the most beautiful thing in your life… And you didn’t know it.’

The Cordelia Dream is a 21st century response to one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. Haunted by her dream of Cordelia and Lear, a woman confronts an elderly man, her lifelong antagonist and rival. During their passionate altercation, he dismisses her success as a composer and demands she makes the ultimate sacrifice: for him to flourish she, his protégée, must be silent.

Five years later, she returns for a final and devastating encounter.

Marina Carr’s tense, impassioned drama uncoils a torrent of confessions, accusations, contritions and blame, as her garrulous protagonists compete, if not for the grail of reconciliation, for the consolation of understanding. The Cordelia Dream lays out another urgent instalment of this unflinching playwright’s exploration of families, their needs and shortcomings, and of the darkness in the human heart.