“For as long as the words are in your mouth, you are their master.
Once they are spoken, you are their slave.”
(Babylonian Talmud)
In the desert of generations: King Lear and the ruin of love as possession, while ALL and NOTHING are the recurring concepts.
There is a threshold beyond which the flesh of time falls apart. That is where Shakespeare places Lear — not merely as a tragedy of declining authority, but as the final disintegration of the invisible pact between those who generate and those who inherit. It is not only a matter of a family, a kingdom, three daughters, or an aging king: it is all of humanity that shatters in the mirror of deformed relationships, where love becomes currency and identity a void to be filled with power.
This is no longer simply about staging Shakespeare, but interrogating him. Waiting for King Lear is not a documentary, but a traversal, a meditative and hallucinatory act in which Alessandro Preziosi — director, actor, and restless witness — immerses himself in an operation that dissolves the boundaries between theatre, art, and cinema, attempting to embody a form of incarnate thought.
Lear, a worn figure of a sovereign attempting to retire while demanding to remain central, begins not as a wise man, but as one who believes he can measure love through the theatrics of words. His daughters are summoned to a parody of affection where voice is test, praise is condition, and silence — like Cordelia’s — is the ultimate crime. The entire drama is nested in this first scene: Lear wishes to give away what he does not know how to relinquish, demands love while failing to recognize its true form, and seeks devotion while denying reciprocity.
Lear’s specter lingers in the folds of a production that does not seek fidelity, but resonance. The text is no longer the center, but an echo. The work is built along a dreamlike path that focuses not on the scene itself, but on the space that precedes and exceeds it: the rehearsals, the voids, the glances, the falls. Venice — a multiple city, suspended between memory and oblivion — hosts this aesthetic pilgrimage, becoming itself a stage and a distorting mirror: the New Prisons, the Arsenal, the Doge’s Palace, the Cini Foundation, liminal places where identity shatters and recomposes.
Preziosi does not direct: he listens, traverses, disintegrates within the collective ritual of performance. The King Lear that takes form is the reflection of a collapse that is mental before it is narrative: a field of ruins where fathers and sons, actors and characters, truths and fictions chase each other without ever truly touching. It is within this rupture that the radical gesture of Michelangelo Pistoletto takes root.
But the words spoken by Goneril and Regan are not affection — they are investments. The old man, perceived as an obstacle to autonomy and wealth, is flattered, deceived, and then expelled. The daughters act according to a logic of calculation, favoring gain over bond, function over feeling. Cordelia, who refuses to lie — not out of pride, but integrity — is punished. Sincerity has no market: the heart that refuses to bend to appearances is excluded, and in her “nothing” lies a radical refusal of the symbolic order Lear seeks to uphold.
Pistoletto’s installations do not embellish, do not illustrate: they are slits in reality, mirror-like portals through which the theatrical work dissolves into visual questioning. Theatre becomes plastic art, word becomes matter, time folds. A long conversation with the artist — master of reflection on duality and intergenerational responsibility — opens further abysses: what does it mean to inherit? What remains of us in those who come after? How is truth transmitted if language is already a fracture?
"If I don’t think, I see nothing in particular; only if I think, I stop it and it gains meaning."
(M. Pistoletto)
Lear does not understand. He cannot. Because he doesn’t listen. Because for him, love is an echo of his own power — not a gift, but a reflection. Thus, having cast Cordelia out and become an unwelcome burden to those who got what they wanted, Lear wanders into the storm — the outward symbol of his inner disaster. He has not gone mad from pain, but from the impossibility of continuing to believe in the narrative of his role. Without a kingdom, without love, without answers, he discovers the nothingness that had upheld him. The Fool — a marginal, conscious being — is the only one who still speaks to him as a man, not a title.
Michelangelo, too, has three daughters, like Lear, and his Demopraxy will determine their inheritances and recognitions: a kingdom with which to unburden oneself to seriously confront the theme of death. Through this hybrid experience, which rejects mere documentation in favor of a fragmented liturgy, Waiting for King Lear proposes a meditation on being-exposed: to the stage, to the other, to loss.
“That mutual forgiveness which we are all, whether we like it or not, obliged to grant our parents.”
Meanwhile, another father figure, Gloucester, is torn apart by the same tragic matter. His illegitimate son, Edmund, is the spokesman of a resentful modernity, fueled by injustice and thirsty for revenge. He does not seek love: he seeks space. He does not claim identity, but position. In him, inheritance becomes war, and blood an accident justifying all manipulation. Truth is distorted, the loyalty of Edgar (the legitimate son) slandered, and Gloucester’s blindness — first symbolic — becomes real. But only in darkness does he begin to see.
Lear is no longer merely a character: he is a shared void, an interior threshold, an experience that corrodes certainty and opens to questioning. A cinema that becomes ethical inquiry, a dramaturgy surviving through the gesture that deconstructs it.
Lear wanders the labyrinth he locked himself in, savoring the fruits of his madness, “because only when everything is lost can one see life clearly… there is no future without misfortune.”
Tragedy is never a singular event, but a recurring pattern. No one is steady: every bond is transitory, every loyalty revocable. At its core, King Lear recounts the implosion of trust. The old cannot let go, for fear of worthlessness without what they own. The young do not want to wait, fearing life will pass them by. And so, the intergenerational pact breaks.
The father is a tyrant who demands adoration. The children, shattered mirrors of his own brutality, respond with strategy or silence. In both cases, love becomes impossible. And so one might wonder if this is the tragedy of unchosen love — of family as destiny rather than choice — of relationships that begin in blood and end in hatred, simply because we are incapable of giving or receiving unless on our own terms.
“Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Ride more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest,
Set less than thou throwest,
Leave thy drink and thy whore,
And keep in-a-door,
And thou shalt have more
Than two tens to a score.”
(The Fool)
It is the abyss of every affective system where freedom is denied in the name of duty, and duty becomes violence. If Hamlet is the tragedy of thought that paralyzes action, Macbeth that of desire that corrupts, Othello that of passion that blinds, then King Lear is the tragedy of incommunicability between those who have already lived and those who are yet to live. Not a generational conflict, but a rupture in time itself, in which past and future refuse to meet.
And perhaps that is why this drama, though grand, at times feels excessive. Not in form — which is harshly austere, without grace — but in the density of disaster. Everyone deceives, everyone dies, everything disintegrates. Only one question remains: Is it possible to love without domination? To let go without demanding? To inherit without destroying?
If we cannot answer, then all we can do is wait for King Lear, naked in the storm, screaming into the wind his lament as a man who wanted everything and failed to see anything.
“Do you know why the nose sits between the eyes?
Because what you don’t sniff out, you discover with your sight.”
(The Fool)
