«Fate led me back to King Lear, even though I had decided not to do it. Clearly Giorgio Strehler had heard me, and set this trap for me»: fifty years on from the debut of the legendary play produced by the Piccolo, Gabriele Lavia returns to William Shakespeare’s masterpiece. In 1972 he played Edgar, but this time he is in the lead role, the elderly sovereign who chooses to divide his kingdom between his three daughters on the basis of the love they declare for him. 
It is, as Lavia states, a story of loss: loss of reason, of kingdom and of family ties. «All that remains is to brave the storm. However, Lear’s storm exists in his mind. The storm of the mind of humanity, the death of the man who has abandoned his very existence. Lear rides it out to the end, to the ultimate sorrow when, as he holds the lifeless body of his daughter Cordelia in his arms, he shouts out to the audience: "O, you are men of stones: Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so that heaven's vault should crack...". In this final stroke of genius, Shakespeare-Lear summons the cries and the tears of the entire audience, as though they were the ideal Choir for the final scene of his masterpiece. The cries and tears that lie within the silence of the spectators. A silence that is a cry of despair».