A POWERHOUSE solo performance of the Bard’s deepest and most moving tragedy will grace the stage in the county town.

King Lear Retold will be performed at Dorchester Corn Exchange on Sunday, October 7 at 8pm.

Debs Newbold, writer-performer and Shakespeare’s Globe storyteller, promises to deliver a moving, funny and deeply felt re-telling of Shakespeare’s King Lear at Dorchester Arts.

On a simple, bare stage using no set script, Debs creates a ‘cinema of the imagination’ which will hold you spellbound.

A story of human frailty and love, King Lear Retold catapults its audiences into the turbulent world of a man who gives up his life’s work and in doing so, loses himself.

Describing her inspiration for retelling Shakespeare, Debs Newbold said: “I came to Shakespeare after many years of avoiding him; he seemed too dense and impenetrable to me.

"It was hearing three extraordinary performances that made me fall in love with him: Mark Rylance’s Richard II and Kathryn Hunter’s Richard III, both at Shakespeare’s Globe, and Max Stafford-Clark’s coruscating production of Macbeth at the Arcola.

"From there I was hooked. Shakespeare seems to see everything that is in us: frailty, strength, love, despair, the overwhelming beauty of being alive and the absolute absurdity of it. The tragic and the comic. It is as if he truly understands us, so it’s a shame that so many of us feel we do not understand him: there is something in his ubiquity that makes him intimidating.

I felt it myself, even while studying him at University. I just didn’t get it. So now I want to help make Shakespeare feel more accessible to those who do not think it is for them. Because it is for them...it is for all of us."

King Lear Retold is said to be Shakespeare shot from the hip: direct, dramatic, and different every night.

*King Lear Retold, Dorchester Corn Exchange, Sunday, October 7, 8pm. Contact Dorchester Arts for tickets.