Dan Colley
Country: Ireland
Dublin Theatre Festival
Biography
Dan Colley is a theatre and film maker with a particular focus on devised ensemble work, adaptation and theatre for young audiences. Dan’s creative practice involves long periods of research and development with key collaborators from an early stage. Dan is interested in the slipperiness of realities and form.
His play LOST LEAR won the Scotsman Fringe First award at Edinburgh 2025, where it was presented at Traverse Theatre. Premiering at Dublin Theatre Festival in 2022, it has since toured to the US, UK and New Zealand and has been described as « an astonishing piece of theatre » by the Financial Times.
His adaptation of A VERY OLD MAN WITH ENORMOUS WINGS by Gabriel García Márquez premiered in 2019 and was nominated for two Irish Times Theatre Awards and four Dublin Fringe Awards, including ‘Best Production’. It has since had over 200 performances and been presented in London’s Unicorn Theatre, Scotland’s Imaginate Festival and the Sydney Opera House.
Portfolio & Latest Theatre Performances :
Full portfolio https://www.dancolley.com/
LOST LEAR
Concept of the Performance:
LOST LEAR ; A moving and darkly comic remix of Shakespeare’s play told from the point of view of Joy, a person with dementia, who is living in an old memory of rehearsing King Lear.
Joy’s delicately maintained reality is upended by the arrival of her estranged son who,
being cast by her carers as Cordelia, must find a way to speak his piece from within the limited role he’s given. Using projection, live video, green screen and puppetry we represent her porous realities as she jumps between memories of her life, and scenes from ‘King Lear’, in ways that allow those stories to echo and reveal each other.
Lost Lear is a meditation on theatre, artifice and the possibility of communicating across the chasms between us. It’s about the chaos of the storm and how that can be the only thing that makes sense.
Artistic Statement
My grandmother lived in a care home for people with dementia. In that home there was a section of corridor made to look like a streetscape from a mid-century Irish village. There were the facades of a post office, a shop and a hairdresser, with doors that didn’t open and windows you couldn’t see into. It was like a film set.
In the dementia care home that my grandmother lived in, in one of the corridors, there was a row of fake shop fronts designed to look like an early 20th centurey Irish streetscape. They were just facades with doors that didn’t open and windows painted on. This, I discovered, is part of a movement of care practice intended to affirm the realities of people with memory loss. Some care practices prescribe identifying an old, happy memory of the persone, and then recreating that scene for them over and over, using improvisational performances, with props and costume, and where anyone coming into contact with the person with dementia, has to assume some role in this old life, no matter who they really are. As I looked at the corridor of obviously fake shop fronts that someone thought would be comforting to my grandmother, I wondered; how do any of us talk to each other?
This, I discovered, is part of a whole movement of care
Trailer
