Claire conceived Kong Lear after a conversation with her friend Tony whilst making a ‘Freudian slip’; speaking the words Kong Lear rather than King Lear, as she was critically discussing these patriarchal subjects (Kong and Lear), as problematic presences within culture.
Claire was also drawn to these figures personally because of a profound dream she had as a child where a gorilla came to her home, knocked on the door and carried her away. Years later she was obsessively drawn to witnessing Kathryn Hunter play King Lear at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre in the 1990s, because she watched it nightly on repeat, whilst working front of house. Here, Claire was mesmerised by Hunter’s extraordinary live performance on stage, the first woman to perform King Lear, in mainstream theatre.
This slip, and the lasting residue of Claire’s dream coupled with the affecting memory of Hunter, 10 years later, give rise to a concept, a story and a dramaturgy, developing into a Super 8mm film entitled Kong Lear (2012). The film is a portrait of the two fictional figures merged; King Kong and King Lear but as a woman who comes with her own story. Claire collaborated with the artist Gary Winters to make the film and they recycled, to pastiche some of the texts and images from Peter Brook’s existential film King Lear (1971), and Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s film King Kong (1933), where texts mutated from the slip with the introduction of Sigmund Freud into the mix, another heavyweight. The complexities of Kong Lear’s persona; a woman embodying these male figures but on her terms, through her own mischievous, melancholic, and silent presence on screen are expressed using inter-titles.
City sites of York and New York are featured in the film as dream imagery mixed with documented footage from a walking art performance, where Kong Lear finds herself searching for the contents of Lear’s mind whilst looking for a phallic object to climb.
Kong Lear toured to the Freud Museum, London, and spawned several international performance writing projects for the city, the gallery, the museum and a boxed archive. There is an interview with the artists involved in the project in the book; Embodying the Dead; Writing, Playing, Performing, in the chapter; The Dead Ghost.
Now, for the first time ever, the full Super 8mm film exists online as an archived resource, to celebrate this now, sleeping persona.
