Yaël Farber interview: King Lear – Almeida (The Times)

From Mies Julie to Macbeth, the South African director’s productions seethe with paranoia and sensuality. Now, she takes on King Lear

Two years after she directed Saoirse Ronan and James McArdle in Macbeth, Yaël Farber is back at the same theatre for an even gloomier Shakespeare play. It is not a job this South African director takes lightly. “King Lear is kind of an appointment with mortality,” she says. “You have to have lived. It’s not something I would have dared in my thirties.”