Lear

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This led Evans to attempt one of the biggest Bedlam shows ever, “ Lear by Edward Bond. The budget was again huge, and the leads were again Merry Macs Andrew Loudon and Jeremy Benstock, and the cast included the cream of ‘E.U.T.C.’ acting talent.

The hype for this production was intense. Evans wrote to every famous person he could think of, inviting them to this particularly savage piece of theatre. Most declined. Leaflets were then distributed, printed with the refusal of Margaret Thatcher, the Princess of Wales and Barry Norman,as a publicity gimmick. Liberal leader David Steel, at that time Rector of Edinburgh University, agreed to come and did. He was shocked by what he saw. Lear involves a postmortem, which was realistically performed, with lots of blood, causing the front row of the audience to be violently ill. The success of the show was thus assured. It was the last show to self out every night at the Bedlam for several years, until Ian Marlee’s production of Bent by Martin Sherman in 1990, another controversial play, this time involving nudity on stage.

In Lear the lighting rig was raised five feet by scaffolding and a hell of a lot of sweat. The Auditorium rake was flattened out and the seating rearranged, to a design by Jane Parker, supervised by John Ashton. This was just one show where radical alterations to the Bedlam were made.

Edinburgh’s Bedlam Theatre p.12