William Shakespeare’s King Lear, directed by Japanese theatre director Tadashi Suzuki, will make its first Jakarta appearance at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta on 16 and 17 September 2026 at 8pm. Led by Indonesian actor Jamaluddin Latif in the title role, the production brings performers from eight countries into Suzuki’s stark reworking of Shakespeare’s ageing king, placing questions of power, memory and family inside the confines of an elderly care facility.
Suzuki first created his version of King Lear with Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) in 1984, and the work has remained part of the company’s repertoire for decades. Shakespeare’s familiar catastrophe begins with a king dividing his realm between his daughters. Goneril and Regan win his favour with extravagant declarations of love, while Cordelia refuses the performance and is banished. The decision soon leaves Lear without his throne, his authority and eventually his grip on reality.
Suzuki relocates that collapse from a royal court to a hospital or elderly care setting. Lear inhabits a space in which memory, reality and hallucination begin to overlap. His former kingdom can appear as recollection, his daughters’ betrayal as trauma and Shakespeare’s storm as turmoil moving through an ageing body and mind. The crowns and declarations remain part of the story, but the production keeps returning to something much more physical in the form of an old man losing one certainty after another.
That physicality is central to Suzuki’s theatre, his Suzuki Method of Actor Training works through the feet, centre of gravity, breath, voice, concentration and the performer’s relationship with the stage. In King Lear, controlled movement and extended stillness carry much of the drama. As Lear loses his followers, home and family, the authority once expressed through his body begins to disappear too.
For the Jakarta production, Latif inherits a role previously performed for many years by the late German actor Goetz Argus. Latif has trained extensively in the Suzuki Method and taken part in productions and training programmes with SCOT and Bumi Purnati Indonesia. He is joined by Ellen Lauren of the United States as Goneril, Nana Tatishvili of Russia as Regan and Chilean actor Antonina Isidora Valderrama Saez as Cordelia, alongside performers from Japan, South Korea, Italy, China and Indonesia.
The production also continues a collaboration between SCOT, Bumi Purnati Indonesia and The Japan Foundation that dates to 2015. Indonesian performers have trained and worked in Toga Village in Japan, while previous collaborations have included Dionysus, presented at the Singapore International Festival of Arts and the Theatre Olympics in 2019, and Electra, performed with SCOT actors in Japan in 2022. Dionysus later returned to Gedung Kesenian Jakarta in 2023.
This time, the exchange puts an Indonesian actor at the centre of one of Suzuki’s long-running productions. The cast may arrive with different languages and theatrical backgrounds, but the production asks them to meet through movement, voice and tightly controlled stage work. For a play written more than four centuries ago, its catalogue of ageing, family resentment, pride and regret requires little updating.
King Lear runs for approximately one hour and 40 minutes without an interval. A Suzuki Method of Actor Training workshop will also take place on 17 September from 10am to noon at Teater Wahyu Sihombing, Taman Ismail Marzuki.
To purchase the tickets, contact Puteri at +62 877 8321 4733 or Dienary at +62 821 3017 9139.
