DIRECTING
FOOLISH MORTALS: A Festival of Shakespeare - DGP, Lantern Theatre - 2016
“Oh, what fools these mortals be”
In March 2016, Foolish Mortals was produced as part of Sheffield’s Lantern Theatre’s Shakespeare festival to celebrate 400 years of his work. Men and Women have swapped their roles, all the conventional boundaries that usually define them have been stripped away, the hunt is on for the mortal beneath. It’s Life lived in five acts: the storm of birth, disobedient children, disappointing parents, lust, the manacle of love, betrayal, so many hours, notable cowards, endless liars, promise-breakers, lascivious turtles, sour sweet music, murder, grief, crownless kings, debaucherous youth, broken time, hope, discontented winters, summer-birds, guilt, loss, hags, enchantresses, spotted and inconstant men, monsters, rascals, minute thoughts, maidens, foul wrinkled witches, fools all, ever striving to claw out an existence in spite of the numbering clock.
When I was preparing to direct this festival, I came across a story about Maya Angelou: When Angelou was a young black girl growing up in the Jim Crow American South, she read every book in the tiny library of Stamps, Arkansas. She thought that the author of Sonnet 29 must have been a black girl because its solemn words expressed so fiercely what she—an outcast, the victim of racism, destitution, and childhood sexual abuse, crying out alone before a deaf heaven—felt inside. That’s the genius of Shakespeare: that he can make you feel like he’s speaking from your soul. That a little black girl in America, can mistake an old, white dude who’s been dead for more than three centuries on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean for herself.
That’s what we’ve explored in Foolish Mortals: the relentless passage of Time and the core of human experience, beyond traditional concepts of age, physical type or gender.
Each of the five acts explores a different stage of Life: Birth, Growing Up, Adulthood, Decline and Death in monologue mash-ups, scenes and original montages created with the cast.
Foolish Mortals Trailer
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