13 Dennis Kelly’s The Gods Weep at the Royal Shakespeare Company
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Catriona Fallow
Abstract
This chapter focuses on Dennis Kelly’s work with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in order to explore how canonised and contemporary playwriting practices intersect with the work of this playwright and this company. Now largely overshadowed by the success of the multi-award-winning Matilda the Musical (2010), this chapter considers Kelly’s first work for the RSC, The Gods Weep (2010), in order to interrogate the role of history and canonicity in Kelly’s praxis. In part a response to Shakespeare’s King Lear, The Gods Weep displays a complex, often ambivalent, relationship to its source material. In contrast to other RSC works that respond directly to a specific source such as Mark Ravenhill’s Candide (2013) and Anders Lustgarten’s The Seven Acts of Mercy (2016), I argue that it is precisely this ambivalence towards Shakespeare that frustrates critical opinion and challenges the ideology of reciprocity between past and present that continues to frame the work of contemporary writers like Kelly at the RSC.
Abstract
This chapter focuses on Dennis Kelly’s work with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in order to explore how canonised and contemporary playwriting practices intersect with the work of this playwright and this company. Now largely overshadowed by the success of the multi-award-winning Matilda the Musical (2010), this chapter considers Kelly’s first work for the RSC, The Gods Weep (2010), in order to interrogate the role of history and canonicity in Kelly’s praxis. In part a response to Shakespeare’s King Lear, The Gods Weep displays a complex, often ambivalent, relationship to its source material. In contrast to other RSC works that respond directly to a specific source such as Mark Ravenhill’s Candide (2013) and Anders Lustgarten’s The Seven Acts of Mercy (2016), I argue that it is precisely this ambivalence towards Shakespeare that frustrates critical opinion and challenges the ideology of reciprocity between past and present that continues to frame the work of contemporary writers like Kelly at the RSC.
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of illustrations vii
- Notes on contributors viii
- A foreword xii
- Introduction 1
- I Incubation 19
- 1 DNA in the classroom 21
- 2 Suspended in time and place 39
- 3 ‘I’ll teach you a thing or two’ 55
- II Antibodies 71
- 4 ‘Are you sick, yet? / Are you disgusted, yet?’ 73
- 5 Utopia 90
- 6 Beautiful doom 105
- 7 Subjectivity in Dennis Kelly’s early drama 118
- III False positives 135
- 8 ‘I just want it to be your words’ 137
- 9 ‘What is the difference between made up and real?’ 152
- 10 ‘What else isn’t true?’, or, Dennis Kelly’s expressionism 170
- 11 Atopia 184
- IV Variants 201
- 12 ‘Now look, are you going to tell me a story or not?’ 203
- 13 Dennis Kelly’s The Gods Weep at the Royal Shakespeare Company 217
- 14 Performing stories, engaging audiences 233
- Conclusion 251
- Index 264
- Plates 267
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of illustrations vii
- Notes on contributors viii
- A foreword xii
- Introduction 1
- I Incubation 19
- 1 DNA in the classroom 21
- 2 Suspended in time and place 39
- 3 ‘I’ll teach you a thing or two’ 55
- II Antibodies 71
- 4 ‘Are you sick, yet? / Are you disgusted, yet?’ 73
- 5 Utopia 90
- 6 Beautiful doom 105
- 7 Subjectivity in Dennis Kelly’s early drama 118
- III False positives 135
- 8 ‘I just want it to be your words’ 137
- 9 ‘What is the difference between made up and real?’ 152
- 10 ‘What else isn’t true?’, or, Dennis Kelly’s expressionism 170
- 11 Atopia 184
- IV Variants 201
- 12 ‘Now look, are you going to tell me a story or not?’ 203
- 13 Dennis Kelly’s The Gods Weep at the Royal Shakespeare Company 217
- 14 Performing stories, engaging audiences 233
- Conclusion 251
- Index 264
- Plates 267
