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Kneehigh Anthology: Volume 1: The Bacchae, The Wooden Frock, The Red Shoes
Kneehigh Theatre Company now finds itself celebrated as one of Britain’s most exciting theatre companies. This collection contains the performance texts of four of their most recent and highly acclaimed shows. Contains various forewords which offer unique insight into Kneehigh’s approach to making theatre, revealing how a script can emerge from a collaborative devising process.
- GenresTheatre
208 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2006
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About the author
Kneehigh Theatre Company
3 books4 followersKneehigh Theatre is an international touring theatre company founded by Mike Shepherd and based in Cornwall, England. The company are based in barns on the southern Cornish coast.
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December 5, 2021
Tristan & Yseult: I know Kneehigh was supposed to be a really innovative and interesting theatre company, and I kind of get the sense that came across more in performance than on the page. This is a reasonably interesting adaptation of the Tristan and Yseult legend, but I'm not sure I see what about the company had people so excited.
Thematically, this play does take on a lot of different perspectives about love. There is the love triangle between Tristan and Yseult and King Mark--Mark has sent Tristan to Ireland to get Yseult for him, but Tristan and Yseult fall in love, then Yseult falls in love with Mark when they arrive back in Cornwall. Mark vacillates between whether it's better to rule with the heart or the head. Focin loves Mark (it's not clear whether this is just deep loyalty to his king or a romantic love, but that seems like a reasonable reading given his jealousy of Tristan gaining Mark's favor and his attempt to destroy Tristan and Yseult by revealing the affair). And the play is metatheatrically framed by the Loveless, who draw our attention directly to this central theme.
https://youtu.be/waub9QOae9A
The Bacchae: According to the introduction to this play, it was meant to be an iconoclastic take on Euripides' ancient Greek play, which is surprisingly hard to do considering that Euripides himself was pretty iconoclastic--especially in this play, and especially as regards gender roles and performances. And while having the Bacchants as a group of men in tutus is subversive from a modern perspectives on gender, it would actually probably be quite appropriate for Euripides. Not that I'm saying this play was an ideological failure, because I actually think it's quite good. But I would argue that rather than knocking down Euripides, this play uses Euripides to knock down (1) contemporary gender roles and religious fanaticism, and (2) the image of Euripides as a white-marble-toga-wearing figure of "high culture."
The other thing about this version is that, while it does generally follow Euripides' version (with a few modernizations, especially the incorporation of rap, contemporary club music, etc.), it makes some motivations more overt than Euripides does. For instance, early in the play, Dionysus directly announces to the audience--Kneehigh doesn't seem to believe in a fourth wall--that he is going to destroy Agave because she doubted that his mother Semele was actually impregnated by Zeus. In Euripides I feel like there is more ambiguity about whether or not Agave and Pentheus could have avoided their fates, or whether they were doomed and it was out of their control to change anything. To me this is an important difference, because the ambiguity allows for the tension of tragedy as such, whereas when Dionysus is overtly and unambiguously presented as seeking revenge, it elides the question of fate to a certain extent.
https://youtu.be/OPFmMIOJYiU
The Wooden Frock: This play is nuts, but I think the original fairy tale it's based on is nuts, so Kneehigh has taken a pretty bizarre story and presented it through their own bizarre production process. Basically, the play opens on a happy royal family (we're told they're super happy, but we don't really see them doing much happy stuff). The mother persuades the father that if she dies, he will marry whomever her ring fits. She suddenly (and for no apparent reason other than plot necessity) dies, and the king tries the ring on a bunch of cast and audience members' fingers, but none fit. Finally, their daughter Mary--whose age isn't clear, but she kind of seems like a child, like of roughly ten or twelve, at least based on the fact that she's got a nurse who puts her to bed after a story, etc.--is playing with the dead queen's clothes and she puts the ring on. When her dad--yes, her dad--sees her wearing the ring he's immediately like, "Let's do some smooching because your dead mom wants me to marry you, my daughter." And she's like, "Umm, wtf?" Then the nurse comes up with a plan to kill some time by having Mary ask for a series of impossible to find dresses as a precondition for the marriage, though Ronald (the pigeon keeper) seems to find the dresses with minimal difficulty. While this is going on, the nurse builds Mary a wooden frock,which somehow helps her escape and walk across the sea to another country, where she gets invited by the lonely prince to become his goose keeper. Mary does so, and when she asks to come to the party the queen is throwing to find the prince a husband, the prince is like, "No, because you're a goose keeper and made of wood." (apparently the prince doesn't understand the difference between a garment and a person's actual body). Mary secretly changes out of the wooden frock and into one of the beautiful dresses Ronald got, goes to the party, the prince is all up in her business, she loses the ring, and flees. The queen then decides to have another party to get the mystery girl to come back, which Mary does in the second dress Ronald got, she gets the ring back, and when everybody tries to capture her, she flees and distracts Peter (the prince's friend? tutor? cricket instructor?) with a penny so she can escape. Then, when the queen is too drunk to make the prince an omelette, she calls Mary in to make it, and Mary hides the ring in the omelette. The prince finds it and then I guess realizes that Mary the goose keeper made of wood is actually the sexy woman who has been coming to the parties, and he runs out to the goose area, where Mary is naked in a tree having abandoned her wooden frock. The play ends with her in the tree singing a song while the third dress from Ronald floats up to her.
Total insanity.
https://youtu.be/FqfAF6rkeu0
The Red Shoes: The plot of this play is pretty basic--a girl desperately wants red shoes, and is taken in by a kindly old blind woman who commissions her a pair of black shoes for church (though the girl tricks her and gets red shoes). The priest throws her out of the church for wearing red shoes, and the old woman tries to take them, but the girl puts them back on and begins to dance obsessively. She finds she is unable to stop dancing, even at one point being cursed by an angel to dance forever. Finally, the girl meets a butcher and convinces him to cut off her feet (which continue dancing by themselves), and replace them with wooden feet. Finally, after cleaning the church for a long time, the girl is allowed to go to heaven, but decides not to.
What makes the Kneehigh production so interesting is the dramaturgical approach. This play has very little actual dialogue, with the overwhelming majority of the text being spoken by Lydia, a transvestite narrator (whom, I think, the audience is not supposed to know is a transvestite until the end, though readers are told that in a note at the beginning). The other actors, who begin as "Storytellers" without distinct costumes or characters, get summoned forth by Lydia to perform particular roles. But even then they have very little dialogue, as Lydia continues largely narrating, including expressing characters' perspectives and emotions, as well as providing Choric commentary on what's going on.
https://youtu.be/F9eBtZsIwHQ
Thematically, this play does take on a lot of different perspectives about love. There is the love triangle between Tristan and Yseult and King Mark--Mark has sent Tristan to Ireland to get Yseult for him, but Tristan and Yseult fall in love, then Yseult falls in love with Mark when they arrive back in Cornwall. Mark vacillates between whether it's better to rule with the heart or the head. Focin loves Mark (it's not clear whether this is just deep loyalty to his king or a romantic love, but that seems like a reasonable reading given his jealousy of Tristan gaining Mark's favor and his attempt to destroy Tristan and Yseult by revealing the affair). And the play is metatheatrically framed by the Loveless, who draw our attention directly to this central theme.
https://youtu.be/waub9QOae9A
The Bacchae: According to the introduction to this play, it was meant to be an iconoclastic take on Euripides' ancient Greek play, which is surprisingly hard to do considering that Euripides himself was pretty iconoclastic--especially in this play, and especially as regards gender roles and performances. And while having the Bacchants as a group of men in tutus is subversive from a modern perspectives on gender, it would actually probably be quite appropriate for Euripides. Not that I'm saying this play was an ideological failure, because I actually think it's quite good. But I would argue that rather than knocking down Euripides, this play uses Euripides to knock down (1) contemporary gender roles and religious fanaticism, and (2) the image of Euripides as a white-marble-toga-wearing figure of "high culture."
The other thing about this version is that, while it does generally follow Euripides' version (with a few modernizations, especially the incorporation of rap, contemporary club music, etc.), it makes some motivations more overt than Euripides does. For instance, early in the play, Dionysus directly announces to the audience--Kneehigh doesn't seem to believe in a fourth wall--that he is going to destroy Agave because she doubted that his mother Semele was actually impregnated by Zeus. In Euripides I feel like there is more ambiguity about whether or not Agave and Pentheus could have avoided their fates, or whether they were doomed and it was out of their control to change anything. To me this is an important difference, because the ambiguity allows for the tension of tragedy as such, whereas when Dionysus is overtly and unambiguously presented as seeking revenge, it elides the question of fate to a certain extent.
https://youtu.be/OPFmMIOJYiU
The Wooden Frock: This play is nuts, but I think the original fairy tale it's based on is nuts, so Kneehigh has taken a pretty bizarre story and presented it through their own bizarre production process. Basically, the play opens on a happy royal family (we're told they're super happy, but we don't really see them doing much happy stuff). The mother persuades the father that if she dies, he will marry whomever her ring fits. She suddenly (and for no apparent reason other than plot necessity) dies, and the king tries the ring on a bunch of cast and audience members' fingers, but none fit. Finally, their daughter Mary--whose age isn't clear, but she kind of seems like a child, like of roughly ten or twelve, at least based on the fact that she's got a nurse who puts her to bed after a story, etc.--is playing with the dead queen's clothes and she puts the ring on. When her dad--yes, her dad--sees her wearing the ring he's immediately like, "Let's do some smooching because your dead mom wants me to marry you, my daughter." And she's like, "Umm, wtf?" Then the nurse comes up with a plan to kill some time by having Mary ask for a series of impossible to find dresses as a precondition for the marriage, though Ronald (the pigeon keeper) seems to find the dresses with minimal difficulty. While this is going on, the nurse builds Mary a wooden frock,which somehow helps her escape and walk across the sea to another country, where she gets invited by the lonely prince to become his goose keeper. Mary does so, and when she asks to come to the party the queen is throwing to find the prince a husband, the prince is like, "No, because you're a goose keeper and made of wood." (apparently the prince doesn't understand the difference between a garment and a person's actual body). Mary secretly changes out of the wooden frock and into one of the beautiful dresses Ronald got, goes to the party, the prince is all up in her business, she loses the ring, and flees. The queen then decides to have another party to get the mystery girl to come back, which Mary does in the second dress Ronald got, she gets the ring back, and when everybody tries to capture her, she flees and distracts Peter (the prince's friend? tutor? cricket instructor?) with a penny so she can escape. Then, when the queen is too drunk to make the prince an omelette, she calls Mary in to make it, and Mary hides the ring in the omelette. The prince finds it and then I guess realizes that Mary the goose keeper made of wood is actually the sexy woman who has been coming to the parties, and he runs out to the goose area, where Mary is naked in a tree having abandoned her wooden frock. The play ends with her in the tree singing a song while the third dress from Ronald floats up to her.
Total insanity.
https://youtu.be/FqfAF6rkeu0
The Red Shoes: The plot of this play is pretty basic--a girl desperately wants red shoes, and is taken in by a kindly old blind woman who commissions her a pair of black shoes for church (though the girl tricks her and gets red shoes). The priest throws her out of the church for wearing red shoes, and the old woman tries to take them, but the girl puts them back on and begins to dance obsessively. She finds she is unable to stop dancing, even at one point being cursed by an angel to dance forever. Finally, the girl meets a butcher and convinces him to cut off her feet (which continue dancing by themselves), and replace them with wooden feet. Finally, after cleaning the church for a long time, the girl is allowed to go to heaven, but decides not to.
What makes the Kneehigh production so interesting is the dramaturgical approach. This play has very little actual dialogue, with the overwhelming majority of the text being spoken by Lydia, a transvestite narrator (whom, I think, the audience is not supposed to know is a transvestite until the end, though readers are told that in a note at the beginning). The other actors, who begin as "Storytellers" without distinct costumes or characters, get summoned forth by Lydia to perform particular roles. But even then they have very little dialogue, as Lydia continues largely narrating, including expressing characters' perspectives and emotions, as well as providing Choric commentary on what's going on.
https://youtu.be/F9eBtZsIwHQ
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