Please note: this event has passed
This will be livestreamed. A YouTube link will be provided closer to the time.
6pm - Pre-show talk
7pm - Performance
Pre-play talks
Monday 28 June: Professor Gonda Van Steen and Dr Oliver Baldwin in discussion about Sophocles’ Philoctetes (pre-recorded)
Tuesday 29 June: Live panel discussion with Professor Edith Hall, Dr Rosa Andujar and Dr David Bullen
The Play itself
After the success of 2020’s experimental Dionysus in the Underworld, performed only a few weeks before the UK went into national lockdown and into months of online education and communication, the King’s Greek Play 2021 presents From the Machine. This is a new play, mostly in English, created by students from across the college, which draws on extant and fragmentary Greek tragedy. The project is led by Dr David Bullen, Professor Edith Hall, and theatre designer Nicola Hewitt-George, and is written and performed by an ensemble of current students.
From the Machine explores how the Trojan War cycle speaks to present concerns about responsibility, sacrifice, and intergenerational tension. Young adults across the world suffer acute isolation and despair caused by their irresponsible parents’ abuse, neglect, and endless international disputes: is this the 21st century or the Bronze Age? Presented live through the online medium we have all so recently become accustomed to, the piece draws on texts with lonely adults at their heart, including Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and Orestes, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and Aeschylus’ now fragmentary trilogy about the central figure of Homer's Iliad, Achilles. The result will be a King's Greek Play unlike any that has gone before.