The King’s College London Latin Play returns after a five-year hiatus.

Produced and performed in the original Latin (with English surtitles) by students from King's, UCL and Birkbeck.

Content note: this production contains descriptions of violence, including sexual violence.

For centuries, the gruesome story of Procne, Tereus and Philomena has inspired and appalled writers and artists. From its origins in Greek mythology via Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the tale was adapted into verse throughout the medieval period—by Chaucer, Boccaccio and Chrétien de Troyes among others, later inspiring one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest plots in Titus Andronicus. Taking inspiration from Seneca’s Roman tragedy Thyestes, Gregorio Correr’s Procne was composed in Venice in the early fifteenth century, adapting the story’s classical models of retributive fate within a Christian cosmology.

The production will explore this asynchronous reworking by setting the play in a medieval world reimagined through 21st-century aesthetics and technology. The play contends with the power of appearances, surveillance, voice and voicelessness—all themes that remain potent today. Staging Procne in 2026 in the original neo-Latin text, the production shows language at the edge of communicative breakdown: Procne demands that its audience question the limits of language, portraying a terrifying frontier where stories cannot be trusted and action cannot be hidden.