Wickedly funny, astonishingly queer and over 430 years old, John Lyly’s dramatic comedy Galatea upends gender binaries and sheds power structures like they’re merely a change of clothes. Written in the 1580s, the play “gets deep into the DNA of Shakespeare and his contemporaries”, says theatre historian Andy Kesson, but has been largely forgotten.
This spring, as part of Brighton festival, live artist Emma Frankland is leading a daring outdoor, large-scale production of Galatea that blends academic exploration with queer contemporary performance. Adapted by Frankland and spoken-word artist Subira Joy, and edited by Kesson, this is a collaborative celebration of an under-appreciated play and a reckoning with the way early modern texts are treated – too delicately and exclusively, the team argue. Plus, Frankland says with a cool smile: “We’re going to set shit on fire.”
Bringing together gods and mortals in a town that refuses a monstrous sacrifice, Galatea is a story of mistaken identity and first love, where gender and sexual attraction are elastic. And this is no straight staging. “My practice has been more rooted in contemporary performance and traditions of queer and trans cabaret,” says Frankland, whose last show I saw had her sharpening knives on the broken wings of an angel at the end of the world. “When Andy and I discussed staging this, we thought, ‘What would it be to approach the play with that community?’”
They had met on the Globe education department’s Read Not Dead programme, staging readings of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. She was there as a performer and director, he as an academic; he was doing a PhD on Lyly, at a time when there was “this real wall of structural phobia around looking at people who were not Shakespeare”. Very popular in his lifetime, Lyly had since been dismissed – wrongfully, Frankland and Kesson thought.
The playwright’s influence on Shakespeare is obvious. “You can see that in all of the Shakespearean comedies that take ideas of people running away into the woods,” says Kesson, who is part of the research project Diverse Alarums, which explores the potential for early modern plays in contemporary performance. “They’re wearing clothes they wouldn’t normally wear, becoming unclear about the gender identities of the people they fall in love with or themselves. That’s all something Shakespeare never gets out of his system when writing comedies.”
In the original text, first printed in 1592, residents of a cursed town are told that the fairest young woman will be sacrificed, so two worried fathers disguise their children as boys in the hope of saving them. The teenagers dress in unfamiliar clothes, copy one another’s behaviour, and – inevitably – fall in love. In an extraordinary final scene, the gods intervene to declare an act of gender transformation. “I had no idea it was so queer, so trans, before we even touch it,” says Subira Joy, who before this project, was “not particularly interested in Shakespeare or any of that flavour”. Having taken part in a workshop Frankland led exploring the trans literary canon, they took a leap of faith and joined the team, supporting Frankland in the adaptation and serving as dramaturg. “I came into it on trust of Emma as an artist,” Joy says, “and then I fell completely in love with Galatea.”
Much of the team is made up like this, heart first. With a performing company of more than 50 actors made up of professionals and a community chorus, plus a significant creative crew, this show is a gargantuan task. The team speak with a mix of excitement and trepidation at the scale, made possible by landscape company Wildworks, and Marlborough Productions, a producer of queer radical performance. “There’s a lot of people involved who have been like, ‘I’ve never seen myself in English classical performance,’” says Frankland – deaf performers, queer performers, performers of colour – but like Joy, they quickly fall for Lyly and this play. “Because here is a play that is explicitly queer,” says Frankland proudly, “explicitly feminist, explicitly trans. It’s a celebration of outsiders.”
Over years of workshops, the team have approached the Elizabethan text as a live document rather than a museum piece. “The story has been growing based on who has been coming in the room,” explains Joy. “The play will move to them, rather than them trying to fit in.” Since the workshops have involved deaf performers, the play has been built incorporating spoken English and British Sign Language, with creative captioning in performance. Once they had made translations for deaf actors, they extended the idea. “Why not translate the text to fit better in the mouth of someone using spoken English, too?” Frankland asks. And so Lyly’s text stretched to fit the new hosts of its words.
This malleability is in keeping with how the text would have originally been staged, Kesson says. “Plays are working compromises. When they go into print, we get snapshots of texts which are endlessly being rewritten and revised around the performers.” This adaptability is familiar, too, within queer performance and cabaret, the worlds Frankland and Joy’s work resides in. “Suddenly everything about the mainstream classical tradition seems peculiar,” says Frankland, “compared to what we’re doing.”
Galatea is a busy, clever play, but its core message is one of acceptance. Towards the end, Venus, the goddess of love, is asked what she makes of the queer lovers in front of her. “I like it well, and allow it,” she declares. As simple as that. “We’re currently dealing with such a hostile environment,” says Frankland, “particularly towards trans people. And here is this play that has this explicit moment of acceptance.”
The play was originally performed in front of Elizabeth I and the fact that Lyly was not executed for his queer storytelling suggests a royal endorsement, one that Frankland believes should teach us about historical and contemporary attitudes to gender non-conformity and queerness. “It’s easy to frame trans identity as something that has always been transgressive, has always been dangerous, has never been tolerated or accepted.” She shakes her head. “And this allows us to say, ‘No, that is not an innate attitude.’”
Frankland repeats Venus’s easy approval. “She doesn’t just allow it,” she smiles, “she likes it.” The line encompasses what the show is reaching for. This ambitious new staging is not just an act of academic interrogation or reinterpretation, but one of joyous reclamation.
Galatea is at the Brighton festival, 5-21 May