John Lyly’s long-forgotten Galatea – featuring gods, mortals and a highly elastic approach to gender and sex – is being revived at the Brighton festival. We meet the team behind it
ickedly 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.
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.
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.
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