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
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.”
