Abstract
Since Edward's Boys’ performance in 2014 (Stratford-upon-Avon), John Lyly's Galatea has become much better known as an important part of the history of queer theatre (in part due to Andy Kesson's championing of the playwright), and this new production at Brighton Festival marks a key milestone in it gaining traction outside of the academy. The adaptors, Emma Frankland and Subira Joy gave Lyly's play the type of presentist creative re-interpretation usually reserved for Shakespeare. Unlike three recent online productions (directed by Emma Rose Went, M. J. Kaufman and Will Davis, and Rachel Chung, 2021), here the outdoor festival atmosphere – the large enclosure ringed with red flags, trader stalls, wide screen flanked by trees, low-fi background music, fireworks, and the 50+ company – lent a sense of scale that this play has not been given before (as Kesson mentioned in a BBC Radio 3 interview). Accessibility was integrated into this performance on multiple levels, with most actors speaking in English, British Sign Language (BSL), or a combination of the two, and creative captioning throughout (designed by Joshua Pharo and Sarah Readman) as well as a BSL performance interpreter (Sue MacLaine). With its relaxed audience and party atmosphere, this production was a wholesome meditation on the importance of yielding to love (in all its varieties), as well as a call-to-arms to resist the current moment's ‘culture war’, which targets trans people, disabled people, migrants, and people of colour, amongst others.
Lyly himself did not appear prominently in the marketing for this production that instead emphasised this projects’ efforts to uncover queer history by disclosing ‘early modern theatre's best kept secret’ (Galatea, poster). While resurrecting trans and queer history via Lyly, the production boldly resisted treating his text as sacred. In the Epilogue, Galatea (Femi Tiwo, they/them) earnestly implored the audience that the ‘truest freedom’ comes when we are permitted ‘to love outside the script’ (Epilogue), reflecting how the play text ‘shift[ed] itself to accommodate the company – rather than the other way around’ (programme, n.p.). These many textual shifts included: changing Lincolnshire to ‘little’ Shoreham-by-Sea (where the performance took place); doubling Tityrus (Antonia Kemi Coker, she/her – here Galatea's mother rather than father) with the Alchemist and Melebeus (Ralph Bogard, he/him) with the Journalist (a combination of Lyly's soothsaying Astronomer and Augur); cutting the racism around Peter (Caz Teague, they/them), who now created and distributed Hormone Replacement Therapy with Tityrus; and reframing the near-miss sacrifice of Hebe (Bea Webster, they/them) into a moment of gender euphoria and liberation.
These shifts sometimes had the effect of complicating the play's narrative and introducing new contradictions with, for instance, the play's core relationship of Galatea and Phillida (Macy Jacob Seelochan, she/they/he), who were here both trans/nonbinary from the outset. It was hard to square the restrictive heteronormative code that they conform to in lines such as ‘Can you prefer a fond boy as I am, before so pretty ladies as they are?’ (3.3), with their more expansive gender identities. These shifts, though, allowed for more resonant trans experiences to emerge from Lyly's playful gender dynamics, such as the painful moment when Phillida, played as transfeminine, was instructed by her father, Melebeus (here an exploitative media mogul), that she must disguise as a boy to avoid being sacrificed to the fascist Neptune (Steve Jacobs, he/him), evoking a forced return to the closet due to societal demands. Seelochan's Phillida radiated a gentleness throughout the performance and their relationship with Galatea was portrayed tenderly, in a space where the young lovers could literally run ‘into the grove’ and ‘make much of one another’ (3.2) as the sun set behind the trees lit in soft pink (lighting design by Joshua Pharo). Embracing the confusion, the added line (from Peter) ‘the trans magic is what can’t be pinned down’ (5.3), encouraged the audience to release the need to decipher the de-contextualised gender and sexual dynamics and simply enjoy the celebration of queer love.
The world that these diverse characters existed within was nevertheless a restrictive one, as Neptune's flood stood in emblematically as a transphobic, heteronormative, racist, and xenophobic force that bled into the society of Shoreham and the internalised self-policing of these two main characters. Bogard's Melebeus, in his role as journalist, led the pre-show entertainment, compèring a coronation- or jubilee-like celebration for the sacrifice of a maiden to Neptune. This was followed by the Children's Chorus at Third Space Theatre offering a sweet and sinister ‘kid's show’, which took lines from Tityrus in Lyly's play and explained how the sacrifice took place to protect Shoreham from Neptune's flood. On the sidelines, a hoard of Diana's nymphs, here protestors wearing zombie-apocalypse style streetwear (costume design by co-director Mydd Pharo), yelled ‘fascist’ at Melebeus and held placards, stating ‘Protect Trans Kids’, ‘Black Lives Matter’ ‘Love is Love’, and ‘Stop the Flood’, which emerged as just another (climate crisis-inflected) aspect of this hostile environment they were in.
One major revision was that Neptune did create the flood although he was stopped by Venus (Sophie Stone, she/her) signing ‘You’re being a massive prick’ (displayed in creative caption with giant sparkly words on the screen). In a clever move of the adapters, Jacobs’ Neptune, wearing a long yellow mackintosh over his pastel blue suit, doubled as the Mariner and dragged Rafe (Richard P. Peralta, he/him), onto the stage, mourning the loss of his brothers (Robin and Dick who do not appear in this version). Rafe, here explicitly a refugee, brought two new languages to the stage: Filipino and American Sign Language (ASL). The drowned brothers he sang of (‘Brave we are the fortuned few / To strive the beastly ocean blue’, 1.4) evocatively encompassed more than just Dick and Robin (to those that know the play) but the broader community of migrants struggling to cross the channel. This was a moment where the performance's location in Shoreham-by-Sea was crucial (as well as how the text itself was rewritten to be rooted in this place), as we were so close to the ocean, we could almost smell –if not see – it. When Rafe was later invited to tell his story, he was scapegoated as villain (‘Exclusive Interview: THE MIGRANT MONSTER’ flashed up onto the screen), in stark relief with the real monster (Agar/Neptune) who the townsfolk refused to face up-to – both metaphorically, and literally, as the actors averted their gazes during the near-miss sacrifice of Hebe.
This production of Galatea went beyond sanctioning queerness through historical precedent, both emphasising and amplifying the permissive and celebratory attitude towards queerness within Lyly's play, as Galatea stressed in the (almost entirely) rewritten Epilogue, ‘You have seen that […] queerness pleases the gods’ (Epilogue). Venus’ line (taken directly from Lyly) ‘I like well and allow it’ (5.3), referring to Galatea and Phillida's relationship, was the pivotal moment of the play (and it also came as a sticker in the programme). Her intention (taken from Lyly) to metamorphose either one of them into a man was met with resistance, however, by Peter who interjected with ‘Woah, woah, it doesn’t work like that!’ (5.3), as this production avoided ending on a note which re-inscribed strict binary categories of gender which did not resonate with the lived identities of its cast. Instead, it was the audience and society that were earnestly implored to change.