Director
The Spanish Tragedy
Performed as a 60-minute cut with the Shakespeare & Performance Program at Mary Baldwin University. 2023
Photography by solas.photography.
Reviewed by Peter Kirwan.
There are 11 on-stage deaths in our production. In an effort to stylize how we would depict the macabre nature of the play we decided to use yarn for our fake blood.
A key feature of this play I wanted to highlight was that grief is rarely something people are socially given time to process. To help depict this, I asked that there be no black in the costumes. I wanted the world to be filled with rich color, despite the intense sorrow many of the characters were experiencing.
Director and Dramaturg Note:
Here we sit down to see the mystery…
A mystery filled with vengeance, violence, and volatility, The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd is a reminder of what it is to grieve.
Predating Shakespeare’s Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedy shares many themes and tropes with the Prince of Denmark’s tragedy: seeking revenge for loved ones, contemplation of suicide, the use of a play-within-a-play as a tool of condemnation, violence as performative spectacle. Violent ends fall on those who wronged Andrea and Hieronimo; Revenge ensures tragic ends are inevitable and violence treated as individual ceremonies, all designed for Andrea to see his revenge enacted. Using breath and movement, the violence of this performance aims to highlight the tragedy of the play as moments that could be described by an onlooker in a dream.
The Spanish Tragedy is a play for those who have lost loved ones. It is a play for those who carry grief everyday, yet are still forced to live their normal lives. It is a play where emotions are so strong they cannot be properly expressed in any amount of words or forms of art. And perhaps, that’s the most tragic tale of all.
