Descending from the heavenly sphere of the gods to the mortal world below, Arcturus raises a mighty storm. For Labrax, a ‘procurer’ of women, the storm brings shipwreck and ruin. For his two female captives it offers a chance of escape. Washed up on a rocky coastline the two women seek refuge in the shrine of Venus, but it seems that the goddess alone cannot protect them. They are forced to rely instead on the help of the elderly Daemones, who is already struggling to control his reluctant slaves: the impudent Sceparnio and the inept Gripus.Drawn from a lost Greek play, The Storm is the most popular of Plautus’ Roman comedies. This version opened at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in July 2005 as part of the ‘World and Underworld’ Season.
Lucian Willow has a dark past; so dark he can’t remember it. Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, a former Army Chaplain lives in a state of amnesia on his old comrade Lord Brook’s country estate, deep in the slumbering fields of England. The arrival of a circus from across the channel – with its anarchic forces of magic and comedy – impels these wounded men to confront their horrifying and entangled past. Written in verse and prose, Lucifer Saved is described as an astonishing interweaving of modern story and Christian myth, of tragedy and comedy, by one of the UK’s foremost verse playwrights.Lucifer Saved opened at the Finborough Theatre, London in October 2007
A comedy written for the Shakespeare's Globe, telling the story of an insatiably curious young man who, wishing to turn himself into a wise owl, takes the wrong drug and finds himself transformed into an ass. His subsequent travels lead him to encounter the chaos of human desire from the perspective of a servile donkey. The most exquisite tale in this wonderful epic, as originally told by Lucius Apuleius, is the first known account of the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, which is perhaps the archetypal myth behind modern psychology.Inspired by The Golden Ass, Peter Oswald has written a riotous erotic comedy of love and desire, which premiered at the Globe Theatre, London in August 2002. This version is true to the original: in the words of C S Lewis is 'a strange compound of picaresque novel, horror comic, mystagogue's tract, pornography and stylistic experiment.'
Augustine’s Oak, the first play to be commissioned for Shakespeare’s new Globe Theatre, is the story of St Augustine’s mission in 597 AD to reconcile the Christians of the Celtic Church with the authority of Rome.
After ten years at war, Odysseus returns to Ithaca to find his palace in the hands of violent men. These mortal enemies are overcome but the ghosts of war are not so easily vanquished. Drawing on the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, and loosely following the model of classical Greek drama, Peter Oswald explores the personal journey behind the fantastic one, and asks what it means to be a hero.
The ancient Hindu epic poem The Ramayana tells of the journey of Rama, an incarnation of God, to set free his wife Sita from the demon Ravana. This divine story, here set forth in dramatic form, encapsulates the rise of humanity from animal to God. It was produced at the Birmingham Rep in 2000, and at the RNT in 2001