Dr Peter Kirwan

Tag: Lyly

  • Galatea (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Wharf Studio

    Galatea (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Wharf Studio

    Much of John Lyly’s Galatea riffs on individuals learning who they are while being forced to present themselves as something they are not: nymphs who’ve been magically made to fall in love, girls dressed as boys to avoid a ritual sacrifice of virgins, boys temporarily becoming apprentices to unsuitable masters. Self-identification, throughout the play, becomes…

  • The Woman in the Moon (The Dolphin’s Back) @ The Rose, Bankside

    The Woman in the Moon (The Dolphin’s Back) @ The Rose, Bankside

    Through the combined efforts of scholar Andy Kesson, secondary school teacher Perry Mills and director James Wallace, John Lyly has achieved a remarkable renaissance in recent years. The revival in Lyly’s fortunes is due almost entirely to the rediscovery of his works, not for their complexity of allusion and attachment to court politics, but for their…

  • Galatea (Edward’s Boys) @ King Edward VI School

    Galatea (Edward’s Boys) @ King Edward VI School

    I first encountered Lyly in the form of a heavily cut production of Endymion performed by the junior boys of King Edward VI School in 2009, back before they were even known as Edward’s Boys. Having missed their 2010 Mother Bombie, it was something of a delight to return five years later and find Endymion’s Prologue, David Fairbairn, all grown up and…

  • Endymion (extracts) (Edward’s Boys) @ The CAPITAL Centre

    One of the CAPITAL Centre’s current Fellows of Creativity is Perry Mills, teacher at King Edward VI School in Stratford, who is running a fascinating project based on 16th-17th century boys’ companies. These companies, the relatively ‘private’ rivals to the adult companies of the period, were hugely popular in their heyday. Their plays, often scandalous, were educated and appealed…