Ophelia
London Performance Studios presented a play reading of Ophelia (1979) by Melissa Murray, directed by Kaleya Baxe.
Originally produced by lesbian theatre company Hormone Imbalance and premiered at the Action Space Drill Hall in 1979, the play is a queer-feminist inversion of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which narrative, characters, and the relationships between them are rewritten to these political ends. Gertrude becomes the Queen, there is no Claudius, and Ophelia runs away with her maidservant rather than resign to a marriage with Hamlet arranged by familial patriarch Polonius.
The play got recently published in Radical Rediscoveries, a new collection of scripts written by women in the alternative theatre scene in the 1960s–80s. This is the second publication in the imprint Scores, co-commissioned by London Performance Studios and Montez Press.
This event was organised by Unfinished Histories, as part of the Associate Artists Programme.
12/07
13/07
