by Claire Kimball, Production Dramaturg
As we look back over our examination of The Bloody Banquet over the last few weeks, we’ve covered many topics that make up the tone of our play: from firearms and cannibalism to the contextual significance of dessert banquets and ominous storms. Amid these spectacular highlights, however, we find that the play’s more recognizable trappings often thwart audience expectation.
“A true relation of a barbarous and most cruell murther” (By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library)
Even as it incorporates some of the “greatest hits” of early modern drama – the battles for the throne, the illicit bed tricks, the restorative forests, the gory murders, and the threatening fates – The Bloody Banquet’s text refuses to follow the templates of more well-known plays (like Shakespeare’s). Rather than set up a central conflict between two warring kingdoms, Banquet’s opening combat merely provides an opportunity for a third King to forcibly take the throne. Instead of a bed trick that eventually unites a young woman and her lover in marriage, we discover that the secret act places her in mortal danger and forces her to commit the first murder of the play. As family members turn on loved ones and servants turn on their mistresses, each new confession takes the narrative in a startling direction.
The memorable plot devices that we’ve seen before in other works recombine in this play for a wild ride of rampant ambition and emotional conflict. It seems that everyone in the Lydian kingdom is scheming for one thing or another. Yet the paths these characters tread to attain their goals rarely develop the way they anticipate when they encounter the machinations of others who are equally focused on themselves.The familiar tropes of an early modern revenge play lure us into assumptions: traitors will be punished, women will accept subjugation at the hands of men, and the villain will find his opportunity for poisonous revenge. But that is not the case with The Bloody Banquet. This play has other plans. As we sit in an intimate space and meet with an actor’s eyes, we may think we know the places that The Bloody Banquet will take us … but we’re mistaken.
You have four more chances during the Capital Fringe Festival to see The Bloody Banquet in its first professional staging in nearly four hundred years! Be sure to purchase your tickets.
If you missed any of our previous blog installments, you can read them now:
The Bloody Banquet Returns, Firearms in The Bloody Banquet, Horrid and Inhuman Spectacle, On Cravings and Courses, Prodigious Bearded Fire