Butterfly Theatre Company has brought together a community of 150 people from all over the world to create a unique video version of Shylock’s famous monologue from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, to be released across its social media channels to mark Shakespeare’s Birthday on Thursday 23 April, which is also the day that the first Coronavirus human vaccine trials are due to start in the UK.
Butterfly Theatre Company specialises in site-specific, immersive Shakespeare in the UK, Europe and beyond with the aim to make Shakespeare that authentically connects and is relevant and accessible. Recent projects include an immersive production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in an underground cave complex, Kents Cavern in Torquay, Romeo and Juliet amidst the ruins and gardens at Glastonbury Abbey, and Secrets Unlocked, an immersive telling of Jersey’s history through Shakespeare at 16 New Street, a Georgian Town House in Jersey Town centre.
Aileen Gonsalves, Butterfly Theatre Artistic Director and Company Founder said, “I went to Terezin concentration camp in Prague. I went with ISTA International School Theatre Association with young people from around the world. To devise and respond and collaborate and make work. We heard from a 92-year-old survivor Doris Grozdanovičová – as we sat in the camp with her it was truly profound, we could not get over how humans had done this to each other.
We explored how easy it is to dehumanise each other. The homeless person who we stop looking in the eye because we’re embarrassed…can’t we just connect and say something- anything? Isn’t not connecting potentially the start that ends in the horrors that happened? Whatever people are they are HUMAN. We explored the Shylock speech and an idea started to grow in me.
I am so happy to do this project NOW as instead of highlighting our great divisions, it’s a time when we must be united, we can’t help but feel our universal suffering, discoveries, revelations, healing and our vulnerability becomes clear as we are all ’subject to the same diseases’. And today the scientists are working from round the world together. Testing on humans to ensure we are ‘healed by the same means’
Butterfly believe that truthful acting is at the forefront of what connects the actors to the audience and so during this time of social isolation, we ask ourselves, what connects us now? Not only are we interacting online with friends, family, and colleagues possibly more than we did before this crisis, but also, ironically, this global suffering has created a global unity. We are all experiencing the same situation, we are all affected, we are all vulnerable. No other Shakespeare speech could be truer to this, at this time, than Shylock’s “I am a Jew” speech. We have created a compilation video that combines individual and unique readings of this famous speech which have been altered depending on how the reader uniquely identifies as a human being.
This video is Butterfly’s response to the unique world we now find ourselves in.”
