Using papyrus, shadow puppetry and offstage action to shed light on the way we fill in the gaps in how we see the world, Fragments searches for an ancient lost play, of which only fragments survive.
Potential Difference have collaborated with papyrologists and neuroscientists to draw parallels between how we understand the ancient past from fragments of papyrus, and our own past from fragments of memory. Just half a scene and a handful of broken lines are all that survive of a revenge tragedy by Euripides. By diving into the blank spaces, Fragments creates an irreverent take on a lost myth, and highlights the fractured nature of memory.
Fragments is inspired by the vast collections of ancient papyri held in museums around the world. The show follows three present-day ‘papyrologists’ attempting to decipher and paste together a handful of unstudied fragments like a jigsaw puzzle. Inspired by the hints of story these scraps suggest, they are compelled into the drama as their office swirls with song, puppetry and mayhem. As the gaps in the lost myth are filled with the scholars’ perceptions and assumptions, the play considers how we construct our own memories, stories and worldviews, while also suggesting that gaps in a story are necessary to make space for us to innovate and to create new stories.
Director and co-writer Russell Bender said: “The idea behind Fragments came out of a workshop with academics and theatre makers exploring how fragments of lost plays could be performed. When we first began thinking about putting these fragments on stage, we knew we weren’t interested in just trying to reconstruct an ancient play. Developing the show has been a big but incredibly fun dramatic challenge of what to do when the text stops, and all we’re left with is a gap.”
Co-writer Laura Swift (The Open University) said: “As a Classics scholar, collaborating with a contemporary theatre company has made me think about these texts in a new way. Working with a text that hasn’t been staged for thousands of years was exciting, but we were also drawn to the fragmented form of what survives. We wanted to make something that celebrated the fact that we have only fragments and treated it as a virtue rather than an inconvenience.”
Potential Difference will be curating a number of events around the production, including ‘Fragments: A Journey through Papyri’ at the British Library on March 17th and ‘Papyrus Fragments – Lost Stories from Ancient Greece’ on April 2nd at the Hellenic Centre, featuring collaborators and members of the creative team.
Fragments is at The Playground Theatre, London, 30th April to 16th May, and The Old Fire Station, Oxford 22 to 23 May 2020.
