b'Triptych OPHELIA Authors Note Sophie Trewick My skin rots to mushroom feast.My script is a triptych of monologues from three My retinas are eroded by cotton slithers of lightShakespearian female heroinesLady Macbeth, Sophie Trewick offers a triptych of newly written monologues using characters from Shakespeare plays. This text was framed as athat perforate and slice the dark forest floor. Titania and Ophelia. The short play deals with theatre climate action play for the Theatre for a Changing Climate module.My bones slide into earth.the recurrent gendering of nature in Shakespear-My breath slips into birdsong. ian texts and the phenomenological implications of a canonical essentialising of the female body as LADY MACBETH TITANIA My first death goes unrecorded. symbol, metaphor or object of male desire. I ask how the split of nature from culture intersects You tell me I am not a natural beauty, I am struck at first by his double-nessLater with the split of feminine from masculine, in-That my face is a painted ruin,The head of an assMy image is articulated in paint. The paintervestigating the enforced alignment of nature and A glass museum containing soiled old goods,Drooping from a feeble human bodyremembers his dead mother. He cannot know thewomanhood, and the underlying displacement That my looks could kill,He cowers in the half lightviolence of her dying, the struggling and splut- of subjectivity in which culture is seen as that That I am false as my lashes.Unsure how to be both beast and mantering, the rupture and tear, and the relief. Crispwhich masters and tames the wild, earthly world. As if man were not already beastas oxygen. Green as the first buds. So he paintsIn her 1971 essay When We Dead Awaken: Writing I tell you:a peaceful sleep. A face framed in wildflowers.as Re-Vision, Adrienne Rich states that until we He bays and begins to cry plump donkey tears Tears which adorn the cheeks. A virgin. A holycan understand the assumptions in which we are I want to be unnatural. His hands touch his newly fur-covered head mother. Unblemished and false as the whitest lie. drenched we cannot know ourselves (2018: n.p). I want my curling hair lasered off. I want to beHe is lostIn these monologues, I work with Richs notion poreless and smooth as an acrylic nail. I wantAn actor without a scriptLater stillof re-vision as the act of looking back, of see-my skin to stop sweating. I want my womb toPrimal and self-pitifulMy voice emerges from the body of a young man.ing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from stop shedding, building and collapsing. I want toHaunted by his humanity He feels, for the first time, the clutch of a corseta new critical direction in order to re-visit and stop shitting. I want to stop eating. I want to stopIf I leave him, he will die in the woodsand, before stepping on stage, whispers the fourre-imagine familiar and much performed roles drinking. I want to live in certainty. I want myI approach syllables of his new name over and over. O phe li(2018: n.p). I was particularly struck by Mo-television to be a spotless window. I want to lookI will teach him how beautiful it is to be alivea. He meets the eyes of the actor playing Hamlet.jisola Adebayos dtourned portrait of Gertrude through it into a forest. But I dont want to smellI will teach him the depth of his sensesHe needs no audience to feel the warmth of thefrom Hamlet in Matt Henson, North Star. Taking the earth, the fungi, the animal shit, the rottingrole spreading as he blooms into the wholeness oficonographic figures from their original texts stuff. I just want to see it. I want to collect its vi- He is being reborn himself, into herself. The shell of manhood fallsand placing them in new contexts reveals the tality into a small pot and rub it into my cheeks. IInto another self off. She is left behind. My voice and hers, theyabundance of cultural and political litanies that want to inject it. I want to take it. One which he will surely forget with the risingare one and the same.accompany literary characters so hallowed in the sunWestern theatrical canon. Adebayos decision to I dont want to feel it. bring a miscellaneous chorus of fictional, real and mythic characters into physical proximity on I want to be impenetrable stage allows for an expansive sense of the realms I want to be hatedin which our perceptions of a gendered environ-I want you to judge mement are shaped.Because judgement is jealousyAnd jealousy is attachment And attachment is desireRich, A. Gilbert, Sandra M. (ed) (2018) Essential Essays: And desire is currency in this worldCulture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, [online resource], W.W I want to be worth billionsNorton Trade, Available at: https://read.kortext.com/read-Turn your noses up at that!er/epub/808214, [Accessed on 23 November 2021].62 63'