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The Players are very excited to be taking part in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Open Stages project.
One of our members, Ivan Phillips, has written a New Play, The Wise Man Knows, which we will perform at The Settlement on April 14th, take to local Drama festivals at Sawston and Haynes, and perform at the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich as part of their Open Stages Showcase.
The play is based around a meeting between the artist and writer Wyndham Lewis and a London-based member of the Nazi Party, Dr Hans Wilhelm Thost. The play - framed by a chorus of Wyrd Sisters from Macbeth - explores themes of greatness, nationalism, politics, creativity and history through a Shakespearean lens.
ABSTRACT
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” Touchstone in As You Like It, Act V, Scene 1
1931. As Europe begins its fatal decade, Macbeth’s Wyrd Sisters – here distinctly characterised as the Norns of Scandinavian mythology – convene in London, beneath the creaking sign of the World Tree public house to read the auguries of global conflict. Among these is a visit by Dr Hans Wilhelm Thost to the radical artist and writer Wyndham Lewis. Thost (pronounced ‘toast’) is the Nazi Party’s first official representative in Britain, a correspondent for its newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, whereas Lewis – founder of the Vorticist art movement, author of novels such as Tarr (1918) and The Apes of God (1930), as well as ambitious philosophical works such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926) – has recently published the first English language study of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. This book, simply called Hitler, presents a broadly sympathetic reading of its subject (‘a Man of Peace’) and will fatally damage Lewis’s reputation, despite later recantations. In this meeting, however, the critical ambivalence of Lewis’s attitude in relation to the zealous ideologue, Dr Thost, is made clear and the satirical edge and savage wit of his position is played out in relation to the German journalist’s fascist faith.
Disputing ideas of power, nationhood, war and peace – as well as politics, creativity, and the free imagination – Lewis and Thost are naturally drawn to the treatment of such themes in Shakespeare, with Lewis’s recent study of the playwright, The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1927), being a constant reference point. With the sisters constituting a humorous chorus, The Wise Man Knows enacts a playful, edgy exploration of ‘great men’, bad politics and the turbulence of history.
“The middle of humanity thou never knowest, but the extremity of both ends.” Apemantus in Timon of Athens, Act Iv, Scene 3.
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Settlement Players
Letchworth Settlement
Nevells Road
Letchworth Garden City
Herts.
SG6 4UB
