Six Dead Queens...
and an Inflatable Henry!
Show Information
A rare and glorious opportunity for a cast of six women: a sword-wobbling, anachronistic romp on a bed.
The play begins with the six wives drinking early morning tea, reading the tabloids and bemoaning the lot of their contemporary counterparts. Six queens in a four poster bed. The marital bed. The bedrock of the family, the Church and the State. Six wives, betrayed, be-headed, barren, bemused, broken and bored, but each willing to enter into serious pillow fight tournaments to assert her position as the rightful queen. Stuck in a time warp and destined to squabble endlessly over one fat and flaccid inflatable spouse, the competition is intense.
Swords are drawn both literally and metaphorically. With no other way to define themselves they seem set on a course of mutual self-destruction. But as their constraining corsets of expectation are thrown off in their efforts to validate themselves, a spirit of rebellion is unleashed.
Perversions, subversions, wild parodic dances and unholy rituals create a new order - an anarchic utopia for all dead queens!
The play explored the physical, darkly comic theatricality of the 'bouffon' - the outcast - subverting music, language and the dances of the period and extending the existing grotesquerie of the costumes and cosmetics.