Fragments – an interview with the creative team

Contributors:

Laura Swift – Classicist, co-writer, and project instigator 

Russell Bender – Co-writer, director, runs Potential Difference 

Jon McLeod – Sound designer and composer 

Tom Espiner – Performer, puppeteer, theatre maker 

Lucy Sierra - Set designer 

Lori Hopkins – Puppetry director 

Jasmine Hunter Evans and Christine Plastow – Interviewers

A PDF file of this conversation is available for download.

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Christine Plastow: How did the project begin and develop, and what were your contributions to the process?

Laura Swift: It started with the idea of these fragments of Greek tragedy. I was thinking about how they’re only studied in a very dry and technical way which is very focused on reconstruction and textual criticism, and yet they were pieces of performed art. And it also seems very different to how people deal with other types of fragmentary text, for example Sappho, where the fact that it’s a fragment doesn’t get in the way of seeing it as poetry and literature. So, I think the original idea was: what can we do to make art out of these fragments? And I spoke to Russell and then we got some funding to put on an idea in the Being Human Festival in 2014.

Russell Bender: I remember you saying to me, ‘did you know about these fragmented, lost Greek tragedies?’ I said ‘no I didn’t, that’s a thing?’ And I was really excited by the idea of there being all of these plays where we kind of know what happened, but we don’t really know what happened, and about the idea of ‘what can you do when you run out of text?’ You’ve got these bits of text, and then you don’t, and trying to come up with reasons why that might happen in the scene.

At the very first stage we hadn’t yet settled on Cresphontes as a play. We were actually looking at two other Euripides plays which were Stheneboea and Bellerophon. We got four performers (of which Tom was one) in a room. And we spent a while trying to work out: how do the fragments of these plays that survive map onto what we know about the play? Where are all the places in our lives that we encountered fragmentation? Why might you suddenly have a fragment? And what ways can we represent fragmentation in visual forms?  I remember doing lots of improvisations involving people going in and out of a room mid-scene, and of people watching CCTV footage of a scene to try and make sense of what happened but the audio’s cutting out. And some of the early ideas around seeing part of an image through a door or a window, we just opened a door to a rehearsal room, and said to people ‘go and make stuff happen the other side of the door and let’s see what’s interesting’. And some of the really early ideas about using overhead projectors came in.

Papyrus conservator Rachel [Rosie Thompson] watches as the Muse conjures images out of papyrus on her light box. Photo by Geraint Lewis.

Tom Espiner: That’s right, because shadows is sort of one step removed again, so it’s a fragmentation in itself. It’s not a direct image of the actual thing that you’re trying to portray, so you’re already in that process of seeing a shadow. You’re trying to piece together information about what has been from its initial source, and then how you can put two bits of fragments together, and then it creates an image. As well as visual imagery, we were doing some exploration of audio fragmentation and where that might exist. For example, trying to piece together black box recordings. But also the sort of detective work that goes on with fragments in our everyday lives, so for example receipts: we took out our receipts and then we’d start an improvisation and I’d take maybe Russell’s receipts from his pocket (and I didn’t know that it was Russell’s) and I would then create a story about what had happened just with these fragments of information. So we were already getting into the process of constructing a story, fabricating something, from what is real and what is imagined.

Russell Bender: We started using these techniques in the context of the myth of Stheneboea, the play we were looking at. And then life happened, and things got in the way, and it wasn’t till 2017 that we picked it up, at which point I think the first thing that happened was Laura and I decided to focus on Cresphontes.  

Laura Swift: The showing that we did in 2014 wasn’t a play, it was a kind of showing of ideas, like a sort of collage of different ideas around fragmentation that maybe lasted 40 minutes or something, and then there was a panel discussion afterwards. Whereas, in 2017, we wanted to develop something that was on the way to being a play.

Russell Bender: We decided to focus on Cresphontes, I think mostly because it didn’t feel like there was quite enough or the right amount of text of Stheneboea.

Laura Swift: And it was also about the types of fragments. The trouble with Bellerophon is that all the fragments were book quotations which means they’re very philosophical and very decontextualised. There’s not that much interesting you could do with them because they’d all be things, you know, along the lines of ‘human life is fragile’ or ‘old age is a terrible thing’.  And I think we tried the improvisation that people were being politicians arguing with each other using these sound bites, but we realised basically they’re dramatically quite limited, and that’s literally all that survives from that play. Whereas Cresphontes has quite a nice mixture of papyri and books – and the papyri give you much more contextual detail and make it possible to retell a chunk of story – and then there are still some philosophical ones but not dominating.  And we also liked the idea that it’s a play about misunderstandings and mistaken identity, so the themes of the play are to do with jumping to conclusions and partial information which is obviously thematically relevant to the idea of fragments. And also it’s quite an easy plot to get your head around, it’s a revenge plot. It’s quite similar in certain perspectives to Hamlet, so that modern audiences feel comfortable with that. It’s something that they can recognise from other contexts. We thought we had to pick a play, and this one seemed to tick quite a lot of those boxes.

Tom Espiner: I think something else that happened between the 2014 exploration and 2017, as well as narrowing it down to Cresphontes was a growing interest – certainly I remember from the performing side of things – in the world of papyrology. The detective work that that involved, how forensic you needed to be to brush away the fibres and get rid of the dirt, and actually ‘what is a day in the life of a papyrologist’ became a kind of an interesting question.

Russell Bender: It’s really funny you say that because I think from very early on, all of the performers and devisers were super interested in that, and Laura and I spent ages saying, ‘no one’s going to want to see that’. We really resisted for ages. We tried to come up with all these other metaphors of people piecing things together, and there was a whole thing around detectives.  

Laura Swift: I think it was partway through the 2017 workshops where you had created this kind of detective world, and the performers kept on going ‘we want more papyrology’. And then we went away and wrote a kind of papyrology scene and brought it back and they were like, ‘yes, this is what we want’.

Tom Espiner: You’re sort of embracing all the props that are involved in papyrology, the tweezers and the light screens, the desks and pipettes dropping water and things like that, so there’s a kind of a visual element of that, and it’s great for actors to be able to work with that kind of detail. But also I think this idea of the ‘forensic detective’ as well, it added a level of playfulness about the idea that a papyrologist in their office somewhere in Oxford could have some kind of fantasy of being a detective, with those tropes that we’re quite familiar with, whether it’s in a film noir detective or CSI. I think that started to develop a level of playfulness about how the form of the play could take shape. 

Russell Bender:: The other thing that we started playing with in that 2017 phase was the idea of what would become the muse, and songs being an important part of the story. But we went into that rehearsal process thinking that there was a sort of cabaret host. And quite quickly the idea of, ‘could she be a goddess?’, ‘maybe she’s a Muse or one of the Muses?’, started to take shape.  

But again, we didn’t know where we were, we didn’t know who the Muse was. And we also set ourselves a rule of not writing fake ancient dialogue. 

Laura Swift: Yes, we didn’t mind inventing characters [like the Muse] or those that were in the ancient world, who would’ve been minor characters like palace servants, but we didn’t want to make up dialogue for any of the ancient characters who were in the original story. So, the King and Queen – everything they said had to be from Euripides. We didn’t mind reworking it or attributing lines to people who probably didn’t originally get that line. And as the play went on, we did it by dismantling the fragments and putting them back together in different ways.  But we didn’t want to write a scene where Aeyptus said something that came from us rather than from Euripides. 

Queen Merope [Rosie Thomson] warns her son Aeyptus [Akiel Dowe] to be careful of King Polyphontes. Photo by Geraint Lewis.

Jasmine Hunter Evans: What narratives are at work in the play?

Laura Swift: It’s an aesthetic journey. It starts out naturalistically in the world in a modern office, and you see the fragments literally as projected bits of papyri. Then they start to be magically embellished by the power of the Muse, you start to see them come to life or resemble characters or evoke antiquity, like you see the hands of the scribe [on the OHP]. And then from that, it starts to become more imagistic. You get the sense that the ancient story is taking place in the shadow, but you’re still in the world of the office – you can see this magic happening in the shadows that nobody, except possiblySam, is aware of. And then the ancient world kind of bursts through the back wall, and gradually takes over. Increasingly the characters are taken over by the power of the story, and become the ancient characters. But the scenes from the ancient play are all in some way fragmented or distorted. So there’s a scene between the King and Queen where they have an argument, but you only see it from the perspective of the waiter who’s going in and out of the room, and they keep on being quiet whenever she’s there. Or there’s the critical scene where the prince comes and tells them that he’s actually the bounty hunter. But it takes place behind a door, so you can only hear muffled bits through it, and so you can see the characters’ reactions and distress as they come out of the room, and the different perspectives, but you don’t see the crucial moments.

Lucy Sierra: I think as soon as there’s this idea of a Muse who can ‘conjure’… one of the things that I thought was really interesting was when we were doing the scene research, when you were telling us how ‘the Muse exists because the idea is that we say they remember everything but we mortals don’t’, and so the Muse’s role is to kind of re-educate us or re-share with us all. Conjuring is a great word for theatre performance and storytelling. And I think as soon as you started tying all those things together, the different layers just started to slot in and merge in a really interesting way. 

Laura Swift: Something else that we were worried about with the modern framing was: how do you balance the fact that you’ve got this ancient world with incredibly high stakes, where you’ve got a mother nearly killing her own son and her son wanting to murder his uncle, versus any modern framing where, even if you have quite a high stakes modern drama, it’s not going to be like that. And we didn’t want it to be about the papyrologists – we didn’t want the heart of the play to be ‘there’s this guy who’s working on a papyrus and will he publish it or will he not publish it?’ Because we think, ultimately, it’s going to be really anticlimactic compared to the story of the son and ‘does he murder his uncle or not?’. Eventually we leant into the absurdity of the low stakes, that the high emotional point in the modern world is this really petty argument over control of the space in the office. The fact that one of the characters keeps putting stuff on the desk that the other character wants to keep clear, and that this, to them, is this sort of overblown huge emotional row, such that it then gets transformed into a Greek tragedy where they are the King and Queen who’ve been locked in conflict because he literally murdered her sons 20 years ago, and she’s never forgiven him, and yet she’s forced to marry him.  

Christine Plastow: As well as the myth and the idea of the papyrologists, you also worked with ideas from psychology about fragmentation and illusions – can you tell us more about that?

Russell Bender: We were obsessed with illusions, optical illusions, audio illusions, trying to play tricks on people’s memory, a lot of things that didn’t make it into the show in anything other than the most tangential of ways. We started getting Jon to try and recreate these sort of audio illusions.  

Jon McLeod: It was really fascinating, because there’s the idea of fragments in sort of a tangible way of piecing together bits of stories and what does that mean, but then, when you break them down even more, it’s taking the next level of ‘how small can you piece things together for us to be able to fill in the gaps?’. And you can take that literally in terms of sounds as well. So, as opposed to breaking down a sentence, you can break up a word, and how much can you break up a word, how can you break up a phoneme before people don’t know what it is, before it could mean this, or could it mean that? And then there’s also lots of different audio illusions which we looked at, which are really fascinating. There’s a scientist called Diana Deutsch. She has a lot of really interesting audio illusions, but we sort of found that they didn’t work theatrically. The reveal was too difficult to tell everyone, because, if the illusion works well enough and people don’t realise it’s an illusion, then when you do the reveal it’s not as… you know, you can’t do it in a Derren Brown sort of way. It’s: ‘you were listening to this but you didn’t think you were, believe me’.  It’s quite a difficult thing to d.

Russell Bender: There were also a number of them that only worked really well for audience members sitting exactly in the middle of a stereo sound, or if you were listening on headphones. 

Jon McLeod: Yeah.  A lot of it is to do with your perception of things – it’ll come in in your left and right ear, it needs to be perfectly balanced. But there were a lot of things that came from that, that weren’t used in the way we were originally looking at, in terms of a scientific way, but it was more of a stylistic way, filtering into the final showing. It was a little bit of a rabbit hole while being an interesting one at the time.  

Jasmine Hunter Evans: How did you go about designing the set?

Russell Bender: I remember a lot of those early design conversations, you [Lucy] were saying ‘this all sounds great but where are we?’, ‘what are we looking at?’, ‘what’s the world that you’re creating?’ I was like, ‘well, I don’t know, maybe we’re in a cabaret bar or maybe we’re actually going to start on a crime scene’.  You asked a lot of really good questions.

Lucy Sierra: Those conversations about the visual environment that we were going to be in, and the set design as it were, were really interesting because, you know, actually we were at the stage where we were still talking about the stories, so that’s why it was just like a big elastic band of ideas. But I think actually from my point of view as a set designer, it was actually the shadow puppetry that started to steer it in a way. 

Russell Bender: There was a lot of that kind of early puppetry language that we were starting to develop.  Jess quite quickly came in and started playing with really beautiful film noir shadow aesthetics, and the way you could shove something on an OHP and within five seconds you’ve got a kind of film noir scene. We were already interested in not seeing everything, and I remember playing around with what light and shadow could do, like holding up a piece of shaded Perspex.

Lucy Sierra: And actually I think once we started playing with the OHPs, and knew that that was going to be a really key part of the storytelling and explaining the detail of the Cresphontes story in a really gorgeous bold way, you know, it really started to affect what we would physically need in a space, therefore what it meant, where we actually were, even down to the actual technical aspects of the space as it became about the sight lines. When you’ve got something that slightly nudges stuff in one direction, then it’s amazing how quickly all the puzzle pieces can come together.

King Polyphontes [Clive Mendus] inspects a knife. Photo by Geraint Lewis.

Christine Plastow: As you’ve already alluded to, shadow puppetry is a central part of the play – how did you integrate that element?

Lori Hopkins: [The setting of the papyrologists’ office was] an absolute gift in terms of the shadow puppetry because the wonderful thing about that setting is that we can believe that those projectors exist in that world. You know, if it was a crime scene or a cabaret bar, then you’ve got this huge technical issue of, well...  what cabaret bar uses an overhead projector? And, actually, what works so well I think is that – ok, you’ve got the hidden projector behind the scenes, allowing you to create the illusion of images appearing where the audience can’t see how they’re created – but then you’ve got the projector that everyone can clearly see. All this stuff happening – they’re studying a papyrus that then comes together to create images and things like that – but it looks like it absolutely belongs in the world. It all sort of makes sense, the world made sense.  

Lucy Sierra: I think it’s important as well to take a little bit of a step back and go, well, why OHP and why shadow puppetry? I always loved the aesthetic, and thought it was really great that we are looking at something that is fragmented and is textual and being handled. And so, therefore, we are telling the story of this fragmented aspect of it in a textual, fragmented, handheld way. And, of course, shadow puppetry in itself has its own history that dates back thousands of years. And I just thought it was a really gorgeous link in that way and also because the performers were multi-roling as well. For me, I always think there is this collaborative sense of ownership with puppetry and shadow puppetry, that it’s live and is in the space. 

Russell Bender: Absolutely, it was a really good constraint. We went on a team visit to the Oxyrhynchus Collection, this was now 2018, during which I think a lot of things became clear. There’s these huge cupboards, floor to ceiling cupboards filled with papyrus, and I remember Lucy saying ‘just imagine, like an advent calendar, these different cupboards opening up’. There were a load of visual things we kind of lifted wholesale from the office. But also seeing the papyrus being handled and then starting to say, ‘well, how do we capture that on stage?’  it was the texture, the fact that the text from the papyrus is so special, and that once you put it in shadow, that feels somehow much more tangible. It lets you go on this journey of transformation: it starts as something that looks like people are brushing, cleaning, handling papyrus in this realistic way, something that belongs in this world, but then immediately the shadow takes on a magical quality that you can start to take on a journey.  

Lori Hopkins: Yeah, exactly. It’s a perfect medium for illusion because you can transform things, you can play with different materials and textures, and you can really sort of trick the audience into believing whatever you want them to.  

Jasmine Hunter Evans: Was there anything else about using the papyri that shaped what you did in the play?

Laura Swift: The scene which comes from the prologue of the play, where we see it from multiple different retellings, that came from the idea of how, when you’re a literary scholar working on these texts, it’s very difficult not to make assumptions based on your own beliefs about what happened in that scene. These are based on your beliefs about Euripides, or other Euripides plays you’ve read, or your unconscious assumptions about what this particular character is like.  That scene is quite similar to a scene in Euripides’s Helen where Menelaus is turned away by a gatekeeper. And I think because of that, subconsciously, I’d always just assumed that the servant character is a gatekeeper. And at some point when we were talking about it, I realised actually there’s no particular reason it couldn’t be a maid servant down at the washing pools, or one of the queen’s personal attendants, or all sorts of different characters, so I guess that gave us the idea of, well, ‘how can we replay that scene in different ways that don’t have to be authentically ancient?’ So we ended up with things that were quite silly, like suppose the servant’s drunk in a bar and is not making any sense because he’s speaking into his whiskey glass, or suppose the reason the scene breaks up is that a maid’s making up the room and keeps on going in and out, coming out with a dust pan and brushing, and clashing it around, and that’s why we can’t hear all of the dialogue. I think that was the core of the idea of ‘how much do we know for sure and how much are we actually speculating based on assumptions?’

Tom Espiner: All this stuff has come from these rubbish heaps in Egypt and archaeological sites and there is a sense that there’s just mountains of these things in boxes. I’m not saying chaos as such, but the potential for disorganisation and age, and huge tasks. But then there’s also this world of high-tech equipment which was being brought in. So, you have these two kinds of worlds which are both addressing the same thing and that I think fed into some of the character traits. You can find potential conflict and potential humour in those two different kinds of culture in the world, so there’s a kind of academic who was a bit more old-school, then one who’s a bit more fastidious.

The Muse [Anne-Marie Piazza] tears books in the office into Fragments. Photo by Geraint Lewis.

Jasmine Hunter Evans: That leads me onto the next question, which was what value do you see in relationships between academic scholarship and creative practice when you’re bringing them together in a play like this? 

Lori Hopkins: I know that when we did the talk at Oxford University with [papyrologist] Enrico Prodi and talking to him afterwards, he said that what was fantastic about it is being able to see that what you’re doing has a context outside of just academia. Rather than just studying these fragments for the sake of it, it’s being able to apply it to creative practice or seeing people get interested in it who are not part of that world, so people who are not interested in classics necessarily. That journey, of taking this ‘idea’ and turning it into a piece of theatre, allows benefit for both sides, I think. It’s having something that could be boxed in as ‘this is just something they studied academically’, to something that’s being given a different life and a different point of view. Getting a load of creatives together, the majority of whom had no idea about any of this before embarking on this project, suddenly being able to input into that – there will be a dialogue between these two worlds. I think it’s really interesting. I’m sure it works sort of both ways around as well, you know. The fact that we went on such a deep journey into the world of these fragments rather than just going, ‘oh, yeah, I think I want to write a play about this’, actually going, ‘well, let’s find out about this, let’s actually know what we’re talking about and then have a creative response to that’.  

Tom Espiner: I completely agree.  We were all hungry to get information from Laura and her colleagues.  It’s sort of gold dust for us all, as creators working in that environment, both in terms of story but also historical detail. I mean, the very idea of the Muse, the host initially, but who then became the Muse, and we get all this information about who the Muse was. So there’s this whole kind of extra world which is just so exciting. And there was one thing, when we performed it in Oval, we reconstructed the ritual, the sacrifice with the bull.  And the image of the axe was quite an important thing and we had used the image of the axe before when the mother was about to go and strike Aeyptus. And I seem to remember one academic that was watching was really excited about the idea of the axe as a symbol. Can you remember what that was?

Laura Swift: Yes.  I remember that. It was because the two things that are known about the scene where the mother nearly kills her son with an axe is that it’s a kind of climax of the play, and also that, ultimately, the son kills the king as a sacrifice. The axe is like a motif that goes through it. I never thought about this, but the axe was what was used to stab the sacrificial victim and the axe is what is used to nearly kill the long-lost son. But I don’t think we had consciously been thinking about that. I think it was one of these things that dramatically made sense because we had the axe, we knew about the axe, and we knew the axe had to be in the sacrifice scene because that’s a part of sacrificial ritual. Obviously in the ancient play you wouldn’t have seen the sacrifice because it would’ve been reported by messenger.  

I think it shows how working on [these texts] with performers and trying to re-perform them brings up new ideas, and makes you see it a new way that perhaps is not obvious if you’re just looking at them as words on a page from the context of the library. I think that was what was exciting about that moment was that you came to that naturally because you’re performers, and so your aim was to create something in performance.

Christine Plastow: Can you say a bit more about the idea of the fragment or fragmentation, and how those things offer both possibilities and challenges in the creative process?

Russell Bender: For a lot of the time we didn’t really know what we were trying to do with the show, and I think the guiding principle was to do with the excitement of bridging a gap in information – here is this much we know, and then we don’t know. Sometimes we don’t notice that we’ve leaped over a gap, sometimes we sort of carefully mark it out, intellectually steer as close as possible to understanding what might have been there. That thing of ‘what it’s like to be confronted with a gap?’ and ‘what are all the places in our lives where actually that’s a really human thing?’ It is why it’s so interesting to look at a papyrologist – whose job is to study and make sense of something where we cannot know what is there. The one thing that kept on coming up in every single aspect of the production is ‘where can we put more gaps, where can we put more fragments, what are the different ways we can respond to that?’ 

Laura Swift: We obviously could have just said ‘we want to tell a story based on the myth of Cresphontes’, but we had the central principles that there had to be fragments, and that fragmentation had to be at the heart of it. And I remember really early on in one of the first sessions, giving the performers just some fragments, and being surprised how positively they responded to the scarcity of information. I thought that their response would be, ‘well, this isn’t very much, what do you expect us to do with this?’ Whereas actually it made every word really powerful and thought provoking.

Jon McLeod: I think it’s also one of the benefits of this process being so long as well, it’s been the best part of a decade. To begin with, we were just looking at a lot of techniques, and you had these ideas of what worked or what didn’t work. And that naturally filtered through – we kind of had a palette to work from when it came to putting on the final piece. It felt like a natural point where we weren’t thinking, ‘well, what sort of different ways can we show fragmentation?’  We had all of the ideas simmering there, and then it got to the point of, ‘oh, how do we make a story?’  And we didn’t need to think of the mechanics as much.

Tom Espiner: The process was also fragmented by the pandemic. When the pandemic happened, and of course we were all in lockdown, everybody in this room, thanks to Russell and Laura, gathered together on Zoom and we made our own project. We set up a team of people, of collaborators, and when everything else was put on hold, we were able to work and make something else during the period of lockdown.

Laura Swift: I think also because it was such a long process, it meant that the different aspects more organically created the finished piece. For example, the design, because Lucy had been involved from quite an early stage. It wasn’t that we’d written a script and then went to design a show around the script, but that the design fed into the way we wrote, and then the way we wrote fed back into the design, and the puppetry fed into the song writing and into the script. It all developed together which was only really possible because firstly it was very collaborative, and secondly because it was a slow build process of many iterations.  

Lucy Sierra: To compare the objects and props that we had when we did the version at Oval, if you look at the list of the things that we decided we needed to tell those fragments of the story, they didn’t really grow much when suddenly we had more of a budget and more of a setting. We knew that we only needed two chairs, something that suggested a dinner scene for those moments and things like that, and so kind of leant on that experience to say ‘what actually is it that we need to tell this bit of the story?’ And so it meant that the actual setting, the environment, was more the kind of concept or wrap for the whole production, which is why it kept changing all the time.  But actually, when it came to the fragments of the story, it was very clear, because the storytelling was very clear, because that had been interrogated and explored in such detail that actually we’re all able to say quite quickly what it was that we needed to tell that story in the moment.  

Christine Plastow: You’ve talked a lot about the process and your ideas and how you brought everything together.  Our last question is how was it received - how did you feel audiences reacted to the play?

Lori Hopkins: I can speak about my own experience of watching it, because I worked on all of the scenes that contain any puppetry, and yet I didn’t see the play from start to finish until it was up and running, and I got to come and see it in Oxford. Having worked on it, it felt like something that was very, very weighty, and that could potentially be something that you’d go to a theatre and you watch, and you concentrate very hard, and you come out of it feeling kind of, you know, like you’ve learnt something. And what I found really joyous was when I watched it from beginning to end, and it was my first experience of actually hearing the words spoken and seeing everything, it didn’t feel like that at all, it felt like an incredibly playful yet coherent thing. I didn’t feel removed from it, it didn’t feel academic in a sense of, oh, you know, ‘I can’t follow this’. It was a journey of people trying to bring out a story, whether that’d be looking at it from the Muse’s point of view, or the papyrologist’s point of view.  It was fun, it was coherent, it was about fragments and yet it wasn’t fragmented in such a way that it was inaccessible.  

Russell Bender: It’s hard talking about how audiences have responded because you get a sense of a vibe from being in the room and you get a small sample of feedback from emails and forms and whatever, which I think tends to skew towards positive feedback. I think people were delighted by its unpredictability. That you walk in and it looks like it’s going to be a play set in an office, and then it goes on such a bizarre journey and impossible things come out of cupboards, and everything transforms and changes. I think people enjoyed the experience of trying to piece [things] together. We were often asking audiences to imagine and speculate. I think we could’ve done a better job of making them feel safe about when are you supposed to be speculating, and when you’re supposed to be following. But I think people enjoyed that speculation, and that sense of being invited to reach the wrong conclusions. I think people really responded to the theatricality of it and the totally different styles and forms and songs. People loved the Muse!

Lori Hopkins: You don’t often see puppetry presented in that way. Obviously, there are companies that use shadow puppetry as their predominant medium. And there are other companies that explore it perhaps in a slightly more digital way now. But I think the choice of using shadow puppetry, and using overhead projectors, meant that there was something fairly unique to it.  And I think that must have been really intriguing especially when you start to see that, ‘oh, hang on a minute, what’s happening now? What I’m seeing now is not what I’m seeing laid down on the overhead projector in front of my eyes, so there’s something else going on there’. That kind of theatrical trickery should be really applauded because it’s just not used very often. It’s a sort of a dying art in a way.  

Laura Swift: The point Lori made a minute ago - about it being quite hard to explain or market the play without it sounding like it’s very intellectual. I think probably quite a few people came expecting that this was going to be very intellectual, ideas driven, and actually the experience of watching it is quite playful and silly in many ways, and that was surprising and welcome. They probably went thinking ‘I’m going to watch an erudite play about a lost Greek drama and some specialists who work in an extremely niche academic area’, and then actually get a Muse who bursts out of a cupboard and tears up books, and sort of weird wacky shadow effects. And I think that element of surprise went down well. 

The Fragments creative team are shown around the Oxyrhynchus collection by curator Dr Daniela Colomo. Photo by Geraint Lewis.