ABSTRACT
In 2014, Missouri Williams’ King Lear with Sheep was first staged in a warehouse in London and then in a revival at a Sussex farm; in August of 2015, a longer run was staged at the Courtyard Theatre in Hoxton, and yet further performances ran into the fall. At once an interpretive adaptation of King Lear (chosen for its centrality in the English literary canon overall and its density of animal reference) and also a meditation on theater itself, the performance garnered the attention of the international press and abundant public interest. Pirated videos and enthusiastic audiences attested to the fact that, as Williams put it, she had “touched a nerve.” Writing for the New York Times, Christopher Shea summarizes the dramatic action: “The production, which lasts under an hour, centers on a director character who decides to stage a production of King Lear starring sheep. In the face of the animals’ indifference, he breaks down and begins to perform the tale himself.” But Shea’s sleeping proposition of animal “indifference” begs the question the event seems built to ask. Is our conception of the theatrical event, as such, freighted with unexamined species presumptions? This chapter will address how the occasion of King Lear with Sheep (the unfolding performances, Williams’s play-text, and the cultural surround they generated) suggests our conception of the theatrical event has been all-too-human.
How does the employment of sheep as actors highlight the nonhuman potential already embedded within the theater? How do nonhuman animals onstage defy the notion that they are “indifferent” stage “properties” and challenge the humanity of acting and of representation itself? What implications do sheep actors have on genre-based presumptions of dramatic legibility? Finally, what new horizons does King Lear with Sheep open for reading historically? One review referred to the sheep as an “impassive flock, whose presence render(s) everything tragic and wholly ridiculous.” King Lear with Sheep, however, might more plausibly be said to render humans tragic and ridiculous—or at least to beg the question of humanity as much as it does of animals. After a foray into the etymologies of “silly” and “seely” as they pertain to both human and sheepy creatures, this chapter (in Shakespeare’s parlance) asks “who plays the sheep for whom”?
