Home

Written by Damien Ryan. World Premiere. Sport By Jove & Seymour Centre. 29 Sep – 21 Oct, 2023.

Damien Ryan’s Venus & Adonis feels like a companion piece to Jessica Swale’s Nell Gwynn. Both reframe Shakespeare with a female protagonist, lashings of humour and cutting commentary on the battle of the sexes. The more you know your Bard, the more fun you’re going to have. But beneath the bawdy jokes and wry observations, more serious plot threads rumble.

Aemilia Lanyer (Adele Querol) is getting tired of seeing reflections of herself in the plays of her lover, William Shakespeare (Anthony Gooley). She’s a writer of her own, though no one will publish a woman. But Shakespeare has an idea, he wants to stage his epic poem, ‘Venus & Adonis’, at court – and seeing as it is not a public performance, he wants to cast Aemilia in the role of Venus. A woman playing a woman, almost unheard of! And for Adonis, he wants to cast one of his players, the young pretty Nathaniel (Jerome Meyer), who is used to playing the female roles… It’s all scandal-baiting fun till Shakespeare receives word from home about his son, Hamnet.

It’s clear Damien Ryan has done his homework, as the play is almost too eager to show you the depth of knowledge. The core of the story centres around dissecting Shakespeare’s sonnets for the truths behind the poetry, like his love for a man, his affairs with women and his feelings of guilt around his family. It’s refreshing to have a Shakespeare story that isn’t dancing between the raindrops of his more famous plays. Here we have a man who is tainted by guilt and grief, unable to express himself in prose, only poetry.

The tale of Aemilia Lanyer is new to me and intriguing, but is underserved in a play that is ostensibly her own. After opening the tale, and delivering a scathing monologue (Querol is outstanding in the role), she is all but side-lined as the sheer dramatic gravity of Shakespeare pulls focus. The emotional journey of the play is his, his loves, his deceit, his loss all drive the narrative despite the effort to put the spotlight on Lanyer. 

In fact it feels like there are two plays here, both competing for stage time. In one, Lanyer is the heroine, a brilliant but ignored writer who would never receive her due in a world where women were ignored. And in another, Shakespeare’s repressed emotions bubble forth in his sonnets, a complex mix of emotions about his lovers and his family, brought into sharp focus by the death of his son. Existing in the same world, they never quite gel into a single, clear story. 

The real highlights of the night are the performances. Almost everyone on stage is note-perfect. The comedy is sharp and organic, the rage justified and the love deeply-felt. This cast can handle verbose monologues, dirty jokes and physical comedy deftly – they’re a real joy to watch. And the meta-humour about contemporary theatre life provides some of the best comedy of the night.

Ryan’s script is full of gorgeous language as well, just maybe too much of it. At three hours, the play starts to punish with its long scenes and desire to be deep and poetic. It’s clear he’s a talented director too (Ryan pulls triple duty as writer/director and set designer), as the comedic scenes are tightly choreographed and, as I mentioned, the performances wholly human and honest. The set design is rich, but the use of projections is at times hard to digest.

Venus & Adonis is packed with great elements but feels overwrought and overwritten. Almost everything here is a little too, too much. We don’t need the nudity. We don’t need the fire. We don’t need the rain. We don’t really need Anne Hathaway to be honest. And we definitely don’t need to break the fourth wall for a cheap gag. They just distract from the terrific story and dynamic performances. What we need is faith in the material, and at its heart, the material is very strong indeed.