Abstract

ABYSS blends theatre, live art, poetry, spoken word, living history and literature in a one woman show that interrogates our relationship with art, literature and ourselves. Drawing on references from the worlds of art history, literature, science, theatre and politics, ABYSS focuses on stories of women who drowned throughout our cultural past. Specifically, three figures inform this narrative: Shakespeare’s Ophelia (in original literary form, and in her eternal embodiment in John Everett Millais’ Romantic painting), Virginia Woolf, and the poetically immortalised Lady of Shallot. Seen through the eyes of a central female character - a young science postgraduate preparing for her PhD viva on the physiognomy of drowning, ABYSS seeks to blur boundaries between “theatre”, “performance”, “lecture”, embodying a physical and textual space incorporating - but not beholden to - all these things.