The CastleA soldier returns from the Crusades.
One of the outstanding plays of the 1980’s, The Castle is a play of sweeping landscapes, visionary spectacle and pungent poetic idiom. Its tragic explorations of absence, desire and sexuality are worked out on an immense emotional and moral scale while the struggle between its characters liberates a painful comedy onto the stage. A co-production with Nottingham Playhouse, the Hebbel Theater, Berlin and L'Odeon, Paris.
SKINNER: First there was the bailiff, and we broke the bailiff.
Then there was God, and we broke God. And lastly there was cock,
and we broke that too. Freed the ground, freed religion, freed the body.
And we went up this hill, standing together naked like the old female pack,
growing to eat and not to market, friends to cattle who we milked but never
slaughtered, joining the strips and dancing in the commons, the three days
labour that we gave to the priests gave instead to the hungry, turned the
tithe ban into a hospital and found cunt beautiful that we had hidden and
suffered shame for, its lovely shapelessness, its colour all miraculous,
what they had made dirty or worshipped out of ignorance, do we now. -
ANN: No -
SKINNER: Just deliver it -
ANN: No -
SKINNER: Our bodies and our labour up to their groping fingers?
ANN: No.-
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Expecting his homecoming to be ecstatic re-union, he discovers that his
wife and the women left behind are determined to deny his right to
return to his estate and former way of life. The result is an appalling
conflict that destroys a society.