Rob Myles & Chronic Insanity Launch Shakespeare Against The Machine Digital Theatre Protest Series Ahead Of General Election

Actor & Director Rob Myles (The Show Must Go Online, The Illuminated Text) has partnered with Chronic Insanity Theatre (24,23,22, 52 Souls, Puncture the Screen) to create a new digital theatre intervention, Shakes Against The Machine.

The series puts Shakespeare's text into direct conversation with the last 14 years of UK government, releasing a new episode every day in the run up to the General Election.

This is political protest theatre delivered through the medium of bite-sized social media clips, juxtaposing headlines about the corrupt, capricious and clownish escapades of Britain's ruling class with Shakespeare's direct condemnations of the same.

Rob Myles, a multi-award-winning digital theatremaker, said of the project, "When Shakespeare was writing, there was no freedom of speech, and the Master of The Revels (the censor) insisted that plays affirm the status quo to be performed. Yet Shakespeare spent at least as much time challenging the status quo as he did affirming it, and there's no top-down insistence on that, which makes it far more interesting to me. It's an understatement to say 'something is rotten', so now we're leveraging Shakespeare's cultural clout to draw attention to it, before the nation goes to the polls. The passages themselves needed very little to make the parallels obvious. Our hope is, Shakespeare's words will make people willing to listen who otherwise might not be, and show how the challenges we face are now at the same tragic scale as some of his darkest plays."

Chronic Insanity Artistic Director Joe Strickland added, "We tried talking to theatres about staging this project in person and people came back to us to say that, essentially, they weren't able to put something on so critical of the past decade of government in the current political climate. People say they want theatre to be current and provocative, but those with the keys don't echo their words with their action and, with the closure of many local independent theatres, if we hadn't already been confident with making online theatre then we'd have nowhere to go. Theatre has carried on throughout the pandemic and massive cuts to arts funding, but it will not survive this sort of censorship without digital theatre intervening with gate-keeper free, website-specific theatre projects that feel at home in online spaces and tell stories directly to the people, as theatre has always done and hopefully will do once again some day."

The series features diverse actors from a wide range of backgrounds speaking to the issues they expressed a passion to confront. Both creatives hope the piece will continue to have a life of it's own, and encourage other actors and creatives to respond with their own pieces, with support available to those who wish to.

A new episode will drop every day until July 3rd. Check your socials daily for #ShakesAgainst or see the web page here: https://chronicinsanity.github.io/ShakesAgainstTheMachine/

Creator - Rob Myles 

Directors - Rob Myles, Joe Strickland

Editor - Joe Strickland

Actors - Amelia Parillon, Tom Vanson, Amy Ace Armande, Jamie Stewart, Blioux Kirkby, Lachlan McCall, Carys McQueen, Dominic Brewer, Doug Deans, Lee Ravitz, Luwa Adebanjo, Sulin Hasso, Meg Hodgson, Karim Hadaya, Lily Bailes

Photo Credit: Ellen Schaffert

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