Long has historical fiction fascinated us, with a moment in history able to hold a mirror up to our modern ills. What, then, are we to make of the fact that at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the 1605 attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament seems to have inspired not one but two separate theatre companies?
Playwright Emma Howlett’s The Plot, produced by her company theatregoose, takes inspiration from the consensus that the brutal torture and execution of its plotters influenced William Shakespeare’s work Macbeth, estimated to have been written around the same time. The Plot begins in the aftermath of the attempt, with two of the accused awaiting their trial. While the gunpowder plot of its title has already passed, across the river, Shakespeare writes his own tale of attempted overthrow.
A former student of BA Ancient and Modern History at Oxford, Howlett was “thinking about the idea of the reshaping of a story by different people with different vested interests” while writing her play. Indeed, Macbeth, a drama rather than a historical artefact, served Shakespeare well, ingratiating him with the monarch James I of England and Ireland (who was simultaneously James VI of Scotland) due to its anti-uprising rhetoric and flattery of the Scottish royal line. Who’s to say what a Britain without Macbeth would look like? Perhaps the Gunpowder plot would sit differently in the British psyche.
Britain today is a nation prone to revisionism from those in power, and the intoxicating fictions that uphold its colonial past can seem stronger than ever. “With history, you have to be careful. As a historian, I have this respect for treating the past with accuracy and not misrepresenting things in a way that would be damaging or dangerous for what those stories mean for us,” Howlett cautions. Against the backdrop of misinformation online driving us further apart than ever, turning us away from one another and towards conspiracy, The Plot asks, “what is it in the British identity today that is rooted in this idea of there being an enemy amongst us, of loving the cloaks and daggers, something happening in the dark?”
At first glance, WIT? Theatre Company’s (Lucy Buncombe, Ross Tomlinson, Tom O’Kelly and Kluane Saunders) Remember, Remember! may seem like the antithesis to Howlett’s heavily-researched approach. It is a high-energy musical which, to quote director Alex Pritchett, “exists purely to make people laugh… If you’ve always wanted to know the true story of the Gunpowder Plot, then you should probably Google it.” Yet for all its campy inaccuracy, there seems to be the same wish driving it: the hope that, according to Buncombe, “[Audiences] come away knowing that the Gunpowder Plot wasn’t necessarily what they thought it was!” As opposed to Guy Fawkes who has become ubiquitous with the plot, Remember, Remember! follows the lesser-known plot leader Robert Catesby for “an unapologetically queer retelling of a story that we all learned a little about in school.” As Buncombe explains; “The second we discovered that Robert Catesby was this underdog, that was a really nice hook for us, and an angle to go [down] that wasn’t the typical, expected Guy Fawkes route.”
“Because our show is so far removed from the truth, it’s given us a lot of creative licence to make some performance choices that are perhaps a little bit far-fetched,” she says. O’Kelly confirms that the lack of historical accuracy allowed the team to have more creative freedom, stating; “You don’t know much about these people [beyond] the historical things, so we have just made up personalities.”
In reappropriating the story into something unapologetically uplifting, one could argue that WIT? Theatre are opposing Howlett’s clarion call for responsible storytelling. But on the other hand, they’re satirising how much most of us simply don’t know about our collective past. So while they may themselves say that it’s all in search of a laugh, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a powerful reminder in there, one that echoes Howlett’s cautionary message: that we are all susceptible to the rewriting of history.
Whatever their differences, one thing’s for certain about the two productions. They’re both guaranteed to bring the house down.
The Plot, Summerhall, 6-31 Aug (not 18, 25), 7.30pm
Remember, Remember!, Pleasance Dome, 5-30 Aug (not 17, 24), 5.15pm