“By Jove pull off one of the hardest tricks in theatre by presenting old stories in new ways, and making it seem natural.” Reviewer Tom Bolton on our 2017 Medea
The Gentle Furies was originally founded as By Jove Theatre Company in 2011. Over the next decade we made eight new shows together for audiences across London. In between, we produced one off events in partnership with universities and arts organisations, as well as a regular scratch night, LoveArts, in Bethnal Green. Our work evolved from experimental adaptations in black box studio theatres to installations in found spaces in partnership with local communities. The Gentlest Work proved to be our last show as By Jove, transforming us into the company as it stands today. You can find out more about the company’s journey here.
Our By Jove Years
2011-2012: The Women Screaming Beyond
We made our London debut in 2012 with The Women Screaming Beyond, which played the Courtyard Theatre in Hoxton for half a dozen performances. This completely mad show was a messy mission statement: full of creative ideas involving fruit and masks and chalked prophecies, full of righteous fury about the state of the world, we were figuring out the kind of work we wanted to make together. Both this show and the company originated in a smaller scale production staged the year before, Electra-Orestes. Both shows riffed on Sophocles’ Electra and Aeschylus’ Eumenides to tell the story of generations of women struggling to survive in a violent patriarchal world.
2012, 2013, 2015: Pride & Prejudice: The Panto
While making The Women Screaming Beyond we were clearly looking for some relief and started joking around about classic stories staged as pantos. From this we developed our next show: an experiment to see whether we could combine the tropes of panto with Jane Austen’s novel and make it feminist. Turns out that we could!
The first iteration was at the White Bear in Kennington – performing there is a rite of passage for an emerging company in London. The folks at the Cockpit in Marylebone saw the show and wanted us to brick to them the following year for the 200th anniversary of the book’s publication. Two years later, when the theatre was looking to start an annual adult panto for its audiences, we revived the show once again – with the Bennets more outrageous than ever in what transpired to be their final outing.
2014: Othello
We were invited by the CLF Art Café (based in the Bussey Building, a reclaimed industrial space) to make a show that reimagined a Shakespeare for their Peckham audiences. Our Othello was a queer Black woman in the modern British military; we put Shakespeare’s text in dialogue with new writing that spoke back to the racism and sexism we read in it. We R&Ded the show in February ahead of a run in August.
2014-2015: Before They Told You What You Are
This devised feminist and queer reimagining of Euripides’ brutal tragedy Bacchae was commission by a team of academics from the University of London, our first collaboration with a Higher Education group. They were interested in exploring different ways of being authentic to a source text when adapting it: our answer was to uncover the women’s side of the story. And given that the women’s story takes place in the woods, we brought a lot of soil on stage.
After the first iteration at Senate House Library in central London, we continued tinkering with the show before bringing it to our old stomping ground at Royal Holloway in summer 2015 for a new arts festival they were starting.
2016: Margaret of Anjou
This show was the start of our Season of Violent Women, a year-long collaboration with The Gallery on the Corner, two art galleries in Battersea and Tooting. It was also the European premiere of a ‘new’ play by Shakespeare, edited together from his Henry VI plays plus Richard III to showcase the extraordinary arc of the so-called She-Wolf of France. 2016 was the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, so theatres all over the world were staging his plays even more intensively than usual: Margaret of Anjou was developed by scholar (and Gentle Furies’ trustee) Elizabeth Schafer and dramaturg Philippa Kelly as a feminist statement about neglecting women’s stories in a year full of Lears, Macbeths, and Hamlets. It also had productions in the US and Australia.
May 2017: Here She Comes
The season’s second show, this time in the Tooting venue, was a one-woman epic poem written by SJ Brady. SJ developed the poem after playing Agave – who kills her son in Bacchae – in Before They Told You What You Are. SJ fleshed out this overlooked figure from Greek tragedy, imagining her life before, during, and after the events of the play. And this time we flooded the whole space with soil as part of an installation that was part forest, part living room.
October 2017: Medea
Our season’s finale, this was Wendy Haines’ re-imagining of the most notorious violent woman of all. This time we set up an installation inspired, in part, by Tracy Emin’s famous unmade bed. Audiences were locked into the gallery with a Medea split between three performers who collectively tell the story of how they came to an unfamiliar city only to be abandoned with her children by a cheating husband.
2020: Lockdown experiments
We started making the show that became The Gentlest Work in 2018. We had plans for a production in summer 2020 – but then Covid happened. Some playing around with the possibilities of online performance during the first lockdown led to a new audio recording of Here She Comes and an experimental rework of our Medea from the actors’ bedrooms, with our aim being to recapture the intense experience from the 2017 production in the gallery.
June 2021: The Gentlest Work
After the season, a chance encounter between one of our artistic associates and the renowned expert on ancient Greek gender and sexuality, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, initiated what became a joyous four-year collaboration. Nancy wanted to explore queer-positive representations of characters who experience same sex desire in ancient texts. Rather than write another book, though, Nancy wanted to explore that with us, practically!
Nancy’s focus was on Orestes and Pylades, two men from Greek myth sometimes understood as lovers, sometimes as friends. This allowed us to return to Orestes’ wider family traumas, the subject of our very first shows, and see them in new ways. We undertook several periods of R&D in 2018 and 2019, including a public sharing of emerging material during one of the hottest weeks on record.
Though in-person theatre had re-started, our online experiments led us to embrace an alternative approach as The Gentlest Work finally came to fruition. The world was changed and so were we. Instead of live, in-person performance, we created an online installation features dozens of videos, textual and audio fragments, and images – a digital maze that showcased all the queer possibilities of the characters we were working with.
The installation was originally available for a month in the summer of 2021. The turn to online delivery was made with very little budget to pay for a bespoke web platform, so we used the ‘found space’ of Padlet instead. Since 2021 we have been seeking funding to transfer the installation to a permanent, dedicated site. So, as of spring 2025, we have decided to re-release the installation as it is. You can find out more, and access the installation, here.
After The Gentlest Work, we started thinking about who we were ten years on after our formation – the outcome was a new name and new projects. You can read more about our company history here and about the current company members here.