By Jove
The eight shows that led to the Gentle Furies
Before we became the Gentle Furies, we were By Jove.
Founded 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.
“By Jove pull off one of the hardest tricks in theatre by presenting old stories in new ways, and making it seem natural.”
We made our London debut in 2012 with 'The Women Screaming Beyond', a riff on the story of Electra, her brother Orestes, and the Furies that haunt them. It 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.
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: 'Pride & Prejudice: The Panto', 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 show proved really popular with audiences, with runs in 2012, 2013, and 2015.
In early 2014, 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 audiences in Peckham. The result, 'Othello', featured 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.
'Before They Told You What You Are' was a devised feminist and queer reimagining of Euripides’ brutal tragedy 'Bacchae' that was commissioned by a team of academics from the University of London in 2014. 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. The show was revived in 2015 (with even more soil).
In 2016 we began our Season of Violent Women, a year-long collaboration with The Gallery on the Corner in south London. The season opened with 'Margaret of Anjou', the European premiere of a ‘new’ play by Shakespeare that stitched together material from the Henry VI plays plus Richard III to showcase the extraordinary arc of the so-called She-Wolf of France. It was developed by dramaturg Philippa Kelly and our trustee Elizabeth Schafer. The production proved to be a timely reflection on anti-European fervor and women in power - it opened in the wake of Brexit and Hilary Clinton's presidential campaign.
The season’s second show, 'Here She Comes', was a one-woman epic poem written and performed by SJ Brady in 2017. SJ developed the poem after playing Agave – who kills her son in 'Bacchae' – in 'Before They Told You What You Are'. She fleshed out this overlooked figure from Greek tragedy, imagining her life before, during, and after the events of the play. And this time there was *even more* soil.
Our season’s finale, 'Medea', was Wendy Haines’ re-imagining of the most notorious violent woman of all. This time we set up an installation inspired 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 for her cheating husband to abandon her and her children.
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 that culminated in 2021's 'The Gentlest Work'. We developed the show throughout 2018 and 2019, preparing for a full production the following year. Then Covid hit. So we turned the material we had into a vast digital installation featuring dozens of videos, textual fragments, audio clips, and images. The show proved to be By Jove's last, triggering post-lockdown reflection that led to us reimagining the company as the Gentle Furies.