“The Tragicall Historie of Agamemnon” by Kirk Dodd
Arrive 2pm for refreshments, reading from 2.30pm for approximately 2 hours (with intermission), finishing about 4.30pm.
We hope you can join us and a throng of industry guests for the reading of a new “Shakespearean” blank verse drama – “The Tragicall Historie of Agamemnon”. Using Shakespeare’s dramatic conventions, the play’s treatment conducts a thorough “Shakespeareanization” of the mythos of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.
After ten years of war, King Agamemnon uses the “Trojan Horse” to win the Battle of Troy and looks to return to his wife Clytemnestra, to account for sacrificing their teenage daughter to the Gods (without her permission) at the outset of the war. For ten years, Clytemnestra has ruled Mycenae as her own personal Queendom and has hired a “jester” to ease her melancholy. Thus Agamemnon exits the Battle of Troy but enters a new battle on the home front; a battle that welcomes him home with open arms—and a famous red carpet to test his hubris.
The play is shaped as a sequel to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and was selected as a semi-finalist for the Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries award run by the American Shakespeare Center; until Covid-19 lockdowns decimated their funding and the award was ceased before finalists could be announced.
Location: New Theatre
