The ongoing shutdown of most theatres across the globe has not stopped theatre artists from creating innovative ways to engage with Shakespeare. Evelyn O'Malley, one of our collaborators through the Willow Globe theatre in the UK, is also a professor at the University of Exeter. When she and her students found themselves separated by pandemic measures, they channelled their discussion of Cymbeline into a visually and intellectually gorgeous collaborative zine. Read below for Evelyn's description of the project, and click the image below to download the Cymbelzine! 

"As the government response to escalating cases of Covid-19 dispersed some University of Exeter drama students across the country, leaving others confined to their accommodation in Exeter, unable to travel home, a small group gathered for a week online, accepting daily creative invitations to venture beyond the threshold of their immediate living spaces in search of an Anthropocene Cymbeline. Each evening the students uploaded elements of their creative work – parts of which are represented in this zine – with one another. The following morning we would meet to share our responses and extend our thinking as provoked by the process. Our conversations about the play were inflected by the abrupt changes to living necessitated by the global pandemic, by the shift in our relationships to indoor and outdoor spaces and to nonhuman nature, by the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter actions around the world, highlighting the imperative of Ursula Heise’s connected “sense of planet” (2008) from our newly place-bound living.

Jessica Thompson, the project’s research support intern, took on the role of documenting our “retreat” and I hope that leafing through this Cymbelzine gives you a flavour of a patch of space salvaged for careful and creative collectivity at a queasy time.

We still dream of extending this preliminary work to an in-person performance of a devised adaptation to share at The Willow Globe next summer."