Making Fragments

Fragments is a new play inspired by the vast collections of ancient papyrus stored in museums around the world. The play is about the search forone of Euripides’ award-winning lost plays (Cresphontes) and puts its surviving lines back on stage for the first time in 18 centuries. With original songs and music by composer Jon McLeod and lyricist Victoria Saxton,and shadow puppetry designed by puppeteers Jess Mabel Jones, Fragments is co-written by leading Hellenic scholar Laura Swift and director Russell Bender, who have also collaborated with theatre devisors and experts from theworld of papyrus study and conservation. Fragments reveals the niche world of papyrological research while joyously celebrating humans’ fundamentaland age-old need to tell stories and to keep creating and recreating live performance.

We started developing Fragments back in 2014 when the Being Human Festival and Oxford University commissioned us to do a series of workshops exploring how to restage lost Fragments of Euripides. In 2017, we staged a workshop production at Ovalhouse and the Old Fire Station, Oxford. And in 2018, we were awarded a grant by the British Academy towards developing and producing the full production of Fragments. Since then we have visited specialists at the British Library, the British Museum and the Oxyrhynchus Collection in Oxford on our journey to bringing Fragments to the stage.

We are very grateful to the performers and creatives who have been an important part of creating Fragments, especially: Alistair Toovey, Ben Hadley, Bella Heesom, Jai Morjaria, Sarah Quist, Tanya Stephenson and Tom Espiner.

Thanks also to the many researchers and specialists who have offered us their time and expertise including: Mark Stokes at Oxford University; Peter Parsons, Daniela Colomo and Amin Benaissa at the Oxyrhynchus Collection; Peter Toth, Vania Assis at the British Library and Helen Sharp at the British Museum.