Richard Ashby on post-Holocaust Shakespeare

In a guest film from New Swan Shakespeare, Richard Ashby talks to Julia Lupton about his new Edinburgh University Press book, King Lear ‘After’ Auschwitz: Shakespeare, Appropriation and Theatres of Catastrophe in Post-War British Drama. The book analyses appropriations of King Lear from the 1971 Edward Bond play Lear to the 2010 Dennis Kelly play The Gods Weep, and makes the case that post-war British playwrights have used the play to respond to the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Richard and Julia discuss the genesis of the book; why King Lear has become a central play in post-Holocaust theatre; the relationship between the Holocaust and climate change in The Gods Weep; and the theatre company Forced Entertainment, whose work includes Five Day Lear, Table Top Shakespeare and, in the period of the Covid-19 catastrophe, Table Top Shakespeare: At Home. They also touch on King Lear and the writings of Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, the work of historian Timothy Snyder, and the Austrian émigré artist Oskar Kokoschka.