“King Lear With Sheep” was first staged in a London warehouse last summer, then had a two-night revival at a farm in Sussex, on England’s southern coast. Now it will appear at the Courtyard, an interdisciplinary space in the hip Hoxton district.
The production’s writer and director — Heather Williams, who uses the pen name Missouri Williams — is a 2013 graduate of Cambridge University. She said she had conceived the show in a post-baccalaureate year abroad at Harvard and pitched the idea to a student theater group there, which “rejected it because it was too dirty,” she said in a telephone interview.
The production, which lasts under an hour, centers on a director character who decides to stage a production of “King Lear” starring sheep. In the face of the animals’ indifference, he breaks down and begins to perform the tale himself.
Ms. Williams said that the production aimed for humor but also to get at some of the richer themes that underpinned Shakespeare’s work. “I wanted to use the idea of non-cooperative actors to explore the themes of ‘King Lear’ itself,” she said.
“Because Cordelia’s an actor who refuses to act,” she added, referring to the title character’s youngest daughter, who is disowned after she declines to flatter her father the way her sisters do.
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