Dennis Kelly’s The Gods Weep at the Royal Shakespeare Company

This chapter focuses on Dennis Kelly’s work with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in order to explore how canonised and contemporary playwriting practices intersect with the work of this playwright and this company. Now largely overshadowed by the success of the multi-award-winning Matilda the Musical (2010), this chapter considers Kelly’s first work for the RSC, The Gods Weep (2010), in order to interrogate the role of history and canonicity in Kelly’s praxis. In part a response to Shakespeare’s King Lear, The Gods Weep displays a complex, often ambivalent, relationship to its source material. In contrast to other RSC works that respond directly to a specific source such as Mark Ravenhill’s Candide (2013) and Anders Lustgarten’s The Seven Acts of Mercy (2016), I argue that it is precisely this ambivalence towards Shakespeare that frustrates critical opinion and challenges the ideology of reciprocity between past and present that continues to frame the work of contemporary writers like Kelly at the RSC.