Equivocation: From the Director

London, November 5^th, 1605, midnight. The King’s guards, acting on a mysterious tip-off, have just discovered Guy Fawkes skulking in a chamber below the Houses of Parliament. Next to him stand thirty-six barrels of gunpowder. In a few hours’ time, King James I of England (formerly James VI of Scotland), his Queen, their oldest son, the cream of the English nobility and the leaders of the Anglican Church are due to gather there for the annual Opening of Parliament.

When the story breaks and the enormous implications of the miraculously-avoided catastrophe become apparent, the whole of London is feverish with speculation about who’s behind it. For a wily politician like Robert Cecil, still struggling to find a way to stabilize the country after putting James on the throne, the chaos presents a perfect opportunity. But he needs the right narrative.

As the thirteen Catholic plotters are hastily rounded up, among their possessions Cecil’s men find a book by Jesuit priest Henry Garnet, titled A Treatise of Equivocation. In it, Garnet explains how devout Catholics can avoid telling the truth even when questioned under oath and still keep a clear conscience.For Cecil, its promotion of deliberate deception can easily be interpreted as threatening the nation’s entire social contract. And if the plotters can be framed as pawns in a game played by the Catholic Church, Cecil has the story he’s been looking for. Now he just needs to convince England’s most popular playwright to tell it.

Over at the Globe Theatre, Master Shagspeare is busy wrestling with his new ‘experimental drama’ King Lear. Much to the consternation of his theatre company, he’s trying to write the truth of what it really means to be human. Can he put that aside and write a blatant piece of propaganda about what happens to those who plot and deceive to kill a king - especially when it becomes clear that the government story includes some decidedly ‘alternate’ facts? 

As fiction, truth and other people’s perceptions of it increasingly blur together, Equivocation explores the personal cost of perpetuating what we know to be a lie - and our deep moral investment in telling the real truth, especially in difficult times.

Jenny Hollingworth, Director