New Classics

While the Everyman is known for championing new writing, it has not shied away from re-imagining the classics to resonate with contemporary audiences. Their second production, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1964) relocated the story from Norway to Liverpool where the Lord Mayor was the editor of the Morning Post, hinting at local corruption. Despite the Echo reviewer’s scepticism about Liverpool as a spa town where the water was tainted by Runcorn’s chemical effluence, this bold adaptation set a precedence.

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In As You Like It (1967) characters donned miniskirts, and Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1972) was set on a Liverpool building site where a strike was taking place. Bob Carlton’s 1980s productions revisited Shakespeare. Return of the Forbidden Planet (1983), billed as Shakespeare’s forgotten rock n roll masterpiece, spoofed sci-fi films (particularly the 1956 Forbidden Planet) in a twist on The Tempest while From Jack to a King (1984) transformed Macbeth into a 1950s tale of rock and roll ambition. John Christopher’s No Holds Bard; Or Where There’s a Will There’s a Way (1989) went one step further taking Shakespeare’s ‘best bits’ on a world tour by the Royal Liver Shakespeare Company taking in the Moscow Conservative Club and Yates’ Wine Lodge in Dubai. Donkey-jacketed Andrew Schofield and Michael Starke, a pair of out of work labourers, have decided to ‘stuff bricklaying' and get into the arts courtesy of a £40 a week enterprise allowance and the show (complete with the Battle of Agincourt re-enacted on pantomime horses to a rousing chorus of ‘You’re gonna get your f***ing head kicked in’) was an apt send up of cost-cutting drama in the cash-strapped 1980s. More recently, the theatre returned to reinvented Ibsen with Bob Farquhar's The Big I Am (2018) a re-imaging of Peer Gynt, travelling from the north of England in the 1940s as bombs drop to Vegas, Dubai and beyond.

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Cross casting also helped re-invent how we read the classics. Chris Bond’s adaptation of the Restoration comedy, The Country Wife (1974), a play controversial for its sexual explicitness in its own time, featured a Masque of Flashers and gender-swapped roles, adding a fresh, provocative layer to the Restoration comedy. Recent productions saw Golda Roshueval as Othello (2018) whilst up the road at the Playhouse Adoja Andoh played Richard III (2023) continuing the tradition of innovative interpretations.