The value of salt

Sarah's second play:The Value of Salt, was commissioned by a senior performance lecturer at Roehampton Institute, Dr Joe Kelleher , who is also a member of Sideshow (formerly Theatre Pur). It was commissioned for an undergraduate module where first year theatre students take a play through every theatrical process, from inception to production. The commission had only one constraint and that was that Dr Kelleher had asked Sarah to rework Shakespeare's 'King Lear'. This was a huge challenge. In order to stand away from attempting to simply modernise this play, Sarah decided instead to write a text for performance. There were many influences that shaped this text, and many different kinds of retellings where the central story of 'King Lear' is present. She wanted the text itself to direct, using references to focus the performance; songs, war crimes and art critiques of Artaud to define madness. Texts that exist in parallels of everyday madness and a father's defining jealousy, texts that try to word war and love.

This is an extract taken from towards the end of the play.

Oracles:

Soldiers on battlefields cried out for their mothers
Soldiers on roads watched their blood flow in rivulets
and drew pictures idly with it.
They were good actually. Very representative.
Women reached critical mass
and took up the swords
Billowing grasses hid soldiers
overlooking villages
that had the potential for pillage
and they burned
with bullets raining from above.
A woman ran outdoors in exaltation
and held out her hands to feel the drops
and was sliced into one hundred equal pieces
by the gunner's expertise
Men burn down the street
burning with yearning to release all their fear.
A door moved.
Two soldiers swelled up and released all their fear
into the skull of a six year old boy.
He was wearing braces.
There are burning women everywhere you look
and amongst them marched the queens
breasts in breastplates
behind them, streaming like a cape of ill will,
darkness and death.
Were they fighting each other or did they march in unison?
I couldn't tell you.
They released arrowheads from fingertips.
Rank tornadoes exploded from their mouths.
They killed any man on sight.
Sights up.
The sniper's in the church tower
And the bell rings out for every bulls-eye.
It's been ringing for an hour
But there is nothing left to shoot at.
The soldiers hid behind their colleagues and
avoided looking in their eyes.
Eventually a pile was formed.
Ripe for carrion birds to hop amongst.
Soldiers ended up carving, on a Sunday,
all the maps, cut them up with scissors
into daisy chains.
Corpulent corpses guffawed in their bilious-ness
and the chains hung with human hands
waving a hello.
Many fathers found themselves in daughters' laps
fearing that they were not sane