Hip-hop and theatre? We’ve been here before – but a new production premiering at Dublin Fringe Festival is worlds away from Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda and the founding fathers of the United States. Jacobean theatre and drill music may not seem like the most natural of bedfellows, but +353 Presents: The Revenger’s Tragedy, at the Abbey Theatre, posits the theory that they have more in common than you think.
Kevin Keogh, a self-confessed hip-hop nerd, has adapted and directed a new version of Thomas Middleton’s revenge tragedy, which was first performed in 1606 and underwent a revival in the 20th century after centuries of neglect.
Keogh had the idea for the adaptation when Thisispopbaby, the innovative Irish theatre company, asked him to create a 15-minute cabaret-style show for its stage at the Beyond the Pale festival a few years ago.
“I was doing a lot of work with rave and techno music and making theatre in that space – which is how I linked up with Thisispopbaby to begin with,” he says. “I think they were expecting me to turn up with something in that sphere, and I arrived with a string quartet and a rapper.
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“But they actually didn’t even blink, fair play to them. And that was kind of the genesis of it all. I felt, like, ‘Okay, there’s something to be unpicked here’.”
Keogh was especially interested in how the themes of The Revenger’s Tragedy – toxic masculinity, greed, vengeance, a lust for power and a lot of (literal) backstabbing and double-crossing – correlated to modern-day drill music, the subgenre of hip-hop known for its ultraviolent lyrics.
“Originally I thought of it as this off-the-cuff idea, because I was reading some Jacobean text and I thought, ‘You know what? This reads like a rap album’,” the Dublin theatremaker says. “And then around 2020, when the whole drill movement started happening in Ireland, I thought, ‘This is so theatrical: it’s these kids in masks saying this really gruesome stuff’.
“But it is the gesture of writing it, recording it, shooting the video, making it all look tough and putting it on YouTube that is the violence, not what they’re saying.
“And that’s kind of the same for The Revenger’s Tragedy. There’s no real ‘good guy’ in the story; it’s this idea of deep, deep corruption, and the characters themselves are so flawed.
“But what I was interested in is Middleton writing that in 1606, perhaps being frustrated with Shakespeare, as a societal commentary on King Lear, and how that mirrors the drill scene in Ireland – [drill artists] writing from that same exact place: no care for what they’re saying, or how it sounds, or how it comes across, just ‘This is how frustrated I am’.”
Music plays a big part in this new adaptation, with an original score by Colin Fitzpatrick and Ire Adebari performed live by a 13-piece orchestra.
It started as a music project, with monologues from the play, Keogh says. “When I brought it to Beyond the Pale I was, like, ‘Cool, a music festival: I’ll do something music-orientated’. I texted my friend, saying, ’Hey, can you just make me some baroque string/drill-type beats?’
“And he texted me back, saying, ‘What the hell?’,” Keogh says, chuckling. “Basically, they sampled a lot of existing baroque string-quartet music, made drums and bass for it, and then renotated it.
“It’s a whole opera written on a laptop, essentially. I think about it very cinematically now, where it ebbs and flows. And it kind of breaks up the narrative – because there’s a lot of narrative to get through.”
The length and multiple storylines of Middleton’s play have been “chopped and screwed” for +353’s interpretation, which now focuses on three characters: Vindice, Lussurioso and the mother figure, Gratiana.
The original is set in a 17th-century Italian court; the new version is “in its own world”, with nods to the Jacobean era in terms of costume and set but with contemporary touches such as “the sound of tyres screeching”.
The two lead actors, Alexander Potgieter and Andrew Ajetunmobi, are rappers who had never acted before this production. It has been “a beautiful thing” to watch their journey over the past few years, Keogh says, as well as to offer representation at the national theatre for both black youth and young people in hip-hop.
He came across Potgieter, who plays Vindice, on social media several years ago and drafted him in at short notice for that first Beyond the Pale performance.
“We did a development period after that, and I brought in a voice coach and a movement coach,” he says. “Both of their journeys, from having literally never touched any kind of archaic text to what they’re doing in the rehearsal room now, are insane. Yesterday we had an argument about the plague, and I was just, like, ‘This is wild. Like, I found you on Instagram two years ago’.”
The opera singer Ellen Kelly, who plays Gratiana, has been similarly explosive. “Classical music and classical arts can be very rigid; there is a tradition there, a training that wants you to adhere to it,” Keogh says. “But she came in and tore up the rule book.”
Presenting a version of a play that confronts race and musical stereotypes was not a decision Keogh made lightly. In the early days of its development he reached out to Maiya McQueen, an American anthropologist, who later became the show’s producer.
“At the time that Kevin met me, I was working at the Hiphop Archive & Research Institute over at Harvard,” she says. “He reached out just to have a chat about what he was looking to make, if it was something that could be done ethically – which I really appreciated. He didn’t come and say, ‘I’m going to do this – help!’ He said, ‘Should I do this? Is this out of line? How do I do this the right way?’”
While other characters have been dropped from the narrative, the inclusion of the mother figure, to represent wider society, was “a very intentional choice”, Kelly says. “You can see, ‘Okay, this isn’t about them as people; this is about a sick society’.”
According to McQueen, “When you put two black men on stage and have them deliver the language that they will be delivering with this show, we run the risk of people walking away with [their only takeaway being], ‘Oh, that was really disgusting’, or, ‘Drill is really disgusting’ – which is not at all the case that we’re making.
“I think it challenges the audience to think further than just, ‘I’m seeing two black boys on stage who are saying grotesque things’. It requires a bit more intentional thought.”
She adds: “I think we’re really challenging conversations surrounding storytelling. What is ‘good’ storytelling, what is ‘bad’ storytelling? What makes a Jacobean tragedy better, or more relevant, or more competent than a drill song? So we’re really hoping that people will engage in that conversation really honestly.
And The Revenger’s Tragedy is also great fun, she says, grinning. “The music is insane, so there’s no pressure to be up with the language or the text. If people want to come sit and listen to our insanely good orchestra, that’s fine with me. We don’t want people to shy away from coming because the language is big and scary – there’s so much there to be engaged and understood.”
“It’s for the Abbey Theatre’s audiences, both current and future,” Keogh says, relishing the thought of presenting a provocative show at Ireland’s national theatre.
“The takeaway I want people to have is to think about the next kid they pass on the street wearing a tracksuit who makes rap songs in his bedroom. I love the idea that there is a Jacobean revenge tragedy inside each of their heads, just waiting to be written.
“The youth in Ireland are hungry for work that makes them feel but allows them to feel seen and engaged. And I think this is really doing that.”
+353 Presents: The Revenger’s Tragedy is on the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, from Wednesday, September 10th, to Saturday, September 13th
