Gilgamesh

by Derrek Hines
Director Claudette Bryanston
In association with The Belgrade Theatre, Coventry

About the production

Gilgamesh; King of Uruk. Two-thirds divine. A jock, a bully. Seeks out his citizen’s weddings - demanding to sleep with the bride before the groom. Enkidu is sent to curb his evil rule, instead forms a deep friendship with Gilgamesh. They are a destructive partnership, but with revengeful gods watching surely it cannot last? But who will die and who will live?

Against a backdrop of divine beings, a wild man and a despotic young king Gilgamesh is the famous Mesopotamian 4000 year old epic. The oldest story in the world - it is a story of the heart brought firmly into the 21st century. The play is action packed, set in modern Iraq and yet retains its rich poetic text. It is a story of love, grief and global vandalism.

Reviews

“Gilgamesh (Chatto and Windus) is Derrek Hines’s version of the Gilgamesh Epic - not so much a translation as a vibrant and vigorous reimagining of the world’s first book, which should take its place alongside Heaney’s Beowulf and Hughes’s Ovid on the shelf of revivified classics”.
Adam Newey, The New Statesman

“Derrek Hines’s imagination was fired by it to create his own poem, published in 2002, staying close to most episodes of the original but expressing them through a language ranging from high rapture to low demotic. He has now turned this into a 90-minute play, and the excellent Classworks Theatre has done him proud with its staging of it.  Designed by Phil Eddolls, Claudette Bryanston’s production looks terrific before a word is spoken. On to a curtained recess, cut into red walls, is projected an image of our cloud-smeared world seen from space. Against it is silhouetted a man, who will turn out to be the young Gilgamesh. Above the walls, towering above a horizon of ziggurats, a woman stands, arms crossed, within an empty sphere. She is the Goddess of Life, a character inserted into the epic by Hines to introduce events.”
Jeremy Kingston, The Times, 4 Star review Feb 2007