HARLOTS

About the show

Set in an underground refuge, Harlots imagines the women of Shakespeare’s plays who were forced into a terrible bargain: “die to live”. These are the circumstances Shakespeare gave them. The rest is the story he never wrote. Hidden beneath the world above, the women wait for the men who wronged them to atone before safely returning to the land of the living. But what happened during that waiting? Who else from the canon might have found refuge among them, and who never had the chance? Part critique and part love letter to the Bard, Harlots interrogates one of literature’s most enduring legacies, asking what happens when we shift our gaze away from kings, princes and tragic heroes, and towards the women whose stories have so often existed only in relation to them. Four hundred years after Shakespeare put pen to paper, it asks why these cycles of violence remain so painfully familiar.