Women Front and Centre: Revisiting the Greek Chorus in Kae Tempest’s Paradise and Lucy Kirkwood’s Maryland

As they grapple with the devastating impact of events such as the refugee crisis and the Covid-19 pandemics on our very sense of a human collectivity, writers are turning with growing frequency to chorus and choric practices in order to reflect on the meaning of ‘being-in-common’. This article looks at the way the ancient Greek chorus has been refunctioned and politicised in Kae Tempest’s Paradise and Lucy Kirkwood’s Maryland. Both plays were produced in 2021, in the immediate wake of the lockdowns. Tempest’s Paradise is a full-blown adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes which was presented at the Olivier, the largest stage at the National Theatre in London, in a high-profile production directed by Ian Rickson. Maryland is a contemporary play about violence against women hosting a modern-day chorus of Furies; Kirkwood wrote her short protest piece in two days only and sent it to the Royal Court Theatre for a snap production as a script-in-hand performance. Beyond their evident differences, both projects place a female chorus centre stage and use it to examine the contradictory poles of individuality and communality in our increasingly fragmented civic space. Through their dialogue with the Greeks, Tempest and Kirkwood revive and expand the form of the community chorus in order to explore its possibilities as an instrument of personal and political empowerment, thereby rising to what they clearly see as a social as much as a theatrical challenge.