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Age recommendation: Equivocation is an exciting, dangerous, funny and provocative story, containing disturbing onstage violence and torture, as well as frequent strong profanity.

Please note: Children under 6 are not admitted to plays or other events.

e-Luminations: Robert Cecil
Click here to read an excerpt from Illuminations, OSF's 64-page guide to the plays.

Videos:
Production Preview (1:25)
Origins of the play (3:02)
Thoughts from the director (1:28)
More about the playwright (1:35)

Synopsis: London, 1606.William Shakespeare (in the play spelled Shagspeare, or Shag) has just been made an offer he can’t refuse: King James I wants him to write a play about the recently foiled Gunpowder Plot. Shagspeare is leery: It’s dangerous for playwrights to write about current events. And this event—a plot by Catholics to blow up the king, his family and his Protestant court—has horrified the nation. Robert Cecil, the king’s ruthless chief advisor, gives Shag the king’s script, telling him to just add some dialogue—and witches. The king wants witches.

The rest of Equivocation is about Shagspeare’s struggle to write a play that will please—or at least not offend—the king. But as he gets deeper into it, the task gets more complex—for himself as an artist, a member of a theatre company and a moral citizen.

The four actors that make up Shagspeare’s theatre company, the King’s Men, play most of the other roles: themselves, conspirators, executioners and court officials as well as characters in two unnamed plays-within-the-play that we know as King Lear and Macbeth.

But while the King’s Men may have typical concerns of their singular profession—like not liking their parts—they have a bigger decision than most: whether to risk taking on this perilous play that could get them imprisoned or killed.

Shagspeare writes. His daughter, Judith (played by a woman), who is the company’s laundress, picks up his crumpled script rejects. Their relationship is strained; Shag still mourns the loss of Judith’s twin, Hamnet, years ago, and secretly resents her surviving instead.

As the actors perform the new script, it’s stiff, propagandistic. Logistical flaws make Shag and the actors wonder if the plot really happened the way the government says it did.

To find out more, Shag visits conspirator Tom Wintour, who’s recently been tortured on the rack in the Tower of London. Wintour reminds him of the repression Catholics have suffered and how James had promised toleration, then reneged. In a flashback, the actors morph into the conspirators discussing in anguish the morality of their plan, which would kill the innocent as well.

What Shag learns in the Tower convinces him to rewrite the play as a trial, where both sides have a say. When Cecil shows up, bearing a purloined copy of the script, Shag dogs him about the holes in the story. Cecil promises appalling torture if he doesn’t carry through with the original script. The playwright gets to see exactly what Cecil means as Wintour is disemboweled in front of his eyes. Broken, he agrees to write the king’s play.

Act II begins in court, with the trial of Father Henry Garnet, who was considered an instigator of the plot. Garnet, who wrote A Treatise of Equivocation, handles the hostile and tricky questions skillfully.

When Shag visits him in prison, he begs the priest to teach him to equivocate. “Here are my choices, lie or die. I don’t want to do either.” Shag also wants him to prove he wasn’t part of the plot. Garnet says he successfully eluded the all-knowing Cecil for 20 years and that if he had plotted to blow up the king, there would be nothing left of him.

Shag writes a new play, about a king who gets murdered. Then word comes that Garnet has confessed. Distressed that Garnet might have lied, Shag returns to the Tower. The priest tells him that the government twisted his words to fit their story.

Shag runs from the Tower to the premiere of his play at the Globe Theatre. The play legitimizes James, refers obliquely to the Gunpowder Plot, has witches and raises issues of ambition and lack of conscience that strike home. It is Macbeth. James, who is watching, is pleased; Cecil is not. The company takes off for Garnet’s public execution, where the playwright and Cecil have one final confrontation.

Judith and her father have reconciled. In a soliloquy, she tells what her father did after Macbeth: very little original work. And the last four plays were very odd.—Catherine Foster