Pissed-off Yorkshire Actors Shutter Play They Haven't Read

Load of Bollocks: Theater News Theatre News
When The Show Is Oh No No-Go: Pissed-Off Yorkshire Artists Skip Audition and Shut Play Down Before Reading Script.

On Wednesday, September 19, several Yorkshire artists received an invitation to audition for a play called “The Adventures of Robin Hood” by playwright Roger Screwe. The play is the second production in a series of Screwe's historic plays called “Tales of Merrie England.” The ugly truth is “The Adventures of Robin Hood” is inspired by the fraudulent 19th-century British writers who distorted an ancient legend to make Robin Hood a self-exiled Saxon noble fighting Norman lords. Both the original legend and the subsequent Victorian confabulation have no basis in fact! According to Wikipedia and most historians, “Robin Hood” never existed at all.

The production, which was slated for a December 2018-February 2019 run at Dolamite Theatre in Danby Wiske, was not only written by the Irish playwright Roger Screwe, but was programmed to be directed by the Liverpudlian director Jennifer Lastnamehere. Over the course of the past few days, actors in the Saxon and Norman communities in Yorkshire have called for the show to be withdrawn from Dolamite’s upcoming season. Load of Bollocks asked some of the artists who were invited to audition for “The Adventures of Robin Hood” to comment on why they are speaking out against this production:

According to Saxon actor Kenneth Rawhead, “Who’d’ve thought in 2018 we’d be back to Robin fannying about in Sherwood Forrest, eh? It’s one stereotype after another, and no lie. The Saxons live in forests and shoot arrows. The Normans are fat, speak bad French, eat quail and the like. Wot a load o’ rubbish, that! It’s simplistic, in’t it? That there programming stirs up like Saxonphobia and Normanphobia and I dunno all wot else as I ain’t read the sodding play. Have a real Yorkshireman and/or Yorkshirewoman put pen to paper or finger to keyboard or what have you, or don’t write the play at all!”

Welsh actor Ian Fluellen noted, “That scouse bitch asked me to audition—I spit in her face, I did! ‘I’m Welsh, you bint, are you blind?’ That’s wot I said, I did. It’s wrong on every level, this. You got Saxons playing Normans and Normans playing Saxons, and wot’s with the sodding pantomime horse, eh? Real horse or no horse, I say! Bloody abomination, that. Kiss my leek!”

Cornwall-based artist and activist Ella Leek quickly added that, “As an artist and an activist, I am outraged at the disruption Brexit is causing in the—oh, this isn’t about Brexit? Sorry. I’ve done five interviews this week and I just naturally assumed … sorry.” 

After three days of back and forth between artists in Yorkshire and administrators at Dolamite, the play is now being pulled, to be replaced by a different, and entirely uncontroversial, script as yet to be announced or, for that matter, written.