Boxes are spread throughout the space. They are covered in words that are familiar, but seem to mean something more.

Antigone. Rules. Dresses? Vagina. Uterus. Uterus. Uterus.

The four women interact differently with the boxes.

Gentle. Afraid. Cautious. Deprived.

Secrets are shared and used as collateral.

Bruises and scars cover their bodies.

These women have escaped a darker past, but seem uncertain that the future they seek will ever come.

There’s a higher power, something cyclical.

Maybe they can rewrite this fate… or maybe… they just think they can.

Performed at the Old Red Lion Theatre in London, England, this piece used the portrayal of women in well-known fairytales as a lens through which to examine what it means to be a woman in present society. 

FERAL was the first show devised and performed by the Drifting Magpies Theatre Collective, formed at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. In the way that magpies poke at their reflections in mirrors to try and discern what exactly it is they are seeing, this group of theatre makers is endlessly on the quest to question the boundaries placed around creating ‘theatre’.

Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, a dystopian society has formed as a result of the strict rules placed on what it means to be the ‘ideal image’ of femininity.

How close are we getting as a human race to making this hypothetical future a reality?

Using the myth of lycanthropy… yeah, that’s right, as in werewolves….four women interrogate this question using real life experiences to tell a new version of a well known fairytale.