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‘Marriage hath many acts, and marriage placed upon the stage for all the world to see gains new scenes in retrospect.’
Inspired by the events of the Depp v Heard trial, The Defamation by Jen Tucker visualises an afterlife where a woman’s fate is debated and decided by tribunal. But something is rotten in this court. When Charity, loosely based on Amber Heard, arrives in the afterlife, she meets several of Shakespeare’s heroines who are also doomed to await trial, and patterns begin to emerge. As the women prepare Charity for court, they discover that their stories are not so different. Written in blank verse, the play aligns the 16th and 21st century, plucking Shakespeare’s women from their original plays and placing them on one stage. As present and past interact, the play exposes the treatment of women in the legal sphere throughout history, investigating good and evil, as well as the nuanced spaces between. Trapped within a rigid binary of innocence and guilt, virtue and sin, the women of The Defamation interrogate what it means to be a woman scrutinised in the public eye and explore the complex landscape of modern celebrity culture.