The flesh moves on. The spirit pertains.
Begin ↓Ethos
We are named for Ariel's reply in The Tempest. Asked whether he pities the prisoners: Mine would, sir, were I human.
Were I human is the subjunctive: the mood of the counterfactual, of imagining what is not. It is the grammar of theatre itself — and a question for an age in which non-human machines increasingly speak in the first person.
Theatre is how that spirit gets carried forward, hand to hand, generation to generation. So we make work sited at the pressure-point where the oldest human questions meet the newest human machines — where technology tests, extends and threatens what it means to be a person at all. That collision is the company's whole preoccupation, and we intend to keep pressing on it.
Work
after Euripides · a new stage adaptation
A tech founder cheats death. His wife dies in his place. He commissions an AI reconstruction of her from her digital footprint, while a doctor attempts an illegal physical resurrection. Two versions of the same dead woman come to coexist — and someone must choose between them. Euripides asked what a life is worth twenty-four centuries ago; we ask it again, of the machines now offering to extend one.
In developmentAudio drama · after Karel Čapek
An adaptation of The White Disease for radio. A plague touches only the powerful; only one doctor holds the cure, and he has conditions. A black comedy about white supremacy.
In developmentFilm screenplay · after Love's Labour's Lost
Shakespeare's comedy of renunciation transplanted into the London AI-startup world. Four founders swear off everything except the work. Everything except the work arrives anyway.
In developmentWe are such stuff as dreams are made onThe Tempest, IV.i
Approach
We take classics and new writing and pressure-test them against the present — above all, the technological present. A play earns its place on the slate by answering one question: does the spirit inside it still speak, here, now, to a room full of people holding supercomputers in their pockets?
When the answer is yes, we produce it properly: strong directors, serious casts, and a commercial discipline that treats audiences as intelligent adults with other things they could be doing tonight.
People
Founder & Artistic Director
Actor, writer and producer. Founder of Were I Human.
Contact
Producers, venues, press and collaborators:
Press and producer enquiries welcome. We read everything; we reply to most of it.