How it all started...

BARABAS is a version of The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, and is Hall for Cornwall’s main-house production of 2008. Unbelievably, our show will be the first professional, large-scale revival for nearly a decade of this the most controversial of Renaissance plays. Whilst we put on touring work from all over the world it’s important that we make our own work as well, giving local artists and our own staff to be part of a creative process right from the start.

The roots of BARABAS were planted in 2005 when we started OPENING LINES – a playwriting competition set up to encourage people of all kinds to write a short stage play. As everybody has a story to tell, we wanted to get people writing. We also wanted to find out just how many people in the south west were interested making plays. We had more than 100 submissions and in the end, we produced three of the works at Hall for Cornwall – by Cornish writers Jane Pugh, Henry Darke and Victoria Field. Since then, Hall for Cornwall has produced many more works by local writers, as well as all manner of projects.

After OPENING LINES came RESPONSES, a project that initially involved ten playwrights and national artists working together over the course of a year to write original responses to plays from the Renaissance. Last summer, in 2007, we staged extracts from five of the plays at Hall for Cornwall and brought together more than fifty professional Cornish actors, musicians, writers, designers and artists to create the work.

RESPONSES was all about getting professional artists to use the idea of the Renaissance to expand their own understanding of why we make plays today. Something we learnt from the project was that to make great ‘new’ plays you have to be able to understand ‘old’ plays clearly. Just because a play has been around for a long time and is in print in a million different editions doesn't mean it’s sacrosanct. RESPONSES allowed Hall for Cornwall’s staff to realise that we had the ability to make more work of our own.

Hall for Cornwall is an ambitious project - everybody works very hard all the time to keep it going – and RESPONSES involved staff from every department.So shortly after RESPONSES we started thinking about our next production....Barabas.