Advice to the Players (And the Historians): The Metatheatricality of Mcguinness's Mutabilitie (Frank Mcguinness) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Sometime in the twelfth or thirteenth century BC, there may have been a war that inspired a wealth of classical literature. Unlike their nineteenth-century counterparts, contemporary historians now believe that the Trojan War actually took place. Whatever happened, the Trojan War is the very heart of extant classical Greek literature from Homer to Euripides. Frank McGuinness's treatment of history, indeed of the Trojan War itself, follows this model. Rarely has any play garnered the polarized responses that Mutabilitie received. In 1997, Charles Spenser called it 'one of the worst new plays by a major dramatist in recent memory', (1) but four years later John Waters described it as his 'best work'. (2) With an expansive dramaturgy, the improbable conjecture that Shakespeare encountered in Edmund Spenser in Ireland in 1598, and a running time of three and a quarter hours, the premiere of Mutabilitie taxed most London reviewers to the point of invective. Michael Caven's 2001 production in Dublin at the Samuel Beckett Theatre was better received, not least because that production more fully realized the play's non-realistic stagecraft.