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Your problem is that you want to think that the world is nice, that we can all just get along, cooperate. When the fuck have we ever done that?
—Wilson Wilson in Utopia.1
Near the end of the 2010 Dennis Kelly play The Gods Weep, it suddenly and strangely begins to "snow." Under the fall, the protagonists, Colm and Barbara, come to a disturbing realization:
Barbara:
Suddenly it starts to snow. They look up.
What?
Colm:
They hold their hands out.
Snow? It's not cold.
Barbara:
She rubs some in her hand.
Ash.
Colm:
Ash? Falling out of the sky? Someone must be burning something. It's not from near here. What do you think they're burning?
They stand for a moment. They suddenly run into the shelter, away from the ash. They brush it off them, desperate to get it away from their bodies. They stare at each other. They watch the ash fall (3.155).2
It is a shocking moment. Colm and Barbara retreat and seek cover from the snow because it is really ash—and the ash is coming from burnt, human bodies. The image recalls the industrial incineration of corpses in the Holocaust, the degradation of millions of people into mere ash. "We come immediately after a stage of history," observes George Steiner, "in which millions of men, women and children were made into ash" (43). The Gods Weep is a play that responds to the catastrophe of Auschwitz and the ongoing legacy of the Nazi death camps.
It is also an appropriation of King Lear, its "snow" derived from the stormy, "most strange" (1.1.214) and "out of season" (2.1.121) weather found in Shakespeare.3 Kelly sets the action of King Lear in a vast, transnational corporation, which the CEO, Colm, divides among his subordinates. Over the action of the play, the company collapses and, from its ruins, a full-scale war emerges. For most of the final act, Colm (the Lear-figure) and Barbara (the Cordelia-figure) are left stranded in a bleak, anti-pastoral world, while the rival factions continue the conflict. It is soon revealed that unimaginable atrocities are taking place, as witnessed by a sky totally inundated with human remains. Kelly uses King Lear for...