Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)

Synopsis: Video recording of Ann-Marie Macdonald’s comedic play performed by The Totally Portable Theatre. Constance Ledbelly, a young English literature professor from Queen’s University, goes on a subconscious journey of self-discovery. Constance theorises that Shakespeare’s tragedies, Othello and Romeo and Juliet, were originally comedies, and believes the ideas for the plays originate from the indecipherable Gustav Manuscript. She believes this because, if a wise fool archetype were reinstated into the plays, they could not remain tragedies. The only thing stopping her from showing sceptics like her tutor, Professor Claude Night, that she is right is her timid self. In a moment of despair, Constance is thrown into both her subconscious mind and the two Shakespearian tragedies to discover the truth about herself, and to find the lost fool with the help of Desdemona and Juliet. [Synopsis adapted from the play’s Wikipedia entry].
Language: English
Country: Great Britain
Medium: Video
Technical information: Colour / Sound
Recording date: May 1998
Duration: 123 mins