Nell’s Plague Play tells the story of the imagined elderly wardrobe mistress for Shakespeare’s company- The King’s Men- in seclusion during the plague year (and year of Shakespeare’s death) 1616. Told from the sole female perspective in a world ruled by men, the play explores how creatures of the Theatre (an inherently shared, communal experience) survive alone in pandemic isolation when they are exiled from the act.  In flashback, it also delves into the traditional roles of mothers and fathers, the power plays between men and women, kings and queens- real and imagined- and the unspoken sisterhood between princess and peasant. An Elizabethan/Jacobean Feminist Play-of-Sorts. Using magical realism and ritual, we straddle time and place, memory and current necessity, the quick and the dead, legacy and loss, in a journey to regain faith when it feels like all one loves has been taken away.  None too different from the actor’s dilemma in 2020/1 or a woman’s now in 2023!  I wanted to create a language of my own, somewhere between period, heightened text and modern English, from a purely feminine perspective to expand on the legacy of William Shakespeare’s powerful characters and stories, and to explore the parallel plague years of 2020 and 1616.