directed by Yvonne Brewster

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Samuel Johnson 1709-1784 Critic, Poet, Lexicographer

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Act 3, Scene 4

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" When Lear rushes off into the storm, accompanied only by the Fool and Kent, he crosses the divide between the social world and no-man's land, beyond reason and obligation. In Shakespeare's time, this no-man's land was very close, at the edge of the city and the village. The Heath was the huge expanse of England beyond the reach of enclosing agriculture and the centralising state, a realm of wild growth and darkness without police patrols, King's highways or lights."

"It was the home of escapees from village or paupers denied their parish settlements, vagrants escaping the oppression of wage labour, masterless men without land of trade of their own and madmen like Tom O Bedlam, fugitives from justice and old people abandoned or thrown out of their families. This world exerted a strong hold on Shakespeare's imagination."

"The heath of Shakespeare's time has now gone. The landlords fenced it in. Lighted ways were pushed through the darkness. The vagrants are now in the shelters, in the city co-existing with the wealthy and powerful."
Michael Ignatieff ""The Needs of Strangers" (1984)

"I am not writing of the "lower class" as that term is usually understood, but of the class even further down, the lowest class. . .the homeless. We are in fact in society - the despair of reformers and the misery of ourselves. For us there is no hope of better things. Our distinguishing feature is that we have no hope for the future; we have become so hardened in it that we accept, without dreaming of other possibilities our position. We go sullenly on despairing, or, rather, too hopeless to know despair, which only comes from unavailing hope, and we don't have any hope."

"It was just gone midnight. . .just down over the south end of the bridge these used to be some sheltered sears outside the church; but when they found we used them at night the good people of christ church removed them and would not open the church up for shelter so here we are under the bridge."

"I don't suppose I am a very desirable companion for anyone, for my coat is in tatters, my feet show through the rents in my boots and it would be impossible for a human face to wear a very good favoured expression under these conditions; but for all that I am not an actual dog, as every passer by seems to think me, I am the butt of everyone's scorn."
Anon. The Echo, London (1888)