≈ To Liberty ≈
The project involves the production of a short film and the reading of Oscar Wilde’s poem, To Liberty. Its purpose is to give primary school children the chance of expressing emotion through non-verbal communication. They will engage with sophisticated poetry that has relevance to our present world and the world of Wilde. It will also show to them and an audience, the character of Wilde the poet, something at variance with common perceptions.
Characters: Narrator, Liberty & Liberty’s Children.
Screenplay: The Narrator begins to address an unknown person’s children. As she is speaking, she approaches Liberty, with her masked children in loose monochrome clothing, ragged and stained. They are strange, feisty children, who sum up their character, expressing Wariness, Anger, Stealth, Courage, Self-Sacrifice and Unity. Throughout the Narration, the Children, fighters for Justice respond using movement, while their Mother Liberty is a stern and formidable presence. At the poem’s close, Liberty and her Children stand together, while the Narrator drops to her knees and cups the face of a child in her hands.
To Liberty
Not that I love thy children
Whose dull eyes see nothing
Save their own unlovely woe
Whose minds know nothing
Nothing care to know
But that the roar of thy Democracies
Thy great anarchies, their reigns of Terror
Mirror my wildest passions like the sea
And give my rage a brother.
For this sake only do thy dissonant cries
Delight my discreet soul
Else might all kings by bloody knout and treacherous cannonades
Rob nations of their rights inviolate
And I remain unmoved
And yet, and yet,
These Christs that die upon the barricades
God knows it, I am with them in some things.
– Oscar Wilde
