Review: BEOWULF, A RETELLING at Taffety Punk Theatre Company

“So I’ve got a story to tell you. It’s a good one.” Marcus Kyd paces the small stage of the black box theater at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop where the house has been arranged like a comedy club. The lights slowly dim over friends and strangers seated around small tables, eating popcorn and drinking mead. And the story begins.  

Storytelling is one of the oldest human traditions, present in every culture across time. Taffety Punk’s Beowulf, A Retelling revives this ancient tradition in its purest form. This is not the kind of one man play with a costume change every ten seconds, with the drama and sleight of hand involved in elaborate cues, musical interludes, or avant-garde inventions. Taffety Punk co-founder and artistic director, Marcus Kyd, simply narrates the ancient story of Beowulf in the oral tradition from which it came. Throughout the 90-minute show, he maintains a casual, conversational tone. He even interacts with the audience and offers breaks to fill up on mead - which is delicious. Sometimes the color of the lights shifts or fades; sometimes Kyd creates sound effects with a guitar or drums to help narrate a fight scene. But these subtle additions don’t detract from the impression of a guy telling a story in a bar - A VERY OLD story, with very old values. 

Beowulf is the story of a hero who defeats a man-eating monster, then a dragon, and becomes the king of a great land. It’s a simple story, but foreign in many ways to modern sensibilities. In the ancient heroic tradition, virtue is inseparable from physical courage and strength. The hero tends to be strongest man in the room (Hercules, Achilles, Beowulf). Over the years, we’ve evolved our view of heroes to be broader and more nuanced - often starting from the weakest person in the room who has to overcome their limitations, the underdog (Captain America, Harry Potter, Violet Sorrengail). What a culture gains in this value shift is obvious, but Beowulf, A Retelling draws attention to the more subtle point of what we lose.  

In many ways, modern culture has moved away from the physical. We still value physical courage and strength, but we’re more focused on intellectual virtues like kindness, wisdom, and inclusivity. We’re more focused on our individual, internal battles than external foes. So we face a problem when someone comes along who does not care about kindness, wisdom, and inclusivity. Someone intent on using their power to hurt and destroy, who cannot be reasoned with or won over by empathy - a bully, or in ancient parlance, a monster. 

There are many examples of our collective failure in this regard. Large and aggressive personalities go unchecked because no one knows how to stand up to them. Think of the cruel boss everyone lets rule over his employees with an iron fist. Or the bystander effect, where whole groups of capable people will watch a violent act and fail to intervene. We won’t get into politics... In these situations, we could use a hero like Beowulf, a hero willing to run into battle, face the bad guys head on, and fight to the end heedless of the personal consequences. But it’s rare today to hear a story that celebrates these simpler virtues. 

This alone makes Beowulf, A Retelling stand out. But what makes it even more special is the audience experience designed to parallel the story and its values. The very space is set up to mimic the mead hall, Heorot, in Beowulf’s tale. It forces a communal and physical experience. The production is kept simple, just like the story. And the value of storytelling itself is explicit. Of course through Kyd’s narration but also via his detours to contemporary stories that bring these ancient values into a more familiar context. This is not forced. It fits right in, including a folk song about John Henry, the man who beat the steam-powered drill and a shout out to Eddie Aikau, a Hawaiian surfer and lifeguard well worth looking up.

It’s clear how much thought went into the production. This immersive approach makes a rare and convincing case for heroic virtues from the ancient tradition and shows the power that stories, and art, have on us all.