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WORKSHOP PRODUCTION | DIGITAL PROGRAMME

THE GREATEST SONGWRITER YOU'VE NEVER HEARD

Thank you for attending this workshop production of SAPPHO: The Poetess. This is the first public presentation of this work, and your feedback is hugely valuable.

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To share your thoughts and feelings, and have a chance of winning tickets to a future production of SAPPHO, please complete our short feedback form.

Book, Music, & Lyrics by Hayley Canham

Directed by Hannah Hauer-King

Musical Supervision, Orchestration, & Additional Music by Sam Young

Welcome to this Workshop Production of SAPPHO: The Poetess. This production marks the first full public showing of this work, less than a year after Hayley Canham first pitched the music at BEAM, a showcase for new Musical Theatre work. ​

Sappho of Lesbos, hailed by Plato as the “Tenth Muse,” lived during the late 7th to early 6th century BCE and is one of the most celebrated lyric poets of ancient Greece. Little is known for certain about her life, but her poetry, gathered into nine books by the Alexandrians, has echoed across millennia for its beauty, intimacy, and emotional depth. Writing in the Aeolic dialect, Sappho composed songs to be sung with the lyre, exploring love, longing, friendship, and the complexities of human emotion. She lived on the island of Lesbos, where she is thought to have led a circle of young women engaged in artistic and educational pursuits.​

Although ancient scholars collected her work with great care, almost all of it was lost over the centuries, surviving only in quotations by later authors and on fragments of papyrus recovered in Egypt. Today, just one complete poem, the Ode to Aphrodite, and a handful of nearly complete pieces remain, alongside hundreds of shorter fragments. Despite this, Sappho’s influence on literature and scholarship has been immense, shaping understandings of lyric expression, performance, and female authorship in the ancient world. Her surviving verses provide a rare and vital link to the personal and musical traditions of early Greek poetry.

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DIRECTOR'S NOTE

"Before working on this project my knowledge of Sappho was pretty limited, other than knowing her as a lesbian icon of sorts.  I’d see her name pop up on t-shirts at queer events, and of course anything that includes the word ‘Sapphic’ is a whisper of her legacy. But I could never have predicted how powerfully she could be brought to life through music and theatre, or how timely her story and work still feels today. 

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When first reading Hayley's rich dramatisation of Sappho's life, I wondered what it would be like to have the story told by not just Sappho, but also an ensemble of actor musicians who embody the characters in her life, as well as her band of musicians. This felt further justified when I read that many believe the "girls" featured in Sappho's poetry have often been interpreted as the musicians she played with when bringing her work to audiences.

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The project of this development process has been partly to explore this idea and its efficacy, as well as to generally see how the story resonates with an audience. The performers have been fearless and joyful in throwing themselves into what has been a wild and wonderful one week of rehearsals, with Sam Young creating an extraordinary score, musically directed with gusto by Tom Knowles.

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We hope you enjoy it, and that you fall in love as much as I have with Sappho: the woman who can be thanked for the word lesbian, and a stunning albeit fragmented literary legacy!"

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- Hannah Hauer-King

Images show fragments of Sappho's poem An Old Age (lines 9-20) LB 58, and The Oxyrhynchus Papyri: Part X

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