Serpent's Tooth

Music - Deborah Conway / Willy Zygier
From the album Everybody's Begging

Credits

Mother - Deborah Conway
Daughter - Zohar Starr
Band - Syd Zygier, Willy Zygier, Simon Starr

Director and DOP - Michelle Dunn / MDP Photography and Video
Puppet Maker - Paul Newcombe
Drone Operator - Martin Peters
Crew - Thomas Burgess, Alison Shirley, Bronwyn Peters
Editor - Thomas Burgess / MDP Photography and Video

Thanks to Megan and Bryan at Empire Theatre Crowlands, Fiona Sweet, Laurel Frank Puppet dressmaker and all the extras - Karolina, Linda Franklin and Martin Hale, Virginia Wise and Circe Moloney-Wise, Amy Tsilemanis, Martin and Bronwyn Peters, Amy Zuell, Paul Newcombe, Sonia van Dorssen, Jasper and Rory van Bolton, Ailsa and Jemima Brackley Du Bois, Charlotte Adams, Tas Wansbrough, Jillian Taylor and Josie McCulloch.

I remember studying Shakespeare’s “King Lear” but being a schoolgirl I never fully comprehended the tragedy of the betrayal of a parent by his children. Lear chooses to be seduced by the excessive, false flattery of his two eldest daughters rather than the less eloquent
but sincere affirmations of love from his youngest daughter, all of which ends rather badly, in fact by curtain close everyone is dead.
No one dies in our song “Serpent’s Tooth” but all these decades later and now as a parent of 3 daughters, that magnificent quote “how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child” rings bells of recognition and deepest empathy that at my first encounter I didn’t feel. Becoming a parent was a kind of alchemy for my deepest being, it exposed the tenderest layers of feeling I had no idea I could have, the deep wells of worry and the tidal waves of love that have no equal; I went from fortress to cupcake and of course on the same continuum, a lion, if they were in any kind of danger. And then comes the teenage years. Lear’s daughters are most likely teenagers, it is certainly a portrait of the kind of carnality that chimes with the teenage experience. Cruel, vain, seeking to stamp their authority by not just stepping out of the nest but kicking it out of the tree, what parent of teenagers hasn’t been at the end of a sharp tongue, suffering under a torrent of abuse or enduring days or more of stoney silence? It’s perplexing and of course the hurt is so much more intense when the stranger before you is your own flesh & blood. King Lear is excessive in its body count but Shakespeare is dealing in the rawest of human relationships and maybe only a pile of corpses can attest to how sharp that pain is. So in view of my changed circumstance, I felt compelled to revisit this great work of art in a modern context - I present you my shattered emotional corpse.