The court
Body held. Language formal. Time measured. Desire forced into straight lines.
International ensemble
England · Italy · Sweden · America · Norway · Germany · Holland · Canada · Croatia · Scotland
These Mortals
An international ensemble making actor-led, multilingual Shakespeare through language, movement and play.
Meet the company
01 / Company
New company.
Mature practice.
These Mortals is an international ensemble discovering Shakespeare through the actor, language, body, space and audience.
We work across gender, ethnicity and language—free of inherited assumptions about who may embody a role. Each performer reveals something new in the character; the mortal underneath remains recognisable.
Our name comes from Puck’s delighted verdict: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” However vast Shakespeare’s worlds become, their scale is human.
Actor-led
International
Multilingual
Portable
Playful + rigorous
02 / First production
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
WOOD
Five actors. Seventy minutes. An empty space. A forest made from rhythm, sound, breath and silence.
wood /wʊd/ adjective · archaic Mad; out of one’s mind. noun A forest.
The play has an irrepressibly funny spirit and a dark undertow. Hermia faces death. Desire becomes possession. Lovers humiliate one another. Bottom is transformed, adored and discarded.
This is not a decorative fairy tale, but an anatomy of love at its most human: tender, ridiculous, erotic, irrational and cruel.
The wood
Bodies release. Languages multiply. Time bends. Identity becomes fluid.
The lovers’ quarrel
Meaning before translation.
The performance begins in English. As love drives the characters into the wood, English fractures into the performers’ own languages—and then into rhythm, sound, breath and silence. In the lovers’ quarrel, misunderstanding becomes physical, musical and very funny, with danger still visible underneath.
The audience can no longer rely on words alone. It reads movement, rhythm, sound, breath and silence; it recognises longing, jealousy, humiliation and wonder before every word is understood.
5performers
70minutes
0touring set
2suitcases
∞possible woods
It happens between bodies—in rhythm, sound, breath and silence.
Every room, landscape and audience creates a different wood.
03 / Working method
Assume nothing.
Discover everything.
We give the actor precise conditions for discovery, rather than a finished interpretation.
-
01
A stimulus
A partner, target, object, threshold, place, sound, rhythm or word.
-
02
An imaginative act
The actor makes before analysing. Precision releases play and the unexpected.
-
03
A new grammar
The ensemble discovers a physical and vocal language particular to this play.
Our pedagogy begins outside the actor. Inspired by Declan Donnellan, Monika Pagneaux, Anne Bogart, Complicite, Filter. We take time over every moment: where does a word come from, what provokes it, and how do its sound and rhythm become action?
We set aside received meanings—not to empty the text, but to discover it afresh. Shakespeare is the structure for discovery, not a predetermined result. Imagination leads; intellect follows, testing and shaping what has been found.
Often the actors learn every line by rote before rehearsal—not to fix a reading, but to put the words fully inside them. Free from the page, they can listen, play and be changed in the moment. We become masters of the text, rather than allowing the text to master us. We are imagination driven, not intellectually bound.
The practice also carries Paul Brennen’s work with Filter Theatre and Sean Holmes—now Associate Artistic Director at Shakespeare’s Globe—on Twelfth Night and Three Sisters: trust in the actor, live listening, ensemble play and theatrical economy. Each play is minted anew through these performers, this space and this audience.
04 / Research lineage
A company formed
through the work.
These Mortals is new. Its shared language has been tested across three countries, four Shakespeare plays and performers from across the globe since 2024.
-
Twelfth Night · Florence
Paul and Joe begin their intensive collaboration with a question: where do words come from, and how do they become action in performance?
-
Into the Forest · Norra Backen
The first Midsummer investigation with an international ensemble: poetry, place, mother tongue, play and visible transformation.
-
The Tempest · Tuscany
A five-day international laboratory deepens the relationship between language, embodied voice, partner and space.
-
London laboratories
Ongoing professional development through Shakespeare scenes, new writing, embodied voice and ensemble practice.
-
Macbeth · Florence
A workshop in releasing the actor through imagination and through the acoustics and rhythm of the scene and language.
-
A Midsummer Night’s Dream · Norra Backen
A second week-long laboratory led by Paul, Joe and Giaele, culminating in a public sharing and the foundations of WOOD.
05 / Creative leads
Experience in the room.
Space to surprise.
Performance, voice and movement meet in one shared enquiry.
Actor · director · writer · teacher
Paul Brennen
Paul’s theatre work includes Cheek by Jowl’s The Duchess of Malfi and Troilus and Cressida, and Filter Theatre’s Twelfth Night and Three Sisters. His practice is strongly informed by Declan Donnellan’s The Actor and the Target and by Donnellan and Nick Ormerod’s The Actor and the Space.
Voice teacher · practitioner
Joe Windley
Formerly Head of Voice at RADA, Joe connects voice to impulse, body, imagination and relationship: a way of listening, receiving and being changed. His recent work includes voice practice on Than Hussein Clark’s Mother Has Arrived.
Movement director · choreographer · performer
Giaele Mattioli
Giaele develops the company’s movement research through animal and neutral mask work, through transformation and physical imagination. Her work brings precision to the body while keeping discovery alive.
Collaborations · residencies · performance