23:00, Wed 5th – Sat 8th March 2008 at ADC Theatre
Lent Week 7

Few words survive from the dark ages. Even fewer from women. But a voice echos through the millennia, speaking of miracles and martyrdom... One thousand years ago, in a lonely cell in a remote abbey in Saxony, the nun Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim wrote the play Dulcitius. Both farce and tragedy, it is a tale of buffoonish Roman soldiers battling the frightening conviction of three girls determined to be Christian martyrs.

To the modern audience, it is a play for both skeptic and believer, the contented and the disillusioned; a thoroughly unusual and vital attempt to reconcile a rationalist Western framework with the sublime influences that shape our common history, mythology, and current struggles with religious extremism. This production fuses the original play with modern texts to illuminate its central themes.

From the sublime to the mundane, modern to ancient, science to religion, this unique theatrical event is a reminder of how much - and how little - has changed over the past one thousand years.