Daphne and Apollo

(2019)

Daphne falls wildly in love and in six short months loses everything. She then attempts to fight for justice...but can she get her voice heard?

This moving play is told as a ‘fictional documentary’. Joey Christie wrote detailed character notes and story points that were drawn from a true story. The actors were given these notes to study before I interviewed them in character. The play is built from these semi-improvised performances. 

The project opened my mind to domestic violence being so much more than black eyes. Coercive control is a subtle form of abuse and so can be harder to spot. The grassroots federation Women’s Aid defines it as “an act or a pattern of acts of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten their victim”. They campaigned and succeeded in making coercive control a criminal offence.