The Hammer of Defiance Rebooted
In November 2014 we restaged The Hammer of Defiance, our play about the Luddite rebellions in Ashfield, at the Galleries of Justice. We were very excited about this for a number of reasons. Firstly this is the building where the trial that we recount was held in, 202 years ago; secondly it’s one of the few times we’ve been able to restage one of our shows (the other times being a re-run of A Lifetime Guarantee at the T.U.C. building in London, The Cries of Silent Men reworked for a show at Nottingham Castle for NEAT 2011, and a rerun of The Wise Fools of Gotham in 2013, ten years after the original show, and staged entirely by the community without any help from us at all); thirdly because this time we had The Rise Choir (who recorded Songs of Defiance with us) joining in with The Army of Redressers; and lastly because it was part of a Subversion and Rebellion Conference, exploring mythical and real characters and events of rebellion from the East Midlands (which is part of the UK’s first national festival of the humanities, Being Human, led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy).