The Duke

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There can be fewer storytellers with the ability to transform a drive up the M6 into a mythic crossing of worlds as Shon Dale-Jones. Departing from his acclaimed role as the softly-spoken Hugh Hughes, Dale-Jones embarks on a typically transitory adventure across land, politics and family.

Back in 1974, Dale-Jones’s father purchased a “Royal Worcester porcelain of the Duke of Wellington on horseback” for £750 (just over £8,000 in today’s money). Ten years after his passing, our hero's mother calls him up to confess a heinous crime: she’s broken The Duke. Although in the process of working on a film script, Dale-Jones sets off to replace the broken heirloom, as details of his script begin to spill over into “real life”.

This multilayered piece of time-travelling fiction is ingeniously constructed. As details of the refugee crisis also fold into the narrative, Dale-Jones begins to unwrap global narratives of displacement and home. He is dissecting two incriminating truths of white art: that crises are only ever designated as such because they “interrupt” the order of artificial western civility, and that theatre only ever “responds” to crises after years of ignorance. Put differently, British theatre is often both spurious outrage and after thought.

Does articulating these observations give Dale-Jones’s theatre making greater value? Does it discredit his former work? The Duke asks powerful questions of social responsibility and accessibility, art and commerce, family and comradeship, all through the masterly mingling of fact and fiction.