City of Wine

Playwright Ned Dickens has never stepped back from a question that demanded a good story to find the answer. And among the many many treasures of City of Wine, among its many tales of people and triumphs and tragedies, are a trove of great stories. Some of them you’ll recognize from the myths you have heard in one form or another. Many of them are Ned’s invention, or rather perhaps his projection of what we have received from the Greeks into what might have happened. That is, if we ask the best possible questions and never shy away from what the answers may tell us if we look closely, carefully, with humanity and humour and compassion and skepticism and desire and love.

City of Wine is a cycle of plays based at its heart on potent life-changing questions, an approach that also lives at the heart of Nightswimming and our approach to dramaturgy.

Ned’s commitment to asking great questions is among the many reasons we commissioned six of the nine plays and have committed 30 years of dramaturgical support to developing, nurturing and promoting Ned’s cycle. Questions that demanded action and exploration and collaboration to truly understand and to then address. Questions that Ned asked of himself and of the stories he wanted to retell. Questions that pushed him more deeply into the landscape of mythology in order to write not about myths but about the people who populate them and why they do what they do, how they live together, how they lead one another, and what happens when leadership breaks down or betrays or thrives or needs the people to save it.

Questions such as –

• What happened in the moment when Oedipus and Jocasta, his eventual partner in marriage, first met? How did they fall in love and what was their love before disaster crushed the family and the city they loved and led?
• What new perspective is revealed when we look at the character of Creon not as a proto-dictator but as a leader faced with huge moral questions about what it is to lead and the costs it may have for one’s city and one’s own family?
• What steps take a person towards tyranny? How can we understand a tyrant like Laius not as an inevitability, but as a person with a long life, many influences and a pathway that is worth examining despite the terror with which he is ultimately associated?
• Would you give up immortality for love, and if so what might be the circumstances that would lead you to such a momentous decision? Harmonia is among the most important characters in City of Wine, and one of the least familiar, yet her decision to love and commit to Cadmus in the first play of the cycle is astonishing. Ned needed to ask how she got to that decision and in doing so what the repercussions might be for the city that she then co-founded as a home for that love.
• What remains of a city when the city and its people are gone? What lifeforce resides in the stories we tell about ourselves, our past, our people, our city? Even as we know that there is no single accurate version of those stories, we are compelled to tell and retell, to remember and project our stories – or what we remember of them – into the future. But, as Ned and the characters of Seven, the final play, so potently demand, what if we can’t agree on the stories and what if there is no one left to tell them?
• Jocasta is best known for her agonies of discovery when Oedipus’ actions and true ancestry are revealed – but what of the rest of her eventful life, Ned asked? She survived some of the worst moments of Theban history and went on to lead her city thoughtfully and powerfully, one of the many powerful women in this multi-generational story who stood up, took charge, improved the place she lived and loved, and battled against the powerfully patriarchal landscape in which she dwelt. By asking this question, Ned reveals to us a remarkable person, remarkable in her own right, not just for meeting Oedipus and mourning his later actions.
• Male, female, both? The trajectory of Tiresias, known mostly as the seer who helps unveil the truth of Oedipus’ past, is so much more than a vital plot point in a horrific family saga. Ned asked what we didn’t know about Tiresias – the youth’s early life and loves, the pain and punishment meted out and survived, the impact of their transformations, and the cost of the insights which all of that led to – a person ‘gifted’ with prophecy, doomed to see it all but know that it was out of their control, and an individual, through the gift of Ned’s imagination, restored to three dimensions, with a life, like a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end.
• And, perhaps most importantly, at least to me, Ned asked us as we worked together as playwright and dramaturg on this epic undertaking what it would mean to reconsider and fully bring to life the people of Thebes, the citizens of this city that are generally perceived in the stories we received from the distant past as passive and powerless commentators on the actions of the powerful. Are they not individuals with stories of their own, with contradictory opinions and beliefs who make mistakes and shape their city as much as their leaders and fall in love and tell great stories of their own? That is a powerful question, and the answer of course is a resounding ‘Yes’.

Ned’s answer, of course, is much more than a simple ‘Yes’ – it is thirty years of imagining, writing, collaborating and creating to give life, new life, to the people of the city of Thebes. To acknowledge that the city, any city, is as much theirs, the people’s, as that of the leaders who may be remembered longer than any individual citizen, but are no more important than the tavern keeper, or the cloth maker, or the one who sits at the end of the bar with a head full of stories.

These individuals are called the UnNamed within City of Wine because their names are never spoken aloud, much in the way that we seldom use the names of our closest friends when we talk with them. For most of us our names will never be recorded in ways that history acknowledges. But we are here, living the life of our city, and in City of Wine Ned has given them lives and stories and impact and hearts.

They are the soul of the city and are the true story tellers who ensure that the city, any city, lives on in the future.

–Brian Quirt | August 2025
Artistic Director | Nightswimming
Dramaturg | City of Wine

For Brian’s perspective on the process developing City of Wine from the first commissions to the City of Wine Festival in 2009, read his article “Huge”.

Download a PDF copy of Brian’s introduction here.

City of Wine features great names: Zeus, Athena, Harmonia, Laius, Jocasta, Oedipus, Dionysus, and Tiresias, to mention only a few. Such names are so powerful that I felt I could not introduce fictional ones into the mix. At the same time, I very much wanted to find a new approach to the idea of the Chorus. I wanted to show a diversity of interacting personalities which, taken together, would represent the ordinary people—the citizens—of the City of Wine.

The result is a group of seven personalities (often related from play to play but not always the same individuals) who, although distinct and real, are never named. Throughout City of Wine they are always present, reacting to and affecting the actions of the Named.

The UnNamed are “the aching, dancing body of my town.” In order to keep them straight in the text I gave them “tags” such as Bowl, Cloth, Blood, Water. The truth of my premise that names are powerful things is borne out by the fact that many people persist in thinking of these tags as names. You, of course, will not make that mistake.  — Ned.

Synopsis of City of Wine

The Grape Trilogy
Harmonia
This is the story of how Harmonia, daughter of the gods Ares and Aphrodite, and her mortal husband Cadmus, become the founders of the city that will become Thebes. In the kitchen of Ares’ palace on Mount Olympus, surrounded by the desires and games of both gods and mortals, Cadmus wins the love of Harmonia but incites the fury of the gods. Harmonia gives up her immortality to pursue her love as she and her new husband are driven from Olympus. They vow to found a great city dedicated to equality and truth—and thus the city is born. “Nothing begins in history.” As I scratched around for a point of entry into the story of Thebes I tripped over the idea that two gods would give Harmonia, their goddess daughter, to marry an enslaved mortal who had not only offended them but had failed at everything he had tried to do so far. Equally intriguing was that she might fall in love with him. “There has to be a story behind that!” I told myself, and here it is.

Pentheus
The second play introduces us to Harmonia and Cadmus’ grandson Pentheus, who finds himself chosen king just as the city is undergoing an unexpected transformation. Also brought to life are the magical characters of Tiresias, the seer whose prophecies play a pivotal role in city’s story, and Dionysus, the god whose gift of wine brings both joy and chaos to Thebes. In this alternative version of the events of The Bacchae, the tragedy of King Pentheus (and a hidden love story!) brings our city into a new era.

While Harmonia can be said to deal with the conception of the city, this play looks at its adolescence. It swirls with sexual infatuation, questions of emerging identity, and a tragic loss of innocence. Robert Graves (poet and scholar) suggests that the real root of all the problems which beset Thebes (called Cadmea at this point in the story) is the institution of patrilineal monarchy, the idea that the crown must pass from father to son. He argues that this idea offends the powerful female energy in the ancient world and sets off “the war of the sexes” with a bang. I have tried to show how, in context, that idea, called here Pentheus’ Law, might make sense to a young man who unexpectedly finds himself on a throne for which he feels completely unprepared.

Thebe
The character and story of Thebe have grown organically over the years. Exploring and unpacking both was a huge part of the impetus behind the last expansion of City of Wine from seven to nine plays. In Harmonia, Poseidon, spurned by her, spits into Thebe’s mouth (a particularly nasty assault that echoes the story of Apollo and Cassandra) and he decrees that her kiss will always give instant forgetfulness. The dynamic between memory and forgetfulness is central to our story, and storytelling. It also allows me to introduce narrative elements that have no basis in traditional versions, as long as I arrange to have them forgotten, such as Thebe’s being the mother of Tiresias and, eventually, Laius.

The Vine Trilogy
Cadmea
The city has grown, but so has distrust and fear between the sexes. Lycus and Dirce rule in luxury while Laius waits impatiently to take the crown. Amphion and Zethus, the twin unacknowledged sons of Lycus, arrive. They use Laius to punish Lycus for his treatment of their mother, Antiope, unleashing assassination, riot, and massacre. Laius escapes into exile and the brothers arrange to be elected twin kings. Thebe fulfills the prophesy that she will be queen.

Fairly late in the 30+ year City of Wine writing process it occurred to me that the Theban plays of Sophocles et al. weren’t Theban at all: they were created and celebrated in a city trying to be a democracy (Athens). They are stories about the horrifically dysfunctional monarchy, and military rival, next door. They are deeply political.

The city of Cadmea/Thebes is the protagonist of City of Wine, and her challenges, growth, triumphs, disasters, and her journey from an intentional settlement to a city state, take centre stage in the Vine Trilogy. Here she becomes a place familiar to a modern audience, shaped by familiar characters: grifters, schemers, dreamers, and traditionalists.

Elis
Elis is a nearby city in the mountains, where Laius has sought refuge in exile. Wine has also arrived in town and a disused slaughterhouse is becoming a tavern, with help from Bowl, one of the UnNamed that has taken a central role in the cycle. Laius festers in bitterness and self-pity, abusing the hospitality and the vulnerable son of his hosts until he, Laius, commits a crime that will haunt Thebes and its people for generations.

Elis is the middle play of the cycle and, like the first and last, it doesn’t take place in Cadmea/ Thebes. Elis is a mountain city based heavily on cattle farming. Their main festival celebrates the semi-annual slaughter. Dionysus is the god of wine, of course, but he is also god of the theatre. One theory suggests that public theatre emerged as a way to contain and control the rites of the riotous god. The need for that containment shows when bacchanalia meets slaughter festival.

Jocasta
This play illuminates the story of Jocasta, one of the great figures of ancient mythology, familiar to us largely for her death scene in the play Oedipus. The exiled Laius returns to Thebes, marries Jocasta and she bears him a son. The first act of Jocasta traces the descent of the city, under King Laius’ rule, into dictatorship and despair.

Act two brings with it a much-discussed moment in Greek mythology/legend: the magnetic first meeting between Jocasta and Oedipus. With no idea what their relationship portends (for themselves or Thebes) their happy marriage restores peace to the city.

Tragedy is often an architecture of unfortunate choices, many of which make sense in context, but which add up to disaster. The impulse to write this play (sixth in the cycle but the second written, after Oedipus) came from the realization that many of the critical choices which inform that story were made before it begins, by Jocasta and Laius, rather than by Oedipus.

I wanted to find out why, and what those situations may have looked like. The more I explored and imagined my way backwards into hypothetical time, the more enthralled I became with this extraordinary woman. Wanting to understand her is the seed crystal around which the entire City of Wine has grown.

The Wine Trilogy
Oedipus
Oedipus attempts to relieve Thebes of a plague, and the curse that brought it to the city, and in doing so brings the famous story of Jocasta, Laius, and Oedipus to its disastrous and horrifying conclusion. Oedipus was the first play written, and still marks the grand climax of the cycle. Much of the motivation for writing the larger project was rooted in a desire to fully contextualize what happens here. In the modern world we have tended to think of ourselves as moral singularities, responsible only for our own choices and actions. Seen through that frame, Oedipus becomes a victim of cruel and irrational fate, doomed to suffer despite his best efforts. I offer him rather as a point in a larger narrative curve, paying the cost of his father’s crimes and his family’s unfolding pattern of well-intentioned error.

Creon
On a pleasant evening, years after the events of Oedipus, a visiting stranger enters a peaceful tavern and acquaints himself with the Thebans savouring the local wine. His questions about their city and its history result in an impromptu and often comic reconstruction of the story of Antigone. Its controversial story about leadership is re-evaluated and the fate of Thebes is explored, disputed and reinvented. Once again, wine points the way, bringing both chaos and, finally, good cheer in its wake.

Throughout City of Wine the UnNamed are always present, responding to and influencing the actions of the Named, but in Creon they take over, and the cycle enters a new stage. Increasingly it is less about history and more about story. The character Bowl says “I have just listened to the stories that wounds tell.” I wanted to look at how communities define, heal, and even re-create themselves through the sharing of narratives. I also wanted to introduce an element of suspense to an ancient tale. Since I have chosen to wander from the path of received mythology from time to time, in this play I decided to offer my characters the same opportunity, and then see where they would take the story.

Seven
During the siege of Troy, seven scruffy Theban citizens, all that remain of the city of Thebes, sit drinking around a campfire in their makeshift outdoor tavern. After receiving orders to go on a futile and certainly fatal mission the next morning, the seven spend their last night trying to make sense of their lives, their place in history and in memory.

– Will wine offer insight or blindness?
– How will they meet the challenge that dawn brings?
– What will remain of Thebes after they are gone?

The Iliad is such a detailed account of the Trojan War that some scholars surmise that the author was actually present for the great events and not just passing on an oral tradition, thus marking a transition from myth to history. How stories, and through them societies, evolve and survive, or not, up to and then through such a massive transition fascinates me.

Theatre itself, in a way, sits on the threshold between written and remembered narratives. Indeed, it pushes backwards from written into oral narrative. Beyond all that however, I could not resist the temptation to spend one last night with the UnNamed.

– Ned Dickens.

Download a PDF copy of Ned’s Playwright’s Note and Synopsis here.