Androcles and the Lion

Parson’s Nose Theater opens their 16th Season with George Bernard Shaw’s whimsical retelling of Aesop’s fable, adapted into a one-hour performance by Parson’s Nose Artistic Director, Lance Davis.

George Bernard Shaw couldn’t occupy all the soap boxes in Hyde Park’s “Speakers’ Corner” at once, so he wrote plays so that his characters could. In Androcles and the Lion he takes Aesop’s fable and spins it into a discussion about religion, the state, animal rights and martyrdom, complete with a waltzing lion. Christians await their fate in the Coliseum, in a Rome that is very much like London. They have just enough time for Shaw to ask us, ‘What would you happily die for?’