‘Our duty is plain. To bring an end to peace.’

An empire gone wrong; an empire completely gone, in fact. A nation with delusional ideas of its place in the world, making poor choices, involved in clumsy foreign adventures, constantly on the edge of war.

At home, class divides are stark yet all attention is on a Duke’s ceremonial marriage. And surging through the chaos, the absurdities of masculinity threaten to destroy everything.

An epic fable set in the faraway Spanish Golden Age, Jo Clifford's play Losing Venice is a joyously original, witty take-down of dangerously daft machismo and the deranged behaviour of countries that have lost an empire and still not yet found a role…

First seen at the 1985 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Losing Venice was revived at the Orange Tree, Richmond, in 2018.