The oldest story in the World

About the epic

The Epic of Gilgamesh, called “Humanity’s First Story,” was carved into 11 clay tablets nearly three millennia ago around 1700 BCE—a thousand years before The Iliad. Unknown until 1853 when the tablets were discovered in Nineveh, its cuniform language remained un-translated for some 40 odd years until the end of the 19th century.  Based on a historical King who reigned in Uruk (present day Iraq) the story of Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu is well known.  Their intimate friendship and their various heroic adventures together (including attacking the monster Humbaba, rebuking Ishtar, and killing the Bull of Heaven), are followed by Enkidu’s tragic death.  The result is a grief-induced obsession with finding the key to immortality that takes Gilgamesh to places no human is meant to see. Novi Most's adaptation is both a reliving of the great story of Gilgamesh and an examination of human limits as we experience them here and now.  At the center of the story are essential questions of how to define, and live, a human life. Our Gilgamesh "drops in" on contemporary wall street in crisis, the sexually charged relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu in ancient Uruk, the Sumerian underworld (containing mythic beasts, rivers of death and the worlds first bar tender), the study of Victorian archaeologist George Smith who first transcribed Gilgamesh (and the true story of how he took off all his clothes when he did so),  and the contemporary world of oil spills, military incursions, floods and droughts where we live out the themes of this ancient epic, subconsciously and daily...A fusion of original music and invigorating physical theatre, this project resurrects a long ago "time before time" letting it pulse and live in front of us, reminding us of truths about ourselves we've perhaps forgotten.