Gaslit and shamed: play about Eleanor Glanville and her butterflies

'There's nothing wrong with having a hobby, or even what you might call in this case a hyperfocus,' Dr Godrick tells Eleanor Glanville in a claustrophobic therapy room. Outside the Phoenix theatre in Hampshire a summer heatwave delivers perfect conditions for butterflies; inside, in air-conditioned gloom, the new play Butterfly rehearses a darker story about a woman whose passion for butterfly hunting is turned against her in an abusive relationship.

The play draws on the life of Eleanor Glanville, a pioneering female naturalist whose name survives as the Glanville fritillary. After discovering the rare species at the end of the 17th century, she endured a violent, money-grabbing second husband who seized her estate when a judge overturned her will, concluding she was 'deprived of her senses' for roaming the countryside in pursuit of rare butterflies.

Writer and artist Claire Jackson relocates that history to the present, translating 17th-century male abuse into the 21st-century manosphere.

eleanor glanville, glanville fritillary, butterflies, butterfly play, claire jackson, phoenix theatre, hampshire, manosphere, abusive relationship, 17th century