The Golden Ass (or the Curious Man)

A comedy written for the Shakespeare’s Globe, telling the story of an insatiably curious young man who, wishing to turn himself into a wise owl, takes the wrong drug and finds himself transformed into an ass. His subsequent travels lead him to encounter the chaos of human desire from the perspective of a servile donkey. The most exquisite tale in this wonderful epic, as originally told by Lucius Apuleius, is the first known account of the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, which is perhaps the archetypal myth behind modern psychology.

Inspired by The Golden Ass, Peter Oswald has written a riotous erotic comedy of love and desire, which premiered at the Globe Theatre, London in August 2002. This version is true to the original: in the words of C S Lewis is ‘a strange compound of picaresque novel, horror comic, mystagogue’s tract, pornography and stylistic experiment.