Feminist Adaptation in The Rabble’s Orlando, Story of O and Frankenstein

  • Sarah French
Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Contemporary Performance InterActions book series (CPI)

Abstract

This chapter examines three performances by Melbourne-based theatre company The Rabble, Orlando (2012) after Virginia Woolf, Story of O (2013) after Pauline Réage, and Frankenstein (2014) after Mary Shelley, which intertwine their explorations of feminist political themes with visceral imagery, sensory elements and embodied intensities. Drawing on Robert Stam’s theories on adaptation, the chapter suggests that each performance adopts a different approach to adaptation, characterised by their engagement with the notions of intertextuality, metatextuality and hypertextuality. The Rabble employ adaptation as a method with which to reassess the political implications of influential historical literary texts and reimagine them via a critical feminist and queer framework. Each performance dramatically reconfigures its source text to construct a feminist critique of contemporary patriarchal culture.

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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  • Sarah French
    • 1
  1. 1.University of MelbourneMelbourneAustralia

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