Multivalence: The Young Vic and a Postmodern Changeling, 2012

Abstract

This chapter analyses the 2012 production of  The Changeling  at the Young Vic as a postmodern adaptation of the play, despite director Joe Hill-Gibbins and dramaturg Zoë Svendsen’s insistence that the play’s seventeenth-century text was at the centre of their interpretation. Although the play has been relatively popular on British stages since 1960, its text has long been criticized for perceived problems of unity and coherence, and most contemporary productions have grappled with how to reconcile its two, seemingly disconnected plot lines. This chapter argues that the Young Vic   Changeling  (and its revival in the same year) embraced divergence and multivalence in its staging choices, rejecting both Aristotelian unities and Stanislavskian psychological realism in favour of a heavily adapted, deliberately disjointed, and distinctly non-naturalist production.