Staging Hauntings

Abstract

As the previous chapters on Charles Dickens (Chapter 3) and Charlotte Brontë (Chapter 5) have demonstrated, literary adaptation has been one of the main means through which the Victorians have been represented on stage since the early 1980s. Nevertheless, there has been a steady stream of original drama since then, set wholly or in part in the Victorian period, from David Edgar’s Entertaining Strangers (1985) to Sarah Daniels’ Gut Girls (1988), and including Nigel Williams’ Country Dancing in 1987 and Richard Nelson’s Two Shakespearean Actors in 1990 (both first produced by the RSC), Royce Ryton’s The Royal Baccarat Scandal (1988) and Frank McGuiness’ Mary and Lizzie (1989). More recent examples include Nicholas Wright’s Vincent in Brixton at the National Theatre and in the West End (2002–3), Peter Whelan’s The Earthly Paradise at the Almeida (2004) and Michael Punter’s Darker Shores at the Hampstead Theatre (2009).