In December 2004, Marina Carr’sBy the Bog of Catsopened at the Wyndham’s Theatre in London, directed by Dominic Cooke.The first image was arresting: actress Holly Hunter, as Carr’s ‘Celtic Medea’ Hester Swane, made her way across a white stage, suggestive of icy bog lands, tugging the heavy corpse of a black swan. Hunter, an established Hollywood star, was the main attraction for many in the audience. And she was hugely striking, tiny but wiry and muscular, dressed in ragged black, her face half-hidden by matted hair. Then she spoke: and it was impossible not to be equally startled...

This is a book about myths: the forms myths take, their interaction with history and with individual lives, their significance and effects, and how far myths can be changed. It is about figures of women represented in myths and about women themselves as mythmakers. It is about strategies of writing and rewriting, and especially of playwriting and performing. It is about stories and ways of telling them. It is also, inevitably, a book about feminisms. This does not imply that all playwrights included here define their work in feminist terms; rather, it is to assert first that feminist thinking crucially...

In this chapter I discuss three plays born of second-wave feminism which examine the political potential of re-visioning myths: the monologuesThe Same Old StoryandMedea, co-authored by Franca Rame and Dario Fo (1977), and Sarah Daniels’s realist dramaNeaptide(1986). Yet if theatre-making is inherently political, as Varley suggests, any such selection may be challenged: why these texts rather than others? First, the discussions of this chapter aim to facilitate analysis of the political beyond Varley’s claim that theatre is already, of itself, resistant. I have chosen plays where engagement with political subjects is self-conscious and systematic rather...

The systematic disempowerment ofNeaptide’s women provokes their refusal of the structures that sought to contain them: within the fictional world, at least, they escape it, disappearing from their persecutors’ grasp as if the ground had swallowed them up. Rame’s protagonists ridicule the laws that attempt to constrain them, denying their authority or, like Medea, striking out forcibly against them. The plays considered in Chapter 3 examine further such practices of resistance: that which is devalued or repressed returns with a violence that threatens to collapse ‘civilised’ order. Here, however, the plays address acts of collective revolt. Medea’s crime might...

In ‘The Character of “Character”’, Cixous attacks fundamental assumptions of subject representation. The very concept of ‘character’ is a straitjacket, she insists: promising subtlety, it is in the end always a reductive puzzle whereby the subject exists in order ‘to befigured out, understood, read’ (1974: 385). As readers, our engagement with ‘character’ becomes an ideological transaction in which the text ultimately confirms and endorses that which we have been conditioned to see. Fetishised as whole, conscious and knowable, ‘character’ cannot by definition embrace that which does not yet exist; it prohibits in advance what Cixous describes as ‘the open,...

The two dramatists considered in this chapter each achieved critical prominence in her early twenties for plays staged in the last half-decade of the century. The late British playwright Sarah Kane and the Icelandic writer Hrafnhildur Hagalín are broadly contemporaries and internationally associated in so far as Hagalín has expressed admiration for Kane’s work and translated the other’s 1998 playCraveinto Icelandic (her version broadcast by the country’s national radio service, Ríkisútvarpith RUV, in 1999). Yet whilst Hagalín cites Kane as an influence, the aesthetic and thematic preoccupations of the two seem at first to have little in common....

In 2006, the University of Bristol held a three-day international, interdisciplinary conference titled ‘Medea: Mutations and Permutations of a Myth’. The event sought to reassess theories of myth and myth-making and to examine transmission, reception and appropriation of the Medea myth from antiquity to the present day. The response to the call for papers was overwhelming, especially, though by no means exclusively, from women academics and artists; many more offers were made than the sixty-odd contributions eventually selected.¹ The quantity and range of material proposed testified to the subject’s continuing critical currency; and whilst the figure of Medea can always...