Staging Angela Carter

Abstract

Babbage considers the challenges of staging Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and ‘The Company of Wolves’. Discussing several contemporary productions, Babbage shows that while Carter’s Gothic iconography has been effectively represented, theatre adaptations have struggled to sustain the fluidity of position that is equally important in her work. Referencing examples from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drama, and the insistence of Burke and Radcliffe that terror requires obscurity and ‘boundlessness’, Babbage examines treatments of Carter in non-theatre sites. Grid Iron’s The Bloody Chamber, a promenade production in Edinburgh catacombs, and Burn the Curtain’s The Company of Wolves, a night-time performance in woodland, exploit the potential of space, proximity and obscurity; both adaptations thereby structure a relationship to Carter’s writing that is exciting, unsettling and potentially liberating.