This research project will investigate the possibilities and challenges of staging the work of Britain's first professional woman playwright - Aphra Behn - for contemporary audiences.
In collaboration with the female-led theatre company The Thelmas, Oxford researchers will research and develop an adaptation of Behn's 1677 comedy The Rover, her most successful work. The late seventeenth century (a period known as 'the Restoration') was a transformative moment in the history of British theatre, especially in terms of gender: it brought the first professional female performers and, in Behn, the first professional female playwright, and with these profound changes came forms of drama that represented and interrogated gender identities, difference, and inequalities in new ways.
This project will uncover this complex history and grapple with the themes of sexual power and sexual violence at the heart of Behn's play precisely by experimenting with ways to bring it to new audiences. Theatrical adaptation will be adopted as a research method that, through collaboration between scholars and practitioners, can shape new approaches to textual reading and interpretation.
