Abstract
In 2013, Lazarus Theatre Company staged a production of Elizabeth Cary’s 400-year-old play The Tragedy of Mariam, the first original play in English to be published by a woman under her own name. Mariam remains an esoteric, rarely performed play and the Lazarus production represents an important intervention in the play’s performance history. This chapter explores the unique gender politics of this production and the significance of its fringe context. Taking Lazarus’s Mariam as a case study, we focus on how editing, casting, staging and ensemble work combined to constitute what we term feminist dramaturgy and we suggest that such an approach can help develop innovative and imaginative productions of classical drama that can lead the way in putting women centre stage.
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Productions Cited
A Fragment of Mariam. Dir. Rebecca McCutcheon. Shakespeare’s Globe. Conference. December 7, 2013.
The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry. Dir. Elizabeth Schafer. Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey. October 1995.
The Tragedy of Mariam. Dir. Kirstin Bone. Improbable Fictions, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. March 14, 2013.
The Tragedy of Mariam. Dir. Gavin Harrington Odedra. Lazarus Theatre Company. Tristan Bates Theatre, London. August 12–17, 2013.
The Mariam Project–Youth and Young Girlhood. Dir. Rebecca McCutcheon. St. John the Baptist Church, Burford, Oxfordshire. June 12, 2013.
The Mariam Pop Up. Dir. Rebecca McCutcheon. Designed Talulah Mason. The Gretchen Day Gallery, Peckham, London. August 13, 2013.
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Reimers, S., Schafer, E. (2019). Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: Lazarus Theatre Company’s Staging of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam. In: Sewell, J., Smout, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_29
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