Frances Babbage begins her study by accounting for Holly Hunter's less-than-successful appearance on the London stage in Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats (2004). This potentially risky strategy prepares the reader for the central aim of her book: to identify the processes of re-vision and ‘the accompanying difficulties’ (p. 3) facing female playwrights using classical myth in their work.
Chapter 1 offers a usefully detailed account of myth and how it has been interpreted and appropriated to shape cultural beliefs that have in turn been challenged, revised and rewritten, not least by feminist criticism, but, as Babbage argues, such interventions are also problematic. Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero is identified as a ‘stimulating model’ (p. 32) for Babbage's approach, which seeks to avoid an essential feminine or separatist agenda: ‘For Cavarero, re-vision is not about searching either for truth or lies in philosophical texts and myth narratives but for loose threads to pull’ in order to expose ‘tensions that threaten to destabilize [the dominant] order’ (p. 31). It is from this position that Babbage pursues her study of female playwrights who have not shied away from the problematic weight of the classical stage and its cultural baggage to create work that ‘re-vision[s] myths for performance’ (p. 33).
Familiar plays, including works by Franca Rama, Caryl Churchill, Timberlake Wertenbaker and Sarah Kane are given detailed consideration alongside the less familiar, such as Hella Haasse's re-visioned myth of Ariadne, Theseus and the Minatour in A Thread in the Dark, first performed in Amsterdam in 1960–1. Babbage is careful to convey the complexities of the social context within which the playwrights are working and while this inevitably requires strongly descriptive narrative, Babbage layers this with critical perspectives that, in the case of Sarah Daniel's Neaptide (chapter 2), Maureen Duffy's Rites (chapter 3) and Hélène Cixous (chapter 4) will encourage new readers to return to such seminal (or classical) work by second-wave feminists with renewed and ‘re-visioning’ interest. In chapter 5, Lacanian rewriting of Freud and Jung is explored as the work of French feminist Cixous is opened up alongside Italian theatre-makers Serena Sartori and Renata Coluccini, illuminating the selected plays with skilful close reading. This approach is particularly effective in identifying the postfeminist wave of ‘disidentification’ (p. 189) with feminism in plays by Sarah Kane and Hrafnhildur Hagalin. Writing against the complacency of the 1990s, Babbage argues for their re-visioning of myth in the ‘overlapping theatrical territories’ of in-yer-face and the postdramatic (p. 196).
It is to the reader of the dramatic text that Babbage largely appeals and while theatre and performance scholars might argue for more disruptive or disturbing approaches to the dominance of the text (over other theatre-making processes), this is a valuable contribution to the study of female playwrights. The powerful draw of classical myth is contextualized through an accessible assessment of the strengths and shortcomings of second-wave feminism, upon which new generations of women build their own expressions of equality and freedom – whether they are aware of it or not. Teachers and students will find this a strong resource with its discrete sections on each play but Babbage's study also offers a more detailed and sophisticated critique for those seeking a deeper engagement with a book rich in literary and theoretical pers pectives.
