Sensation fiction on stage

Adaptation and the Stage in the Nineteenth Century

“…Their contested status was compounded by what Andrew Maunder describes as 'the uneasy relationships between novelists, adaptor-dramatists and theatre critics'. 11 In her essay, Kate Mattacks analyses Watts Phillips's 1864/65 sensation drama The Woman in Mauve, identifying it as a complicated form of adaptation. Rather than merely transferring a product from one genre to another, Mattacks argues that this drama presented a more sophisticated form of remediation, a conscious 'exercise in reproduction' that challenges ideas of authenticity.…”