Modern Adaptations and Audiences

Modern Adaptations and Audiences 

Mary Pix undoubtably helped opened the door for female playwrights in the UK but even as influential as her work was and is, in the modern day there isn't much revamping of her work into new, stand alone pieces. The reimagining of her work gets done primarily through new, experimental designs in productions of her original plays. Even though The Innocent Mistress doesn't get performed in the modern day quite as much as one might expect because it isn't as prolific as Pix's more well known piece, The Beau Defeated, there are still theatre companies that have been eager to tackle her lesser known piece.

A large majority of modern production history I've found takes place specifically in acting schools in the UK, for example the UEA Drama Studio located in Norwich, England. They included The Innocent Mistress in their restoration comedy series in 2015 alongside The Country Wife by William Wycherley and The Beaux Stratagem by George Farquhar


For the production they used a mixture of period appropriate costuming and a more surrealist set design.







The opposite techniques can be seen in the 1997 production of The Innocent Mistress produced by the ArtsED London School of Acting in which the set design stayed grounded in more realism but the character design became more bizarre. 












Outside of the school setting there have been highly acclaimed professional productions of The Innocent Mistress, most notably one 2014 production at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre in the United Kingdom, which is highly renowned and considered to be the oldest continually operating theatre in the english speaking world. Their production contained a more traditional interpretation of the play with gorgeous set design by Hannah Wolfe and costumes by Maisie Roberts. The very high reputation of this theatre company and them choosing to do Pix's work helped to reintroduce her to a large modern audience.



I feel it would be doing a disservice not to talk about another interpretation of Pix and her work that isn't modern but actually from her own time period, entitled The Female Wits which was published by an anonymous author in 1696. This piece was a satire play intended to humiliate the largest female playwrights in the United Kingdom at the time including Delariviere Manley, Catherine Trotter and of course, Mary Pix. There have been many discussions in the academic world regarding how one should read The Female Wits- if it should be interpreted as straightforward misogyny which only exists as a method to try and silence female authors, or if it should be taken as a more lighthearted poking at the expense of these women, which speaks more to the women's power, popularity and influence at the time.

I also feel it's important to make the distinction that in my research I've found The Innocent Mistress has also become the name of an erotic romance series available for purchase on amazon- which, by the way, doesn't have great reviews. After looking into the author of that series a bit more I can confidently say there is no inspiration for that series directly from Mary Pix's piece of the same name. So if you're doing research on the Innocent Mistress, I recommend being very specific in what you type into the search bar.

Citations:

Unknownplaywrights. “The Innocent Mistress.” Unknown Playwrights, Wordpress, 13 June 2019, https://unknownplaywrights.wordpress.com/tag/the-innocent-mistress/.

Ejderos, Sofia. 'The Innocent Mistress' Bristol Old Vic Studio. Designer Hannah Wolfe - Sofia Ejderos, 2014, https://cargocollective.com/sofiaejderos/The-Innocent-Mistress-Bristol-Old-Vic-Studio-Designer-Hannah-Wolfe.

Bishop, Ben. “Game? Sex? Match?” Concrete, 29 Nov. 2015, https://www.concrete-online.co.uk/game-sex-match/.

Van Hensbergen, Claudine. “The Female Wits.” The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire, 2019, pp. 73–90., https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198727835.013.13.

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