This chapter looks at how experimental theatre companies, directors and artists channel Samuel Beckett’s sensitivity to the ways women lose their agency when exposed to the patriarchal gaze. Through casting and spatial locations, Mabou Mines, Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne have transformed the quiet and mysterious Come and Go into a blistering look at the audience’s narrowly focused gaze. Patricia Rozema’s film Happy Days and Arlene Shechet’s installation piece Passing By are vibrant site-specific performances that seek to transform the gaze of the audience into one of compassion. These four adaptations, when looked at together, appear to turn the gaze from the characters to the audience. These adaptations managed to blur the borders of what is Beckett and what is theatre by exploring the gaze in his work, and in doing so the audience find themselves looking at the way they look at Beckett’s women.

This chapter discusses one of the most recent and – despite the absence of dialogue and anything resembling realistic acting – most faithful adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Guy Maddin's 2002 film of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's dance adaptation, set to the music of Gustav Mahler, Dracula –Pages from a Virgin's Diary. Maddin's 'Victorian' interpretation of Dracula is marked by an emphasis on the turn-of-the-century cultural contexts of the novel (gender, medicine, race, imperialism). The film presents 1890s England as seen through the eyes of a knowledgeable 21st century viewer whose close reading of the source text is shaped by critical discussions of the novel and the Dracula myth in popular culture. Vampirizing various cultural artifacts from Caligari to Coppola, Maddin's palimpsestic film ultimately manages to be both highly original and collage, both – in the words of Jonathan Harker's diary – ‘up-to-date’ and ‘nineteenth century […] with a vengeance’.

This section sheds light upon the post-war context of Nottingham’s multicultural, working-class communities, before exploring their dynamic, interactive and accessible literary creations. Particular emphasis is placed on African Caribbean and white British authors through readings of selected Nottingham texts. This introduction contextualises ‘Notts’ cultural expression as diverse as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958); a digital app that immerses walkers in the streets of Sillitoe’s fiction; the Afrocentric (out)spoken word collective ‘Blackdrop’; and a publicly funded campaign to celebrate the city’s literary rebels. By mapping a brief microhistory at the intersection of Nottingham’s white working-class and African Caribbean communities, it explore how commonalities and differences of experience manifest in the city’s cohesive, yet heterogenous range of literary voices.

The conclusion summarises the key findings for each of the places discussed in the book. It then draws out the commonalities across the region, before reflecting on the policy implications of these findings and, finally, considering the future of literature and the wider creative economy in the Midlands.

This chapter re-examines Beckett’s 1950s coining of the terms ‘adaphatroce’, which could best be paraphrased as ‘dreadful’ or ‘atrocious adaptation’, to argue that it does not signify a wholesale rejection of creative responses to his work but rather constitutes the starting point of a gradual embrace, at least an acceptance or recognition of the phenomenon as a powerful cultural force. By critically assessing his comments on the matter as they appear in published letters from the 1950s to the 1980s, touching upon various genres and media, the chapter attempts to reconstruct Beckett’s implicit ‘poetics’ of adaptation and illustrate how it aligns with key notions such as self-translation, self-directing, intertextuality and intermediality, which now have come to be recognised as central to his creative practice. Starting with an overview of adaptations that Beckett was himself involved in, the account moves on to creative reworkings he merely authorised or denied, to end with a reflection on how his perception of his own authority over his own work had changed as a result. In doing so, the chapter makes the ongoing (re-)historicising of Beckett, partly through archival research, an important precondition, not only for a better understanding of his own views on adaptation but also to keep his work vibrant in a twenty-first-century context.

This chapter analyses the ‘afterlife’ of the figure of Beckett in four contemporary novels: Lucia, by Alex Pheby; The Joyce Girl, by Annabel Abbs; A Country Road, A Tree, by Jo Baker; and Jott, by Sam Thompson. Rather than adaptations of Beckett’s works, these novels interact with the historical figure of Beckett in the war years (Baker) and in his relationships with Geoffrey Thompson (Thompson) and Lucia Joyce (Pheby and Abbs). It is argued that the ‘historical’ nature of the figure and reputation of Beckett is brought to the fore and made problematic through his deployment as a fictionalised character. Baker, Thompson, Abbs and Pheby all draw on biographical material that has recently become more readily available through the publication of the letters. Yet it is also apparent that a lack of biographical material is supplemented by these authors through adopting or adapting facets of Beckett’s own works of fiction. By examining the economy of these textual traces, the chapter charts a tension between the ‘biographical’, ‘historical’ and ‘fictional’ representations of Beckett. The chapter also argues that these four fictional uses of the author allow us to consider his own practice of ‘adapting’ from real-life, especially in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (in which Lucia Joyce appears as the Syra-Cusa) and Murphy (which draws on Thompson’s experiences at the Bethlehem Hospital). This in turn raises ethical concerns about the use of ‘real’ people within fiction, for both Beckett and others.

Chapter 9 analyses the push and pull factors which cause Midlands creatives to relocate to London. While a select few West Midlands writers have gone on to achieve widespread acclaim and recognition within a London-centric literary infrastructure, some creatives from the region feel the local cultural ecosystem is not conducive to what educational psychologist Carol Dweck calls a ‘growth mindset’. (Mis)perceptions of the region as lacking in cultural prowess may in fact have real-world consequences for those Midlanders seeking careers in the creative industries – not only with regards scant external funding but also the extent to which personal advancement may be interpreted negatively at the local level.

Chapter 6 interrogates the notion of Birmingham as a ‘non-place’, seeking clarity on where this (mis)conception originates and emphasising the city’s unique creative aesthetics. It achieves this through close readings and original interviews with Costa prize-winning Irish-Brummie author Catherine O’Flynn. Her fictional representations of Birmingham are considered in parallel with the ‘grand narratives’ of the city as it developed in the latter half of the twentieth century, in order to understand how the personal sub-narratives of the city are both critical of, and informed by, the bigger vision.

Chapter 2 examines issues of class, hierarchy and class consciousness in the late fourteenth century, principally through a study of three major works: William Langland’s Piers Plowman, in particular the relationship between this literary text and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and its relationship to the genre of medieval estates satire as well as social reality; and John Gower’s Vox Clamantis. Piers Plowman emerges as an excoriating attack on the corruption of English society in the late fourteenth century, as principles of profit threaten to sweep away the last vestiges of society’s moral order. Langland celebrates the dignity of ordinary labour but concludes that a self-sufficient, functioning society cannot be achieved until a point in the distant future, if at all before the return of Christ. Instead, the task of the dutiful Christian citizen must be to save souls not society. Chaucer has often been contrasted to Langland as a poet who sneered at the pretensions of social climbers. Through an analysis of The Miller’s Tale and The Reeve’s Tale the chapter shows that, like Langland, the more urban-focussed Chaucer also saw a society in disarray, falling prey to the forces of greed and commercialization. His satirical attacks are less concerned with individual classes than the failures of the collective whole. In contrast, Gower has no problem in blaming the rebellious peasants for England’s social ills and, accordingly, he dehumanizes them as ignorant beasts.