Abstract

This essay analyses the representation of the maternal body and its relationship with the monstrous in a series of plays that have recently appeared on the British stage. With a specific focus on Robert Alan Evans’s The Woods (2018), Simon Stone’s revisioning of Federico García Lorca’s Yerma (2017) and Selma Dimitrijević’s Dr Frankenstein (2017), this chapter interrogates how such dramas have inherited elements of Gothic horror to explore representations of motherhood. Moreover, it questions how the theatrical medium, as it draws upon live bodies in a shared time and space with its audience, can offer a distinct and resonant platform to consider the horrors attached to the monstrous maternal, particularly in its complicated relationship with patriarchal and neoliberal constructions of time and place.