ABSTRACT
Since the 1970s feminist literary studies have established a body of scholarship concerned with challenging the value systems that govern and determine the literary canon. Such studies have revealed how the canon is based on those value systems that also dominate our systems of (capitalist) economic and (patriarchal) social control, and have, in consequence, highlighted its gender bias. Feminist approaches to the canon have worked both to read canonical ‘master’ texts from a feminist perspective, taking account of gender, race and class, and to discover ‘lost’ work by women writers, which the value systems of the canon have obscured from view. This latter direction is pursued in the following chapter. Here, I am concerned with how, as women/feminist theatre-makers, we can challenge canonical ‘masterpieces’ through a feminist theatre practice.
