Zinnie Harris: interrupting the inevitable flow of tragic time

This article focusses on Zinnie Harris’s feminist adaptations of three canonical European tragedies: Aeschylus’s Oresteia as This Restless House (2016), Duchess of Malfi, as The Duchess (of Malfi) (2019), and Shakespeare’s Macbeth as Macbeth (an undoing) (2023). These works see Harris revisioning conventional tragic plotting and tragic temporalities, to explore themes of gendered violence, trauma, and reconciliation. Drawing on debates around tragic form and its relationship with feminist theory, this article assesses the effectiveness of Harris’s strategies for adaptation in unearthing new feminist readings of these classic performance texts, especially her critique of the notion that the dialectic of progress arises from the tragic form itself, from its presumed universality.