Restaging Macklin

This chapter represents an effort to identify and disseminate some of the ephemeral insights from a restaging of Macklin’s Love à la Mode in Dublin in 2017 and 2018, exploring not only the practicalities of ‘restaging’ Macklin, but also the conceptual implications, challenges, insights, and values that arose from the process. The chapter considers the problems and complications of staging eighteenth-century farce, the connections between English literary study and performance studies, balancing the academic and commercial aspects of the twenty-first century theatre, the translation of plays across time and in different cultural contexts, and practice-as-research, or ensemble-research praxis. It also considers the audience as a central component to the work of staging a farce, and the challenges this poses for rehearsal.