Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, which appears in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, is being adapted for the stage by an Oxford-based theatre company called Marvellous Machine.
As their website puts it, Marvellous Machine was set up by two friends living in Oxford, and aims to provide “inventive homespun theatre” by combining “music, movement and text”. The show premieres on 17th November 2016, and tickets are now on sale, available at Oxford Playhouse.
‘The Tiger’s Bride’ is one of Carter’s reworkings of ‘The Beauty and the Beast’, but with an inventive twist at the end: instead of the beast transforming into a man, the woman sheds her human skin to reveal the beast lurking beneath. Carter also highlights the patriarchal structure of traditional marriage by having her Beauty exchanged between men. The tale opens with the line: “My father lost me to the Beast at cards”, a line of which Carter was especially proud. This is a story of desire, power and transformation.
You can follow Marvellous Machine on Facebook and you can watch a trailer for their production of ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ below:
Angela Carter Online 