AustLit

'In December 1882, Eliza O’Flaherty died of “diabetes and exhaustion” at her lodgings in Sydney. Aged 64, Eliza lived in a brick cottage behind a dyeworks, where she had been employed as manager for two years. Her demise might seem unremarkable: a widowed, childless woman of the 19th century who had been worn out by work. But O'Flaherty was actually Eliza Winstanley, the first woman to play Richard III in an Australian theatre, and an early star of the colonial stage.' (Introduction)

This essay examines the adaptation of the serial fiction of Eliza Winstanley into sensation melodramas for the stage in suburban (and particularly East End) theatres in London. The process of adaptation was not a straightforward one. Winstanley was an actress turned writer who drew heavily on her own theatrical background in structuring her writing. Her stage background lent her serials a strongly theatrical flavour; however, playwrights adapting her work seem to have found its inherent theatricality problematic. Examining such adaptations reveals two aspects of playwriting and staging in mid-nineteenth-century suburban theatres: the conflicted attitude of playwrights towards the serials’ theatricality and their occasionally contradictory attempts to tie their productions closely to the original texts by basing tableaux and sensation scenes directly on the serials’ illustrations.