Taking a Trojan Horse to the Classics by Griselda Heppel
When I’m reading a book review or looking at notices of coming play performances, there’s one word that tells me I need read no further. I know at once that this novel or this performance is not for me.
I know I'm repeating myself here (see Mary Bennett above), but I would rather writers thought up their own gripping plots and created their own emotionally complex characters. I don’t want to read The Mill on the Floss from the point of view of Tom Tulliver. Or Uriah Heep’s version of David Copperfield.
The word is ‘reimagining’.
Instead of the writer’s creating his or her own original work of art in novel or play form, they have piggy-backed on a classic, taken over the well-defined characters (saves the effort of creating their own), invented new plotlines and generally ‘updated’ the story to add ‘freshness’ and ‘relevance’ for today. A particular favourite at the moment is to go for a minor character – Mary Bennett, say – and retell Jane Austen’s great novel from her point of view. The result is a kind of Cosy Classics in which readers are duped into thinking they’re being given a new, original story when much of it is simply borrowed finery from an infinitely greater creator.
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| The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. Told through the eyes of Maggie, NOT Tom Tulliver. Published by The Jenson Society, NY, 1910 -https://archive.org/ details/worksofgeorgeeli03elio,Public Domain, https://commons. wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14985642 |
What’s the harm, you may ask? If people enjoy these ‘takes’ on the classics, why shouldn’t authors do this?
Call me a spoilsport but I care about the originals, and I worry that this mania for reimagining them will fix in readers’/viewers’ minds inaccurate versions of Shakespeare, Austen, Brontës, Dickens and others.
The Summer 2026 issue of The Author contains an article by Tanika Gupta, a playwright who, as well as penning her own plays, is a great fan of reimaginings, in which she adapts classics ‘into a world shaped by empire and migration.’ In her BBC Radio version of A Doll’s House, for instance, Nora becomes Niru, ‘a young Bengali woman in a mixed marriage with an English colonial administrator who… embodied the entitlement and arrogance of the Raj. His control over Niru mirrored Britain’s control over India.’
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| Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House Adapted by Tanika Gupta |
I can see how this would work. Gupta is clearly an accomplished writer and doubtless produces a powerful result.
But the blurring of cultures and historical periods troubles me. For one thing, A Doll’s House isn’t even British, it’s by Henrik Ibsen. Norway didn’t have an empire, so it seems rather hard on that country’s greatest playwright to tack criticism of the British Raj on to his play. For another, the shock value of A Doll’s House remains to this day: though the position of women as chattels (in the west at least) is no longer what it was in 1879, Nora’s rebellion against the patriarchy still strikes a chord. How can you overwrite the play’s strong feminist theme with an anti-colonial one without shifting the focus away from Ibsen’s original message? According to Gupta, her version of A Doll’s House is now studied on the GCSE curriculum. I only hope students are introduced to Ibsen’s play at the same time, or how will they understand that he, not she, is the original author?
The same goes for Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, each given a similar British colonial treatment by Gupta, who admits that the process allows her ‘to smuggle in the histories, politics and lived experiences’ of the UK’s South Asian communities. Adaptation, for her ‘becomes a Trojan horse.’
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| A replica of the Trojan Horse, used in the 2004 film, Troy. By Fredrik Posse -Self-photographed, Copyrighted free use,https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1574215 |
Which is rather an unsettling image.
More so, perhaps, than Gupta intends.
Find out more about Griselda Heppel here:
and her children's books:
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