Kneehigh’s Retellings

Devised adaptation as practiced by Kneehigh Theatre is a complex, collaborative process of recreating myths, fairy tales , classic texts and films. These are adapted as popular, accessible, and often both celebratory and subversive theatrical experiences. This chapter is a study of Kneehigh’s creative processes alongside analysis of several of the performance works that they have generated since 1999. This study reveals the suitability of devising methodologies as valuable collaborative processes for unlocking and reimagining source texts . The company’s preference for the term ‘retelling’ over adaptation is shown to signal their alliance to an oral storytelling tradition in which intertextuality , narrative mutability, and shared cultural ownership of stories is prioritized over single authorship and fixed originals.