I’d be surprised if there’s a more unlikely attempt to update a classic text this year than Linda Marshall Griffiths’s take on Villette at West Yorkshire Playhouse, which relocates Charlotte Brontë’s novel to an archaeological dig in the future and recasts Lucy Snowe as a clone. If some reimaginings are mere nudges, this is an almighty kick. Marshall Griffiths’s attempt to reinvent a 19th-century novel that seems firmly set in the past may not quite come off, but it’s part of an honourable theatrical tradition.

As Simon Stone observed in the programme for his own updated version of Yerma at the Young Vic: “There’s a moment, about 100 years after the work of an artist, when you can either say, ‘You are now condemned to the ranks of a footnote’ or ‘We are going to make you the centre of an international culture by keeping on telling your stories.’” Stone suggested that it is in the act of reinvention that “you liberate someone from their original cultural context and elevate them to the level of myth-maker”. It was a point explored in Anne Washburn’s brilliant Mr Burns, which asks what might endure in a post-apocalyptic world: Homer? Or perhaps Homer Simpson, from the TV series that itself so cleverly steals from everything from Shakespeare to B-movies?

Here are five examples of improbable relocations that shouldn’t work but do.

The House of Pootsie Plunket

In Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neill relocated Aeschylus’s great trilogy The Oresteia to New England at the end of the American civil war, leading one reviewer to observe: “It is uneven, but so are the Himalayas.” Catalyst Theatre took the Electra story and reimagined it as a tragicomedy played out in the icy wastelands of Canada with the dysfunctional Plunkett family who, after the discovery of returning patriarch Agamemnon (here renamed Buster), dead in the septic tank with a bullet in the brain, are plunged into a cycle of revenge.

Return to the Forbidden Planet

Shakespeare’s The Tempest is often referred to as one of the original sci-fi dramas, so propelling it into the future and setting it in space is not too big a leap. Certainly not for writer Bob Carlton, whose musical mashup of 1950s B-movies and Shakespeare has proved hugely successful and is frequently revived. No doubt when he first proposed it somebody said it was a stupid idea, but it’s likely that somebody said the same about a musical version of Romeo and Juliet relocated to New York in the early 1950s too. How wrong they were.

The Lion King

Yep, it’s Hamlet played out on the African plains with lions instead of humans and Elton John songs instead of poetry. OK, so the only real similarities are in the plot, although young Simba does seem as conflicted as any Hamlet and is slow to act against his uncle. But it reminds us that Shakespeare fits into Simon Stone’s notion of myth-maker (even though the Bard stole most of his own plots) and the plays are plastic enough to be reimagined in many forms, whether it’s Romeo and Juliet with cyborg Montagues and the Capulets as genetically modified humans, King Lear relocated to medieval Japan, or the Danish royal family as big cats.

The Erpingham Camp

There have been lots of updates of Greek tragedy but probably few as strange and spot-on as Joe Orton’s rewrite of The Bacchae, set in a holiday camp on an August bank holiday in the 1960s, where the residents increasingly come under the influence of the demonic Don (short for Dionysus). Soon they are throwing off their British reserve and running riot. Originally written as a TV play (“H Pinter says it like Battleship Potemkin,” wrote Orton proudly in a letter to a friend), it was subsequently staged at the Royal Court and continues to be revived, its savagery more than matching Euripides’s last play.

The Playboy of the West Indies

Playwright Mustapha Matura had a stab at Chekhov with his Trinidadian Sisters, but his real triumph was in transposing JM Synge’s 1907 comedy The Playboy of the Western World to a 1950s Trinidadian rum shop where cane-cutting Ken arrives, boasting of having killed his father. It may seem a long way from cold, boggy rural Ireland to the sun-filled Caribbean, but this success for the Tricycle theatre (in the 80s and again in 2004) proved a perfect match, with many of Synge’s lines effortlessly translating into the Caribbean vernacular, as Matura played up the comedy of the original without sacrificing the play’s underlying melancholy.