Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen. Victoria Lowe

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СКАЧАТЬ stage and screen during three catalytic periods in British film and theatre history: 1929–33 and the introduction of synchronized sound to film; post 1956 with the British New Wave on stage and screen; and finally the growth of stage adaptations of specifically British films post 2000. These particular periods were chosen to illustrate the principle that adaptations have to be understood within the particular historical and cultural moment in which they are produced. Therefore, Chapter 4 looks at the work of Basil Dean, early British Hitchcock and the Aldwych farces as differently inflected responses in film adaptation to the coming of sound to cinema in Britain. These examples give insight into the cultural context because of the way that they foreground (or diminish) theatrical elements in the adaptation to the screen. In a similar way to the first half, I am particularly interested in actors’ performances in these adaptations because of the way that their presumed ‘theatricality’ has often been misunderstood by critics as ‘holding back’ British cinema, rendering it a second-order experience of a more culturally legitimated mode of dramatic expression. The work of actors can often be overlooked in adaptations and I contend that examining how acting is presented in the films can lead to a more nuanced understanding of its function.

      In a different way, the British New Wave can be thought of as a movement that crossed between the performance media of theatre and cinema, with both plays and films challenging established norms not only in writing but also in acting and design. These were articulated within medium-specific frameworks such as translating theatrical naturalism into cinematic realism, but also by other strategies that moved towards a more poetic anti-naturalistic expression across both stage and screen. In Chapter 5, I will examine two well-known film adaptations of stage plays, The Entertainer (1959) and A Taste of Honey (1961), but also a lesser-known work, The Kitchen (1961) by Arnold Wesker to understand how these aesthetic experiments were played out.

      The final chapter in the section reverses the process again to look at the adaptation of specifically British films for the stage. My argument here is that the accelerated changes in technology since 2000 have created a climate where not just the content of the film but the medium in which it is articulated are addressed as subject matter, and so in a different way these adaptations recycle questions about the relationship between theatre and cinema for British culture raised by the early sound films. Following on from Ellis who argued that ‘adaptation into another medium becomes a means of prolonging the pleasure of the original representation, and repeating the production of memory’ (1982: 4), I will investigate how the cultural memory of these films is woven through the adaptation, inviting the audience to repeat acts of consumption. However, in a political context dominated by discussions of national borders and ensuing identities, the staging of these films also offers the opportunity to interrogate these issues through a theatrical engagement with the products of British cinema.

My arguments will be explored in the first half by looking predominantly at examples from a range of English language plays and American and European films and in the second half through what has been described as ‘British’ cinema and productions within the English theatre.⁵ Particularly within British cultural history, there have, of course, been many links between popular cultural forms that cross between stage and screen such as music hall and variety, not to mention the links between theatre and television, but I feel that this is beyond the scope of my central argument so mention of this will be limited. Another further qualification is the absence of sustained discussion about Shakespeare on screen. This is because I feel that it has for a long time dominated discussion of screen adaptations of stage plays (and is beginning to dominate discussion of live theatre broadcasts too) to the exclusion of other plays and practices. Therefore, because it has been dealt with exhaustively elsewhere (e.g. Hatchuel 2004; Buchanan 2005; Jackson 2014), my discussion of this subject is restricted to discussion of the RSC’s live cinema broadcasts in Chapter 3. It should maybe go without saying that the case studies (with a few exceptions where the name has been translated) all share the same name so that whether the audience has seen the referred-to work or not, the fact that they are known by the same title, but in a different medium, usually implies a self-conscious desire to draw attention to their status as an adaptation. Adaptation studies has spent some time contemplating what is and what is not an adaptation and I feel it is unnecessary to replicate these points of view here, but rather to draw attention to Julie Sanders’ succinct and useful definition of adaptations as ‘reinterpretations of established texts in new generic contexts or […] with relocations of […] a source text’s cultural and/or temporal setting, which may or may not involve a generic shift’ (2015: 19).

      Because of the fairly broad scope of the book in spanning the historical and the contemporary, it is difficult to identify one overarching critical theory or framework that can be used to analyse the play that gets adapted for the screen (recorded or live) or the film that is staged in the theatre. That is not to say that there hasn’t been an awful lot written over the twentieth century about film’s difference from the theatre as a dramatic medium. Susan Sontag’s 1966 article, ‘Film and theatre’ from whence the quotation that started this chapter was drawn, was a definitive intervention into an ongoing critical debate about this issue. Sontag argued that many of the positions articulated in the debate depended on an essentialist view of each art form or were determined by a critic’s need to assert cinema’s individual identity by distinguishing it from theatre. She concluded that this meant that ‘the history of cinema is often treated as the history of its emancipation from theatrical models’ ([1966] 1994: 24). Again it is not my intention here to rehash these different viewpoints, as they have been ably dealt with in several edited collections, namely Cardullo’s Stage and Screen: Adaptation Theory from 1916 to 2000 (2012) and Knopf’s Theater and Cinema: A Comparative Anthology (2005), and the reader is directed to these works to find relevant key works on the relationship between theatre and film. In particular, Cardullo’s introduction offers a useful summary of the differences between them in terms of object, creator and audience, and lays some of the ground work for this book in calling for attention to be paid to how their relationship is affected by elements that are situated in a particular culture and/or time (2012: 1–17). Roger Manvell’s 1979 Theater and Film also takes on board the difference in film adaptation of novels and plays and has a useful section on acting on stage on screen. However, it should be noted that both Manvell and the edited collections centre around the adaptation of plays to the screen, rather than adapting films to the stage or broadcasting live theatre to cinemas, and do little to move the discussion forward in terms of addressing a reconfigured media landscape or taking on board the increasing attention paid today in both film and theatre studies towards current processes of media convergence. A more recent work, Ingham’s Stage-Play and Screen-Play: The Intermediality of Theatre and Cinema (2016) is more inclusive of these practices. Its stated aim is to provide ‘a systematic attempt to map this stage drama–screen drama relationship across a spectrum of dramatic possibilities’ (2016: 9). Ingham proposes a broad continuum that takes on a range of intermedial exchanges between theatre and film and includes screen-to-stage adaptations and live casting as part of its remit. However, his adoption of intermediality as a critical framework to make sense of these stage–screen interactions means that his continuum goes beyond the practices of adaptation to encompass a whole spectrum of intermedial practice such as the representation of theatres on film and the use of screens on stage. Whilst intermediality is obviously a useful term in any investigation of stage–screen relations, because it refocuses attention on the operations of the media themselves, I contend that the specificity of adaptation between theatre and cinema is subsumed into this broader approach.

      Centralizing performance and event

      Consideration of performance is often elided in discussion of adaptation between stage and screen, with the stage treated as an adjunct of the page. This may seem surprising, with adaptation studies often claiming to move beyond the literary paradigms that have dominated the field (e.g. Leitch 2003; Cartmell and Whelehan 2010). One of the few critics to have looked more inclusively at adaptation is Linda Hutcheon who has asserted that ‘theatre shares much with film as both are “showing” mediums that can use visual and sonic means to construct stories, which then can be performed СКАЧАТЬ