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Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen. Victoria Lowe
Читать онлайн.Название Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781789382341
Автор произведения Victoria Lowe
Жанр Кинематограф, театр
Издательство Ingram
We were able to construct a scene that is highly effective in cinematic terms, yet wholly concerned with the least visual of all possible subjects; music itself. I do not believe that a stage version of this scene would have been half as effective.
(Shaffer 1984: 57, original emphasis)
It is noteworthy then that a revival of Amadeus at the National Theatre in 2016, after Shaffer’s death, took a very different attitude to the music and one that arguably was inspired by the integrated use of music in the film. Whereas Hall’s original production used music sparingly, Michael Longhurst’s production put the music centre stage by employing twenty musicians from the Southbank Sinfonia to play Mozart’s music whilst being assimilated into the action. Dressed in modern black clothes they become a chorus commenting on the action, responding to Salieri with both music and movement. As the Independent review highlighted, this enabled Mozart’s music to have a visceral impact, by being brought alive in correspondence with the action on stage, similar to that described by Shaffer above.
There’s an extraordinary sequence in which Salieri is glancing through a folder of his rival’s sheet music. As he drops the pages one by one, unable to bear the beauty of what he reads, the Sinfonia’s glorious performances of them get abruptly aborted but the mobile platform of steps on which they are standing continues to bear down like an implacable juggernaut on the writhing and retching Salieri.
(Taylor 2016: n.pag.)
Finally I would like to look at an example where the relationship of music to the drama was both integral to the production and then examine how this was then adapted to the screen. The play in question is Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, which was adapted to the screen in 1951. Both versions were directed by Elia Kazan, with Marlon Brando in the role of Stanley and Jessica Tandy/Vivien Leigh in the role of Blanche in stage/screen versions respectively. The debut production of Streetcar opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York on 3 December 1947 and was a huge commercial and critical success, playing for 855 performances. As Davison has argued, the ‘music created for theatrical productions is notoriously ephemeral. It is not uncommon to find that the only information about a production’s music to survive is a credit for the composer and/or performers in the play’s program or playbill and, occasionally, a few lines about the music in reviews of the play’ (2011: 402). Because of the existence of archive material relating to both stage and screen versions of the drama, the score of Streetcar has been subject to an unusual level of critical investigation (e.g. Davison 2009; Butler 2002). For instance, Davison describes how because of disputes about the categorization of the play between producer Irene M. Selznick and the American Federation of Musicians, the extent and purpose of the music, and how it developed from text to production, is exceptionally well documented (2011).
From the start, Williams had included references to music in the play, including a blues piano, which ‘expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here’ (Williams and Miller 2009: 1), a muted trumpet and a ‘polka tune’ that functions as Blanche’s memory music and comes in towards the end of the play to highlight Blanche’s mental disintegration. In pre-production, Kazan developed this into two dissimilar types of music that played at different times in the production and Blanche’s ‘leitmotif’ was brought in earlier in the play. As Davison suggests, ‘placing these cues throughout the play suggested that Blanche’s mental state was fragile prior to her arrival in New Orleans’ (Davison 2009: 83). The theme was performed on the world’s first polyphonic synthesizer, the Hammond Novachord and was played just slightly off-stage. The Novachord could warp acoustic sounds into defamiliarized and uncanny variations in order to leave it ambiguous whether it was there as mood music from outside the action or represented the sounds that were inside Blanche’s head, as she recalled her life in Belle Reve.
The blues piano and trumpet in Williams’ playscript evolved into improvised jazz music performed by a live band upstairs in a dressing room and amplified to the auditorium to give the impression of a band playing in the fictional ‘Four Deuces’ café over the road. Davison also relates how the jazz score was used at key moments to counterpoint the action, such as a ‘slow, whimsical, sexy version of Sugar Blues’ being deployed to undermine Blanche’s protestations that she has ‘old fashioned ideals’ (Davison 2009: 84). Kazan also decided that the jazz blues was to be used to underpin the latent physical sexuality that is expressed between characters, ‘whether characters are conscious of its power, expressing it in their words and actions (Stanley and Stella), or whether the music expresses its power over them, in their denial or suppression of it (Blanche)’ (Davison 2011: 440). In production then, Williams’ original suggestions for music cues were often changed or removed. A particular example of this is the ending, where Kazan chose to bring the action to the close with the sound of the haunting polka music rather than the upbeat jazz indicated by Williams, which encouraged sympathy with Blanche as she is led away by the doctor and matron and implicitly linked her demise to the suicide of her husband, the loss of Belle Reve and the fragmentation of her identity that followed.
This sense of the music being used to comment on characters was fairly innovative for music accompanying a play in the theatre and this active engagement with the characters and narrative was retained in the score for the film. Alex North’s score has been described as ‘the first functional, dramatic jazz score for a film. Up until then, jazz had been generally used only as source music’ (Lochner 2006: 3). Davison argues that the score of the film challenged the notion that music for a film should guide the audience towards a particular interpretation (sometimes called Mickey Mousing), maintaining that it retained the play’s ambiguity towards its characters (2009: 84). Butler on the other hand argues that the film score operates within dominant Classical Hollywood norms, by using jazz music to aurally point to what is deemed seedy and immoral (2002: 98). He references handwritten notations on North’s original score, where the words ‘sexy, virile’ appear alongside the instrumentation for muted trumpet whereas Blanche’s dreams of her previous, seemingly unsullied life are underscored by a more classical soundtrack involving violins, and cello, with the note that it should sound ‘magic-like, shimmering’ (Butler 2002: 98). What is certainly clear is that the music blurs the boundaries between the diegetic and the non-diegetic in terms of whether it is internal to the plot or used to underscore the dramatic action from outside of it. For instance, in the opening scenes, the rolling blues piano that accompanies the images becomes the music heard by the characters in the bowling lanes, where Blanche meets up with Stella.
North also expanded the music for Blanche by developing two themes that worked as leitmotifs. The first is the polka theme that is associated with Blanche’s memory of dancing with her husband before he shot himself. Whenever he is referred to in the film, however obliquely, the tune comes in and snaps off at the sound of a shot. The only exception to this is at the end when Mitch comes round to break up with Blanche. The music does not stop after the shot but goes on, perhaps indicating that Blanche’s relationship with Mitch is as doomed as that with her former husband. However there is another theme, which North called ‘Belle Reve Reflections’, that is used not only to indicate that traumatic loss of the estate for Blanche, but also at other points in the film. For instance, it plays when Stanley breaks the news of Stella’s pregnancy to Blanche. This might not seem on the surface to impact Blanche but by linking this to Blanche’s music of ‘loss’, the music comments on the action, suggesting that this will be another nail in the coffin for Blanche, by being cut out of the new family unit, as indeed happens at the end.
There was also more than one score for the film as North’s original music suffered from cuts made in the film by the producers to satisfy the Catholic Legion of Decency, precisely because of the perceived ‘carnality’ of some parts of the score (Davison 2009: 68–72). This was the score that played during what has been termed the ‘staircase scene’, which comes about halfway through