Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen - Victoria Lowe

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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.

      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 by actors’ (2006: 159). Hutcheon also provided the introduction for a collection of interviews and essays that consider the implications of live performance for adaptation (MacArthur et al. 2009), though this did not focus exclusively on film. Christine Geraghty has provided the most useful scholarship in this area so far with her monograph Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (2007) and her chapter contribution to Modern British Drama on Screen (2013). The former makes a clear distinction between literature and drama as sources in adaptation and applies this understanding to a revelatory discussion of film adaptations of Tennessee Williams plays in terms of the reconfiguration of dramatic space and actors’ performance styles. In the latter she applies the same principles to the screen adaptation of Ann Jellicoe’s stage play The Knack, analysing how the ‘theatrical origins of the film shaped some of its aesthetics’ (2013: 121). Indeed, the entirety of Palmer and Bray’s collection of essays, alongside their companion collection Modern American Drama on Screen (2016), provides useful models for examining screen adaptations of stage plays in terms of their shared identity as ‘performance media’ (2013: 8).

      This book’s emphasis on performance and participation in an event also owes a debt to

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