Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen - Victoria Lowe

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based on the elements of speech, movement and design they both share. Williams’ argument depended on his willingness to investigate as he put it ‘literary text and theatrical representation, not as separate entities, but as the unity which they are intended to become’ (1991: 10). This deceptively simple assertion of the unity of written text and performance belies a long critical debate that can be traced as far back as Aristotle, who famously asserted that ‘the Spectacle […] is the least artistic of all the parts’ (Aristotle and Cooper 1913: 27–28).

      It is perhaps this inclination in favour of a text centred, anti-visual tradition in western culture, downplaying the significance of performance, that has contributed to a reluctance to discuss how it might function in relation to adaptation and leads to both novel and play as being understood as ‘literature’. As Margaret Kidnie summarizes:

      If the identity of drama is not constructed as bridging two distinct media and what is essential to the work is limited to its text(s), then distinctions between drama and forms of literature such as the novel disappear.

      (2009: 21)

      Therefore including aspects of the play as performance (from actors and acting to design, lighting to props and costume) in the scope of adaptation studies expands the framework of analysis. This then acknowledges that

      The performance has its own aesthetic identity, separate from the play. Plays can be the focus of a theater event, with every conscious choice corresponding exactly to, and informed by, a well thought-out interpretation of the play, but they can also be used merely to facilitate theatre events.

      (Osipovich 2006: 462–63)

      The relationship between text and performance in the theatre is also paralleled by film’s relationship with the screenplay, although the latter is rarely treated as ‘literature’ in the same way as a play. Indeed, Boozer (2008) and Sherry (2016) have both called for a re-consideration of the screenplay as a ‘source’ in its own right and a key determining factor in the adaptation process. The privileging of the artefact in adaptation studies can be detected in Brian McFarlane’s explanation for not looking at theatrical adaptation in his 1996 Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation: ‘That novel and film both exist as texts, as documents, in the way that a stage performance does not, means that both are amenable to close sustained study’ (1996: 202). McFarlane’s formulation here is revealing, because of what he assumes analysis of adaptations necessarily involves, i.e. a tangible ‘thing’ in which textual authority is invested and that allows an empirical comparison. As Dicecco persuasively argues, this

      draws attention to the pitfalls of treating the logic of the archive as the interpretative default. The notion of one idealised text […] reveals a bias in favour of the written document [and thus] drama presents a distinct challenge to formal/ ontological models of adaptation because the test of authenticity appears to operate according to different rules from those best suited to the novel/ film paradigm.

      (2017: 617)

      Rather than shy away from performance then because it doesn’t easily fit into established adaptation frameworks, this study understands this as an opportunity to question those paradigms. For instance, a concern with ‘sources’ and their relationship to the adapted work have characterized the field since its inception as a scholarly practice. Approaches to the adaptation that centralize consideration of fidelity have long been challenged, with Leitch, in particular, calling for an upheaval to this type of criticism not least because ‘adaptations will always reveal their sources’ superiority because whatever their faults, the source texts will always be better at being themselves’ (2003: 161). However, theatrical performance complicates Leitch’s argument here because the ‘selves’ of performance are determined by ever-shifting parameters. Indeed performance has in itself been described as an adaptation by Hutcheon (2006), MacArthur et al. (2009) and Babbage (2017) to name a few, because of the way that it transfers the drama from one medium (written expression) to another (theatrical expression). Kidnie refutes this approach as she argues it removes all meaning from the term ‘adaptation’. She argues for a definition of adaptation that doesn’t distinguish between text as source and second-order performance but uses the term ‘work’ to understand the relationship of text and performance (2009: 28).

      Discussions of actors’ contributions highlight how consideration of performance offers not just an (re)-examination of contemporary practices but can reframe historicized analyses of adaptations between stage and screen, within a specific national culture. Christine Geraghty has called for a re-evaluation of British cinema and literary adaptation, arguing that

      accepting adaptation as normal, particularly in a screen culture marked by convergence and intertextuality, helps us to stop using the fact of adaptation as a means of evaluation whereby a film (and a national cinema) are automatically dismissed as derivative or welcomed as classic.

      (2019: 155)

      Whilst calling for adaptation in British cinema to be seen more in terms of ‘exchanges between media’ (2019: 152), Geraghty still includes plays under the category of literary adaptation. The advantage of my approach is that by uncoupling stage sources from literary sources, issues around performance can be brought into view and discussion can be reframed in terms of a dynamic exchange of practice across stage and screen within what might be termed British performance cultures. Furthermore, if we see the exchange as being orientated towards practice, we can also think how it operates not just from stage to screen but also from screen to stage. Geraghty is right to call out the prejudice which is often embedded in value-driven judgements about the ‘dependence’ of British cinema on adaptation and she also challenges the assumptions about the verbal vs. visual communicative properties of film that these dismissals often rely on (2019: 151). But it must not be forgotten that words and dialogue in film are often inextricably bound up in performance: how words are spoken by the actor, how they combine not just with mise en scène but with the bodies and gestures of performers. So as we shall see in Chapter 4, a reliance on dialogue often means a reliance on how actors deliver that dialogue; the nuances that are conveyed in performance.

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