Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen - Victoria Lowe

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of a key sequence. This will be contrasted by looking at adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s Play (1966), which, because of the abstract nature of the space as conceived for the stage, raises certain challenges in its transfer to the screen. The next section will consider issues of acting and performance and the implications of the contribution of star discourses for fundamentally altering adaptations in their transition to the screen. Bill Naughton’s stage play Alfie (1963) will be examined for how the central character has been played across stage and screen. Finally, I will argue that sound has traditionally been overlooked in adaptation studies but that it often marks a key element of the negotiation of affect in the transition from stage to screen production. This will be discussed in reference to films where scores/sound effects are added in the film adaptation to convey character or theme. I will examine theatre and film versions of Amadeus (1979) and look at the integration of visual and aural elements in stage and screen versions of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).

      Cardullo contends that analysis of stage-to-screen adaptations needs to consider how the film translates the theatre play’s structure and its utilization of time and space (2012). As Bazin argued, ‘there can be no theatre without architecture’ indicating that space for performance is organized in terms of the area/s for the actors, for the audience and optionally a setting for the dramatic action. He maintained that the consequences of this organization of theatrical space render the stage a ‘privileged spot removed from everyday experience which renders significant any object or action that appears on it’ (1967: 44). Davies argues that these elements of engagement with the space fundamentally change with the film and its audience calling it ‘a collusion with the cinematic medium – not with the director, designers and actors who present the dramatic work’ (1990: 6). With film the action is not bounded within a demarcated space but rather parts of it are captured; the audience must believe that reality goes on beyond what can be seen because, ‘the screen is not a frame like a picture but a mask which allows only part of the action to be seen’ (Bazin 1971: 105). The spectator of film can be put into a different relationship with the action depending on how that action is framed by the camera, and the variety of viewing positions available to the audience of the play in the theatre is denied by the fixed perspective of the camera.

      Closely related to different organizations of space are theatre and film’s treatment of time. Just as film can offer different perspectives on the action from close up to long shot and is not bound to one continuous use of space, it is also not restricted to the continuous and sequential time marked by the duration of a play. As Cardullo identifies, the realization that whilst ‘on the stage, an actor crossing a room has to cross it step by step; on the screen, he can come in at the door and immediately be at the other side of the room’ was a key moment in the development of cinematic technique (2012: 25). Editing, both visually and sonically, can link two different times together, such as the move across two decades in Citizen Kane (1941) between Thatcher’s words ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘a Happy New Year’, which enables Kane to move sequentially in the drama from a child to a young man. Structurally, the play and film are also different with the shot being the key component of cinematic structure, against the scene, or more precisely as Cardullo contends, the ‘theatrical “beat” within the scene that introduces or resolves conflict’ (2012: 27).

      Anthony Davies argues therefore that for adapters working on translating material from stage to screen, there are two strategies available to them. They can either

      decide to treat dramatic action with the object of preserving its theatrical essence as far as possible by simply photographing the staged performance on the stage space [or] effect an entire visual transformation by moving the action from the confines of the theatrical enclosure and [create] new relationships between the actor and décor, between space and time and between the dramatic presentation and the audience.

      (1990: 9)

      

      Although Davies is rather binary in his arguments here (plays adapted for the screen might contain both a proscenium arch framing and a more mobile use of camera and that does not make them any less ‘cinematic’) his formulation offers a framework for thinking through how time, space and structure are adapted between theatre and film.

      This can be demonstrated by an analysis of the opening of Bola Agbaje’s Gone Too Far, originally performed at the Royal Court Upstairs in 2007 and then adapted for the screen in 2013 by Agbaje and directed by Destiny Ekaragha. The play is about the conflict between two brothers, one British born and one who has just returned from living in Nigeria. It entertainingly dismantles the idea of a homogenous black ‘community’ showing characters whose sense of identity is contingent on how they relate to ideas of indigeneity and the diaspora. The Court’s production of the play had a simple set consisting of black drapes and props to help delineate particular places, such as the newsagents where the characters go to try and buy some milk. The Court production also interspersed the scenes with dance sequences where performers moved around the stage to a grime soundtrack to give a more abstract sense of youthful energy beyond the action of the play. The film on the other hand takes great pains to set the action on the streets and estates where the play was ostensibly set. The writer of both the play and screenplay emphasized how the South London setting was a key factor in the transfer of the play to the screen:

      When I transferred it into a film all I needed to do was transfer it back into the setting that it originally came from […]. It was important to put that world on the screen – to make that world interesting because we wanted to put Peckham on the screen but in a really good light.

      (Into Film Clubs 2015: n.pag.)

      This ‘opening out’ is a common strategy of many stage-to-screen adaptations, as they connect with a world that is implied or referred to by the play but can be realized more effectively by using a photographic medium. In other words, as Palmer and Bray note, ‘the film medium possesses the ability to deepen the sense in which dramatic presentation depends on the interaction of characters with a world we can recognize fully as our own’ (2013: 10). The play’s first scene is set in Yemi’s bedroom, where the two brothers are unhappily sharing an obviously limited space. They are there to do squats administered as punishment by their mum, who is heard offstage admonishing them when their arguing gets too loud. Through the dialogue the differences between the two brothers, one born in Brixton and one born in Nigeria, one speaking English and the other Yoruba, starts to emerge.

      The film on the other hand starts with a pan round a typical south London street scene and then follows a young man on a bike as he weaves his way through the connecting roads (including one showing a recognizably London red bus with the destination ‘Peckham’ on it). The film’s credits are written across the images in a jaunty, coloured font and there is an upbeat extra-diegetic soundtrack. The music then becomes diegetic and the audience move through exterior doors into a local radio station booth with a DJ speaking over the music, before cutting to Yemi’s bedroom as he listens to the broadcast whilst practising his chat-up lines directly to camera. There follows a short scene where Yemi’s mum buys okra from a street market and tells the trader how excited she is that she is going to see her son from Nigeria. The scene then moves to the football field, where Yemi plays with his friends and chats to Armani, the object of his affections, before being interrupted by his mum who hauls him away to meet his brother just off the plane. Therefore the whole sequence cuts together a number of different locales to give a spatially coherent sense of the inner city in which the characters exist. Yemi is shown interacting with the places that make up his daily life, which makes him more clearly the protagonist in the narrative, whereas in the play both brothers have equal weight in terms of their story as the play begins with them sharing the same space. In contrast to the clearly delineated time frame of the opening of the play, the film is much less specific and flexible, juxtaposing different events (the mum shopping and the football game) and moving between concurrent presents (the DJ’s patter and Yemi listening to the broadcast in his bedroom). Structurally the beginning of the play is organized around the dialogue between the two brothers with interventions from the mum offstage, which begin to hint at the themes of identity, culture and belonging, whereas the beginning of the film is taken up with action establishing the main protagonist visually and sonically in his social environment

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