Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen. Victoria Lowe

spellbound out of the upper flat and down the staircase into a passionate embrace with her husband. As Davison has painstakingly analysed, even though the original film passed the Production Code with a few minor changes, the Legion of Decency objected to the music scoring the scene precisely because it indicated Stanley and Stella’s relationship was primarily based on lust. Therefore a replacement cue was written for the scene that avoided this connotation and was attached to the print of the film until in 1993, when in a less febrile moral climate, Warner Brothers released the Original Director’s version that restored North’s original music. This points to a key social and historical factor shaping adaptations between stage and screen, namely the far stricter codes of censorship for the cinema that affected what could be shown and heard on screen. North’s score then expanded on the music for the stage production to explore more intently ‘the characters, the setting, main motifs, crucial events and states of minds. The film soundtrack could thus be denoted as integral to and harmonised with the dramatic action’ (Onič 2016: 59).

      This chapter has argued that understanding of stage-to-screen adaptions can be expanded by looking at material aspects of performance, such as costume, acting, design and sound, and thinking about how they operate on stage and how they are configured in the screen adaptation. This distinguishes them from the adaptation of novels as both plays and films dramatize situations and involve actors performing written dialogue, interacting with settings and sound to make meaning. However, medium-specific conventions mean that these elements are reconfigured between adaptations. In the next chapter, I will reverse the focus on stage-to-screen adaptation to look at how the stage has adapted films and created performance events for audiences. Whilst some aspects such as questions around acting, design and sound are the same for screen-to-stage as they are for stage-to-screen adaptations, I shall also discuss what their staging strategies reveal about their relationship to the source film.

      NOTE

1.Due to the limitations of length, I have omitted to discuss more broadly the very different identification processes that operate in film and theatre in relation to the actor and how this is facilitated by different perspectives on the action. Baron is particularly good on looking at how mise en scène helps to construct performance on film (Baron and Carnicke 2011: 11–31).