Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen. Victoria Lowe

theatre plays to cinemas in the last ten years in the United Kingdom alone, to understand why a book that looks anew at adaptations between stage and screen is necessary now. Whilst cinema and theatre have always existed in relationship to each other and influenced each other’s development, we stand now at a point in history when challenges to both theatre and cinema’s ontological and institutional status are evident. What is ‘theatre’ and what is ‘cinema’ in terms of the ‘crisis’ bought about by the emergence of digital media are questions which have concerned scholars in both disciplines. In the latter field Gaudreault and Marion have pertinently asked, ‘[w]‌hat remains of cinema in what cinema is in the process of becoming? Or rather: what remains of what we thought, just yesterday, cinema was in what cinema is in the process of becoming?’ (2015: 2, original emphasis).³ Set against this background, cultural acts such as the adaptation of films to the stage can therefore use the form to memorialize cinema, to summon up its ghostly presence through a collective theatrical encounter and thus reflect on its current status as a medium. This suggests a sense that during moments of technological change, media are self-reflexive, using their forms to think through their place in a changed cultural landscape. Many of the works looked at in the screen-to-stage adaptation chapters share the trait of reflecting self-consciously upon a medium’s potentialities or limitations sometimes provoking, as Sandra Annett described it, ‘a kind of media melancholia’ (2014: 271). Modes of communication offered by stage and screen as performance media have also come together in an age marked by what has been termed ‘convergence culture’ (Jenkins 2006) as evidenced by a theatre director such as Ivo van Hove consistently using a screen within the stage space to transmit close ups of his actors. Adaptation between theatre and cinema therefore involves not just the textual but the spatial and temporal reconfiguration of a previously given work, articulating it using the dramaturgical systems of the new form and in this process potentially creating a hybrid aesthetic. Bolter and Grusin’s notion of ‘remediation’ (2000) is relevant here and this is particularly the case when examining contemporary phenomena such as live casting – the live broadcast of theatre plays to the cinema, where I will argue not only the performance, but the performance event itself is adapted for the cinema audience, resulting in a blurring of the boundaries between cinematic and theatrical viewing conventions.

      Yet we must be wary of reducing the analysis to a simple technological determinism or of seeing convergence culture as only marking the present moment. Adaptation as a cultural practice has always been sensitive to contextual changes and developments in stage–screen relations. It is the intention of this book to demonstrate how a ‘hybrid aesthetic’ might also be applied to, for instance, the adaptation of plays to the screen in Britain’s early sound period, where the original spoken dialogue and/or preservation of the actor’s performance were integral to the final film. Therefore, what adaptation (re-)produces is always in the context of new conditions whether as a result of technological changes or as demanded by ever-changing socio-cultural and historical circumstances.

      The book is arranged in two halves to embrace a range of perspectives on the stage–screen adaptation as a discrete area. Part One concentrates on ‘Practices’, taking a synchronic approach in reframing current and historical practice in stage–screen adaptation, whilst the second part, ‘Histories’, takes a diachronic approach, examining case studies from 1930 to the present with a focus on British films (as adapted to and from the stage) so as to engage with the performances and events of these adaptations within their temporal, geographical and cultural contexts.

      The first chapter starts with the most commonly analysed of adaptations between stage and screen, that of the adaptation of play to film, but offers a reframing of analysis through aspects of performance to open up new avenues of exploration that include non-literary issues such as the treatment of space and place, design, sound and music, acting styles and star personas. For instance, Bola Agbaje’s Royal Court play Gone Too Far (2007) was adapted by the author for the screen in 2013. Whilst the film adaptation demonstrates classic elements of the transfer between these forms, such as setting the film in the actual South London location alluded to by the characters in the play, an examination of how costume is used in the Court production draws attention to how this element of the performance is translated on screen. On the other hand, an examination of two film adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s Play is used to explore what might be termed the ‘unfilmable’ play, because conditions of its live performance, such as a particular lighting effect, are integral to the meaning of the play.

      The second chapter reverses this more conventional way of looking at adaptation between stage and screen by concentrating on the adaptation of films to the stage, arguing that they relate to each other in a post-literary way, by drawing on the images of the film rather than the spoken text. I will examine a range of works derived from art house to Hollywood films and consider how the performances reconfigure the fragmented space of the film to the continuous stage space of the theatre. Ivo van Hove’s theatre adaptations of American independent director John Cassavetes’ films will be used to demonstrate how stage adaptations of films raise questions of authorship in terms of the translation of an auteur’s film work into director’s theatre. I will also discuss how some stage adaptations can translate the haptic ‘affect’ of film effectively because of the physical encounter between performer and audience that live theatre promises.

      Because I argue that developments in technology have led to the growth of live filmed theatre performances as an area distinct from plays adapted to film, but still understandable within the rubric of adaptation, this will be explored in Chapter 3. This means engaging with the ‘events’ of theatre and cinema and I see cultural products such as NT Live as very much implicated in the processes of adaptation because of how the ‘eventness’ of the theatre production is adapted to the cinema, particularly in the different ways that they inscribe the perceived ‘liveness’ of the theatrical encounter within the cinema ‘event’. This chapter also takes on board how digital technologies affect how audiences perform as audiences at these events through examining an RSC Live broadcast of Romeo and Juliet (2018) and looking at the way social media is used by producers to interact with actual and implied spectators.

The second half of the book takes a different approach to the subject, by looking at adaptations between stage and screen within a broader historical framework. This then positions the adaptation, as Hutcheon has described it, not just as a ‘product’ but as a cultural ‘process’ that can articulate issues specific to a particular place or idea of the nation (2006). With this understanding we can see how adaptations operate within a particular culture and are differentiated by historical specificity, so that issues of, for example, fidelity to the source material are seen as a function of a particular set of industrial and institutional circumstances. Such an approach has led to an enriched understanding of stage-to-screen adaptations in the United Kingdom in the period prior to sound film (see Burrows 2003; Gledhill 2003) but has had limited sustained application to thinking through how adaptations between stage and screen functioned after.⁴ As a full history of the period is not possible within the parameters of this book, these three chapters examine adaptation between stage and screen during three catalytic periods in British film and theatre history: 1929–33 and the introduction of synchronized sound to film; post 1956 with the British New Wave on stage and screen; and finally the growth of stage adaptations of specifically British films post 2000. These particular periods were chosen to illustrate the principle that adaptations have to be understood within the particular historical and cultural moment in which they are produced. Therefore, Chapter 4 looks at the work of Basil Dean, early British Hitchcock and the Aldwych farces as differently inflected responses in film adaptation to the coming of sound to cinema in Britain. These examples give insight into the cultural context because of the way that they foreground (or diminish) theatrical elements in the adaptation to the screen. In a similar way to the first half, I am particularly interested in actors’ performances in these adaptations because of the way that their presumed ‘theatricality’ has often been misunderstood by critics as ‘holding back’ British cinema, rendering it a second-order experience of a more culturally legitimated mode of dramatic expression. The work of actors can often be overlooked in adaptations