Whilst the models described above reflect the fact that both stage and screen versions aim to point to recognizable places albeit through different representational means, what happens when the space referred to is more abstract and this abstractness is integral to the dramaturgical workings of performance? Two film adaptations of Beckett’s 1963 Play can be compared to identify how the performance space, resistant to representation, has been adapted to the essentially representative world of the screen.
Beckett’s theatre is thus not about something, not a simulation of a known world; the image or images of the artistic creation are not images of something outside the work; they are ‘that something itself’, as he famously quipped in 1929 in reference to James Joyce’s then titled ‘Work in Progress’.
(Gontarski 2015: 130)
Play was written in English in late 1962 and first performed in German as Spiel in June 1963. Its first British performance was by the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic Theatre, London, on 7 April 1964, produced by George Devine. The play has three figures, one man, two women, trapped in urns, speaking rapidly about a love triangle they are all involved in. A significant aspect of the play in performance is the spotlight that shines on each of them as they talk and switches rapidly between the figures as they speak. Beckett’s own notes on staging indicate the importance of this spotlight and specific instructions for how it should function, noting that there should only be one spotlight and it needs to occupy the same stage space as its ‘victims’, preferably placing it in the centre of the footlights so the faces are lit from below. In the rare moments that all three faces need to be illuminated it should ‘be as a single spot branching into three’. Otherwise Beckett directs that, ‘a single mobile spot should be used, swivelling at maximum speed from one face to another as required’ (Beckett 2009).
The light then is used to bring the voices into being and frame the rather banal story being played out. It works as a meta-theatrical device by seeming to compel the bodies on stage to speak when their figure is illuminated by it. The actors behave mechanically as the spotlight falls on them; they regurgitate their monologues in an endlessly repetitive cycle. The use of the spotlight directs attention onto the medium itself rather than the plot, parodying the conventions of theatrical performance.
Whatever sympathy the audience feels for the characters comes not from the story they tell, which is undercut with humour, but from their existential predicament, which is the condition of the actor forced to repeat a lame story over and over for an audience whose benevolence is questionable at best.
(Gatten 2009: 97)
The function of this spotlight is central to the dramaturgical workings of Play and so obviously offers both semiotic and technical challenges when adapting this piece to film. As director Anthony Minghella pointed out, when engaged in this task for the Beckett on Film series in 2001, the challenge is to find a ‘cinematic correlative’ for the light ‘otherwise the only alternative is to lock off the camera and record a live performance. You can’t have a light moving and a camera moving – one has to be still’ (quoted in Herren 2009: 19). Minghella’s answer was to let the camera do the work of the light and communicate the materiality of the medium through making the camera an active, visible and audible participant in the drama. The opening image shows the play’s title in white against a grey background whilst scratchy, static noises can be heard on the soundtrack. This then cuts to a section of film leader, with the numbers counting down, usually hidden when a film is projected as it’s a guide for the speed the projector should run the film. We then hear the mumble of voices, before fading up on what looks like the surface of the moon, clearly meant to be a sort of no man’s land. This then shears into an empty frame with ‘hairs’ in the gate, again denoting the materiality of the medium on which the drama is recorded, and the cinematic equivalent of an empty space, before jump cutting back again onto the three figures in the urns in the moonscape setting. This makes the audience aware, in a similar way to its use in Godard’s Breathless (1959), of the presence of the editing in the construction of the piece. The film strip then speeds up and cuts between three quick close ups of one of the figures in the urn (Kristin Scott Thomas) in the middle of her speech. The light is uniform throughout and it is therefore the camera, rather than the light, that acts as a predatory figure here, swivelling between the figures and focusing and refocusing on the faces, before jump cutting to another figure as they begin to speak. However dizzying the moving camera work though, the essential conceit of the play is lost because cinematic convention determines that the camera frame will cut to a figure speaking. The idea that the camera movement, and by extension the medium of film, prompts the figure to speak does not come across with the same clarity as the operation of the spotlight on stage.
There is also an earlier adaptation of Play in 1966 made by director Marin Karmitz in collaboration with Beckett himself. Karmitz and Beckett had a different solution to the issue of adapting light by showing all the faces lit up against a background of black screen. This maintains the abstraction of the play but stabilizes the light so the camera can move, showing the faces in long shot, close up and occasionally two shots. Herren argues that this still weakens the ‘ontological principle that light=activation, that light essentially constitutes being on stage and must always be answered with a response from character’ because each character can choose to remain silent under the camera’s eye (2009: 21). This therefore fundamentally undermines ‘the obligation to express that the utilisation of the spotlight on stage communicates to the audience’ (Beckett 2009). Does this then make this Beckett play ultimately unfilmable? Returning to Bazin here is instructive because of how he refused the split between written text and its setting and performance, arguing that ‘a play […] is unassailably protected by the text’ and that the ‘mode and style of production […] are already embodied in the text’ (Bazin 1967: 84). It would seem as if it would be impossible to adapt this stage play to film because the mechanics of live performance are integral to the work.
However, one aspect of the play’s performance that can be inflected across stage and screen versions of the work is the actor’s playing of character. The labour of the actor in embodying characters has arguably been neglected by adaptation studies. One of the few scholars to have paid it attention is Christine Geraghty, who has argued that one of the key pleasures of classic literary adaptation is the re-materialization of literary language into specific embodiments by particular actors (2002: 42). Yet in the transition from stage to screen, there are already bodily and vocal incarnations of these characters by actors. Sometimes the same actor will play the part on screen that they played on stage, such as Marlon Brando’s iconic performance of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1948 and 1952). Sometimes, different actors will be brought on to projects because they have a particular star appeal or they can draw on a star persona garnered from their other film appearances, to inflect the character with particular meaning. In Streetcar for instance, Vivien Leigh replaced Jessica Tandy as Blanche, partly because the film needed a known star in the role, but also to draw on associations with her most famous film role, that of southern belle, Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939). Often adaptations of stage plays will only get made because of stars agreeing to appear in them, to enable a wider audience than those who might have seen the play in the theatre. The agreement is mutually beneficial as stars can make their name in films and then use their appearance in film adaptations of plays to increase their