Yet the actor or star does not figure in much thinking about adaptation either in terms of how an actor’s performance might mediate a ‘known’ character through nuances of gesture or voice or indeed how a star persona might engage productively or antagonistically with that character. Both Linda Hutcheon and Christine Geraghty have called for adaptation scholars to think more expansively about actors as agents in the adaptive process, with Geraghty claiming that adaptations ‘not only present different actors in the same role but also present acting in a different way’ as they call attention to a gap between the character as originally constructed and its embodiment on screen (2007: 11). Hutcheon raises the question of ‘embodied performance’: unlike characters in books, characters in stage and screen plays are presented to audiences through the bodies and voices of actors who play them and this demands analysis about the relationships between role, actor and star image (2006: 38). This section will consider these issues by looking at stage and screen versions of Bill Naughton’s Alfie (excluding Alan Price in the sequel Alfie Darling in 1975, as it tells a different story). I will argue that by taking into account the character of Alfie in the first radio and stage versions and comparing it with the star personas of each actor in the film roles (Michael Caine, Jude Law), the character of Alfie is significantly changed. The original Alfie was described in 1962 as ‘that dreadful little lorry driver’ (Crossman 1962: 22). Caine’s screen interpretation of the role in 1966 drew upon the public construction of the actor’s star image in the mid-1960s as aligned with the values of the ascendant, young urban working classes and the film then helped to shape Caine’s subsequent brand of ‘blokeish’ charisma. However, Law’s screen articulation in 2004 drew upon his more ambiguously positioned, metrosexual star persona to enable the film to articulate its concerns with post-millennial masculinity in crisis.
Alfie was initially a radio play, first broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme in a production by Douglas Cleverdon on 7 January 1962 between 9.10 p.m. and 10.25 p.m. and subsequently repeated twice on 3 February at 6.30 p.m. and 11 September at 8 p.m., because it was so popular with listeners (Aldgate 1995: 106). It was written by Bill Naughton, a working-class writer from Salford. The radio play, entitled Alfie Elkins and His Little Life, had just two characters, a northern narrator and the Cockney sounding Alfie speaking directly to the audience. The play spanned two decades from the end of the Second World War to the late 1950s.The main character goes from one ‘bird to the other’ with a grim sense of determined hedonism, rejecting anything or anyone that might touch him too deeply. The part was played by Bill Owen (later known as Compo in Last of the Summer Wine) who was older (48) at the time of the broadcast than the character as written would suggest, but obviously being radio there was less dependence on visual appearance (Archive.org n.d.: n.pag.).
Naughton then turned his work into a stage play, first performed at the Mermaid Theatre on 19 June 1963 (it subsequently transferred to the Duchess Theatre) with John Neville in the title role. Neville was a theatre actor who had found matinee-idol success early in his career in the roles of Hamlet and Richard II in the 1950s. His performance, changing the lorry driver to a London wide-boy, was described by the critic Harold Hobson as ‘the highlight of his career’ (cited in Coveney 2011):
John Neville imbues this cynical egotist with the easy meretricious charm that is Alfie’s stock in trade. He handles with great skill that ticklish scene when it dawns on his mind that fatherhood is an experience at once desirable and out of his world.
(Darlington 1963: 16)
The stage version expanded the radio play to actually show the women in Alfie’s life but retained the direct address to the audience. Breaking the fourth wall was a distinctive feature of each adaptation and had different implications with the change in medium. The radio medium emphasized the intimacy that direct address engenders, the feeling that one person is confiding in you their individual thoughts and feelings. In the theatre, a more public space, this technique is a device by which the play is able to comment on its leading character. By taking the audience into his confidence, the gap between Alfie’s self-presentation and the audience’s knowledge of him through witnessing his actions on stage becomes ever wider.
The play transferred to Broadway the following year, with Terence Stamp (fresh from his breakthrough film role of Billy Budd) playing the lead. Whilst the play in London was a success, its Broadway incarnation was not. In his autobiography Stamp describes how delighted he was to play the role and as an East End native, with a glamorous model girlfriend in Jean Shrimpton, he would have seemed to have been ideal casting for the role. The play opened in New York’s Morocco Theater on 17 December 1964, after playing to good audiences in provincial theatres, but the production played for only 21 performances. Stamp blamed a devout Catholic critic for a damning review that would have doomed any play that depicted abortion to failure (1989: 147). Shrimpton however claimed that the audience was just bemused:
[T]hey didn’t understand cockney rhyming slang – in fact they did not understand the play at all. Terry was dynamic enough but this near monologue from him in an East End accent was baffling the audience. It seemed to me it was not going to work and it didn’t. The applause at the end was polite and the critics delivered their coup de grace the next morning.
(Shrimpton and Hall 1990: 127)
Bill Naughton also wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation in 1966, following the play relatively faithfully. It was a comparatively big budget production, financed by Paramount and designed to showcase Swinging London for American audiences, where it was, according to Alexander Walker, aggressively marketed (2005: 95). In an echo of the failure of Stamp’s authentic East End accent to appeal to American audiences, Geoffrey Macnab claimed that Caine had to re-loop his dialogue to make his speaking clearer for the American market (Macnab 2000: 205). Caine was brought in to play the part after it had been originally offered to Stamp, who was his former flatmate. Stamp declined it after his failure in the role on Broadway and Caine recalls in his autobiography that he spent many hours remonstrating with Stamp to do the film role, to no avail (1993: 180). Caine himself at this point had actually failed an audition to replace John Neville in the stage version and was under contract to Harry Saltzman at the time after a minor but significant role in Zulu in 1964 and his starring role as the anti-Bond Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File in 1965. With the resources from the Bond films at his disposal, Saltzman was intent on making Caine a star and Alfie was the vehicle by which this was to be achieved, supported by an increase in the circulation of stories about Caine’s wild off-screen life and iconic photos of Caine in sharp suits and trademark glasses. Christine Gledhill has suggested that ‘stardom proper arises when the off-stage or off-screen life of the actor becomes as important as the performed role in the production of a semi-autonomous persona or image, a development which depends on mass circulation journalism or photography’ (1991: 192). This is evidenced by the extratextual information circulating around Caine at the time. The film’s original poster demonstrates an elision of character and star with the strapline, ‘Caine IS Alfie’. In his biography, Caine claims that at this time he was fully aware of building his public image and giving newspaper editors something to write about, so he made sure that all the interviews ‘were about birds’ leading to a swathe of articles in the popular press with titles such as ‘The bird man of Grosvenor Square’ (Caine 1993: 187). Therefore the original character of Alfie, whose character deficiencies are gradually revealed to the audience, becomes invested with the qualities of Caine’s star persona. This has implications for the overall drama as Alfie’s intensive womanizing is reworked to seem admirable for audiences rather than misogynistic or self-destructive. For American audiences, in particular, Caine was also being sold as the living embodiment of the social changes brought about by the mid-1960s consumer and post-war baby boom and became emblematic of the apparent breakdown in class divisions exemplified by Swinging London. An article in American Esquire that was intended to launch Caine as a star in the United States claimed that his working-class London roots made him a new kind of British star:
No one exemplifies this transformation better than Caine […] he established his reputation not only as an actor but as an emblem of the new Britain and currently he is the most fashionable example of the crumbling of old class prejudice.