has become part of the toolkit with which productions can impact their audiences today, although in the past it was more typical for music to be absent from a stage production and then introduced to underpin classical narrative conventions in the screen adaptation. For instance, in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane (1966) no music is indicated in the written text of the original stage production. The film adaptation, made in 1970, in a strategy typical of the period, has a pop theme tune with the same title, written and sung by Georgie Fame, placed over the opening credits and revisited throughout the film. However, the film also uses music to signal that the action is to be understood as a farce, a generic signifier that the play scrupulously avoids. Campbell has examined the use of music and sound in the marriage scene between Sloane (Peter McEnery), Kath (Beryl Reid) and Ed (Harry Andrews). As the characters promise, ‘I will’, the music suddenly stops and there is ‘a plucked bass portamento, which produces a decidedly comic effect’ (Campbell 2013: 152). Both Ed and Kath then kiss Sloane, and the soundtrack returns to Fame’s theme tune and then to a church organ finish as ‘Amen’ is written across the final image of the threesome together. Campbell argues that the sound explicitly positions the gay marriage as farcical, a parody of Christian marriage and thus encourages the audience to not take it too seriously, unlike the play where the final ménage à trois between Kath, Ed and Sloane is presented without commentary (Orton 2014: 129). The music therefore dates the film in a way that the play remains timeless and because of the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United Kingdom in 2014, ‘the use of audio effects to distance the audience from considering gay marriage as a potential reality now seems quaint’ (Campbell 2013: 167).
There are also examples where music is used in the original production of the play but takes on a different significance in the film. Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus was first performed at the National Theatre in 1979 and subsequently adapted into a film in 1984 by Shaffer himself and directed by Milos Forman. Both play and film depict the rivalry between court composer Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with the former tortured by the realization of his own mediocrity in the presence of Mozart’s feckless genius. The original play was in two acts and divided into twelve and seven scenes, with the music in the play presented as if it was heard from the perspective of Salieri’s paranoid mind. For instance, rather than use sections of Mozart’s actual music, the composer for the stage play, Harrison Birtwistle aurally distorted patches of Mozart’s music so they were almost unrecognizable (Tibbetts 2004: 168).
The film on the other hand both exploited the prestige factor of recognizably ‘classical’ music in the soundtrack and arranged it in line with the conventions of the Hollywood biopic genre. Sequences of Mozart’s actual music were used, recorded by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and conducted by Sir Neville Marriner specifically for the film. Commentators have noted how the release of the film led to a renaissance in Mozart’s popularity, with the CD of the film’s soundtrack becoming one of the year’s bestsellers. However, specific pieces of Mozart’s music were also selected to highlight the narrative’s thematic concerns. Most notable in these terms was the sequence depicting Mozart’s death, where Salieri notates his rival’s Requiem, as the former lies on his deathbed, communicating each part as it is heard in his head until it builds into the whole of the musical score. The scene was not in the play (and couldn’t have happened in real life) but was written by Shaffer specifically for the film. It is designed to take advantage of the properties of the cinematic medium, in that the audience get privileged access to what is inside Mozart’s head and thus witness his genius in putting together the musical parts to make the whole. Shaffer has spoken about how a concern to present the nature of musical inspiration was paramount in his adaptive strategy.
We were able to construct a scene that is highly effective in cinematic terms, yet wholly concerned with the least visual of all possible subjects; music itself. I do not believe that a stage version of this scene would have been half as effective.
(Shaffer 1984: 57, original emphasis)
It is noteworthy then that a revival of Amadeus at the National Theatre in 2016, after Shaffer’s death, took a very different attitude to the music and one that arguably was inspired by the integrated use of music in the film. Whereas Hall’s original production used music sparingly, Michael Longhurst’s production put the music centre stage by employing twenty musicians from the Southbank Sinfonia to play Mozart’s music whilst being assimilated into the action. Dressed in modern black clothes they become a chorus commenting on the action, responding to Salieri with both music and movement. As the Independent review highlighted, this enabled Mozart’s music to have a visceral impact, by being brought alive in correspondence with the action on stage, similar to that described by Shaffer above.
There’s an extraordinary sequence in which Salieri is glancing through a folder of his rival’s sheet music. As he drops the pages one by one, unable to bear the beauty of what he reads, the Sinfonia’s glorious performances of them get abruptly aborted but the mobile platform of steps on which they are standing continues to bear down like an implacable juggernaut on the writhing and retching Salieri.
(Taylor 2016: n.pag.)
Finally I would like to look at an example where the relationship of music to the drama was both integral to the production and then examine how this was then adapted to the screen. The play in question is Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, which was adapted to the screen in 1951. Both versions were directed by Elia Kazan, with Marlon Brando in the role of Stanley and Jessica Tandy/Vivien Leigh in the role of Blanche in stage/screen versions respectively. The debut production of Streetcar opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York on 3 December 1947 and was a huge commercial and critical success, playing for 855 performances. As Davison has argued, the ‘music created for theatrical productions is notoriously ephemeral. It is not uncommon to find that the only information about a production’s music to survive is a credit for the composer and/or performers in the play’s program or playbill and, occasionally, a few lines about the music in reviews of the play’ (2011: 402). Because of the existence of archive material relating to both stage and screen versions of the drama, the score of Streetcar has been subject to an unusual level of critical investigation (e.g. Davison 2009; Butler 2002). For instance, Davison describes how because of disputes about the categorization of the play between producer Irene M. Selznick and the American Federation of Musicians, the extent and purpose of the music, and how it developed from text to production, is exceptionally well documented (2011).
From the start, Williams had included references to music in the play, including a blues piano, which ‘expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here’ (Williams and Miller 2009: 1), a muted trumpet and a ‘polka tune’ that functions as Blanche’s memory music and comes in towards the end of the play to highlight Blanche’s mental disintegration. In pre-production, Kazan developed this into two dissimilar types of music that played at different times in the production and Blanche’s ‘leitmotif’ was brought in earlier in the play. As Davison suggests, ‘placing these cues throughout the play suggested that Blanche’s mental state was fragile prior to her arrival in New Orleans’ (Davison 2009: 83). The theme was performed on the world’s first polyphonic synthesizer, the Hammond Novachord and was played just slightly off-stage. The Novachord could warp acoustic sounds into defamiliarized and uncanny variations in order to leave it ambiguous whether it was there as mood music from outside the action or represented the sounds that were inside Blanche’s head, as she recalled her life in Belle Reve.
The blues piano and trumpet in Williams’ playscript evolved into improvised jazz music performed by a live band upstairs in a dressing room and amplified to the auditorium to give the impression of a band playing in the fictional ‘Four Deuces’ café over the road. Davison also relates how the jazz score was used at key moments to counterpoint the action, such as a ‘slow, whimsical, sexy version of Sugar Blues’ being deployed to undermine Blanche’s protestations that she has ‘old fashioned ideals’ (Davison 2009: 84). Kazan also decided that the jazz blues was to be used to underpin the latent physical sexuality that is expressed between
