4, a reliance on dialogue often means a reliance on how actors deliver that dialogue; the nuances that are conveyed in performance.
Discussions of actors’ agency here points to the clearly challenging methodological issues in approaching stage–screen adaptations through the prism of performance. Merely inverting the object of study into performance instead of text runs the risk of a theoretical cul-de-sac which either ‘shatter[s] that object into an infinite number of performances, or make[s] it self-identical with an individual performance’ (Kidnie 2009: 104). Investigating questions that involve live performance will always involve difficult issues of access and epistemology for the researcher. In terms of the former, more often than not, the material as performance will simply not be available for the researcher to view when needed. In terms of the latter, every performance as Peggy Phelan argued is unique: different audiences will respond to different things and actors will react in kind (1993: 146).7 There may be different kinds of mediated and non-mediated records of a production more generally – the script, reviews, director’s notes – but this all relates differentially to the actual performance. Of course, a performance can also be filmed but when the object of study is thinking about transitions between stage and screen, to understand one of the elements as being presented through the medium it is hypothetically contrasted with somewhat defeats the object of study. On the other hand, advances in technology have in some cases actually collapsed the boundaries between performance and documentation so that in the case of NT Live, for instance, as Claire Read has argued, the performance is the documentation and vice versa (2014).
In terms of my approach then, as far as possible, I limited myself to working with case studies where I had actually seen a production and could think through how it related to the written text. However as, particularly in the second half, I wanted a historical reach to the stage–screen adaptations examined, I extended that condition to where I could access material that gave me an idea of what the play was like in performance. This led to prioritizing practitioners’ accounts of their work and embedding their own ideas about adapting between stage and screen into the interpretative framework wherever possible. Practitioner accounts can be valuable, in that they often transcend disciplinary boundaries, which can be restrictive when approaching performance elements across stage and screen.
My overall aim with this book then is to critically examine adaptation between stage and screen as a cultural practice in a way that in the end validates Sontag’s argument that the two media have always and will always share a dynamic and aesthetically beneficial relationship rather than being mutually exclusive. This critical examination takes on board a contemporary media landscape but also takes a longer view by reflecting on stage–screen adaptation as a practice informed by particular cultural and historical circumstances. It restates the importance of performance elements, the ‘labor of theatrical agents of production’ (Kidnie 2005: 5) in the move between stage to screen, screen to stage and theatre to cinema, and hopefully will inspire new generations of scholars and critics to re-examine this fascinating field of study.
NOTES
1.This book was in production as the COVID-19 crisis emerged, altering arts events in unprecedented ways. It is currently uncertain whether these productions will go ahead as planned.
2.The journal Adaptation (August 2014, 7:2) had a special issue entitled ‘From Theatre to Screen – and Back Again!’ (eds D. Cartmell and E. Parsons). The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance (July 2014, 7:2) had a dossier, ‘Film Adaptation in the Post Cinematic Era’ (eds. Russell J. A. Kilbourn and P. Faubert), although this didn’t look specifically at stage–screen adaptations. Scholarship in the developing area of transmedia studies is also relevant, particularly in thinking through definitions of media and the effects of specific media on narratives (Ryan 2014) with Zipfel discussing fictionality in film and theatre specifically (2014).
3.The uncoupling of film and cinema in the age of digital production and exhibition has led to debates amongst scholars, with Bruce Issacs in The Orientation of Future Cinema: Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle going so far as to ask, ‘[i]s the image created out of digital code cinematic?’ (2014: 24).
4.Modern British Drama on Screen (2013), edited by Palmer and Bray, is the exception here.
5.I am using the term ‘British cinema’, although this is clearly a problematic term when describing both contemporary and historical films. See Higson (2010: 5–11) for discussion of this.
6.Theatre studies and latterly film studies have demonstrated a sustained engagement with how the actor makes meaning in performance. Works across both fields such as Klevan’s Film Performance (2005), Zarrilli’s Acting (Re)Considered (2002) and Naremore’s Acting in the Cinema (1988) are notable here, with Richard Dyer’s influential work on stardom offering a cine-centred analysis of the actor as star (1997). However, because of the downplaying of performance in the adaptation matrix, I would argue that this work hasn’t been drawn upon in any sustained way in adaptation studies.
7.Although this has since been rebutted by scholars such as Rebecca Schneider, who in her influential essay ‘Performance remains’ (2001) challenges Phelan’s assertions of the ontology of performance and considers its place within archival culture.
Stage-to-Screen Adaptation and Performance: Space, Design, Acting, Sound
Most novels are irreversibly damaged by being dramatized as they were written without any kind of performance in mind at all, whereas for plays visible performance is a constitutive part of their identity and translation from stage to screen changes their identity without actually destroying it.
(Jonathan Miller cited in Hutcheon 2006: 36)
This chapter offers a different approach to adaptations between stage and screen, one that accounts for the performance elements of the ‘work’ in its adaptation to the screen, such as the results of creative agency in acting and design. This is because an exclusive emphasis on in what way a written text is transferred to the screen would elide the question of, for instance, how a particular actor’s star persona might affect the character as performed. Discussing performance brings into play what exactly is being discussed in the comparative frame as ‘performance’ can be defined as both
a one-off experience (an experience for which one, usually, pays money), and ‘performance’ as a term able to frame any number of such unique experiences as generically related in terms of the physical activity and audience-actor dynamic to which they give rise.
(Kidnie 2005: 105)
As we have seen Kidnie’s work is applicable here because it seeks to uncover the anti-theatrical bias in adaptation studies or what she terms ‘the ideology of print’ that seeks to cordon off plays from their performances, or at least attribute to the latter
