between the two brothers, one born in Brixton and one born in Nigeria, one speaking English and the other Yoruba, starts to emerge.
The film on the other hand starts with a pan round a typical south London street scene and then follows a young man on a bike as he weaves his way through the connecting roads (including one showing a recognizably London red bus with the destination ‘Peckham’ on it). The film’s credits are written across the images in a jaunty, coloured font and there is an upbeat extra-diegetic soundtrack. The music then becomes diegetic and the audience move through exterior doors into a local radio station booth with a DJ speaking over the music, before cutting to Yemi’s bedroom as he listens to the broadcast whilst practising his chat-up lines directly to camera. There follows a short scene where Yemi’s mum buys okra from a street market and tells the trader how excited she is that she is going to see her son from Nigeria. The scene then moves to the football field, where Yemi plays with his friends and chats to Armani, the object of his affections, before being interrupted by his mum who hauls him away to meet his brother just off the plane. Therefore the whole sequence cuts together a number of different locales to give a spatially coherent sense of the inner city in which the characters exist. Yemi is shown interacting with the places that make up his daily life, which makes him more clearly the protagonist in the narrative, whereas in the play both brothers have equal weight in terms of their story as the play begins with them sharing the same space. In contrast to the clearly delineated time frame of the opening of the play, the film is much less specific and flexible, juxtaposing different events (the mum shopping and the football game) and moving between concurrent presents (the DJ’s patter and Yemi listening to the broadcast in his bedroom). Structurally the beginning of the play is organized around the dialogue between the two brothers with interventions from the mum offstage, which begin to hint at the themes of identity, culture and belonging, whereas the beginning of the film is taken up with action establishing the main protagonist visually and sonically in his social environment before the disequilibrium represented by the arrival of Ikudayisi.
However, I would like to look now at a crucial bit of information that is communicated through costume in the play and then is adapted to the film, using mise en scène, editing and sound. In the Royal Court production of the first scene there is a bare stage with a few suitcases strewn about the floor, containing a mixture of African and Western clothes visible to the audience, alongside the PlayStation that marks the typical British teenager’s bedroom (and to which Yemi keeps returning in defiance of his mum’s punishment). Ikudayisi in the scene is dressed in clothes that are a bit dated in contrast to Yemi who is dressed in more up-to-date fashionable sportswear. This gives the audience a subtle visual signifier of the culture clash that is significant thematically for the rest of the play. This metaphorical use of costume is emphasized in the final scene when we return to Yemi’s bedroom. Ikudayisi has discarded the pseudo western clothes made fun of by Yemi and is dressed in traditional African clothing whilst Yemi is trying to put on an agbada (West African shirt), visually signalling that through the events of the narrative both brothers are coming to terms with what bonds them together; namely family and their shared Nigerian heritage.
However, in the film, where costume does not always carry such metaphoric significance, the introduction of Ikudayisi is constructed audio-visually in such a way as to draw attention to his clothes. Yemi and his mum are walking down the street when they realize that Ikudayisi has arrived. We see a pavement-level shot of a car door opening in slow motion and then cut to Yemi’s expectant face, before cutting to a close up of a foot encased in an unfashionable sock and sandal emerging from behind the car door. We then see Yemi looking worried at what’s coming next before cutting back to the whole figure of Ikudayisi emerging in slow motion from the car. He is dressed in jeans and a cheap looking fake leather brown jacket, with a gold ring on his finger and a chunky looking watch on his wrist, made noticeable to the audience through the deployment of a cut away from the main action. We cut back to Yemi looking even more alarmed and the Afrobeat music accompanying Ikudayisi’s exit from the car is abruptly brought to a halt as if a needle had been swiftly taken off a vinyl record and the action is brought back to normal speed. In a similar way to the play, the signifying power of clothes is used to mark the brothers’ fundamental cultural difference but in the film the sequence is constructed in such a way to highlight Ikudayisi’s clothing as significant and make the sequence more amusing, aligning the spectator with Yemi’s appalled viewpoint at his brother’s unfashionable clothing and marking Ikudayisi more clearly as the ‘outsider’.
A comparable use of mise en scène to find a way to communicate a key aspect of production design is evidenced by the film adaptation of August Wilson’s play Fences (2016). In a similar strategy to Gone Too Far, the action begins outside of the place where the action in the play starts. The protagonist Troy (Denzel Washington) and his friend Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson) are shown riding on the back of a garbage truck that trundles its way through the streets of the suburbs of an American town in the 1950s. This brings some movement into the frame (like the bicycle in the previous example) and allows the characters to plausibly move through their social environment, to set their conversations in context. The film then moves to the front-yard of Troy’s house, as per the stage play, as the after-work chat and drinking begins. The film switches between inside and outside the house, as well as the street in front of the house, but most of the significant scenes take place, as in the play, in the yard. This was noted by the critics who generally berated the film for failing to disguise its theatrical origins, with The Guardian noting ‘the aesthetic is still inescapably stagy. Vestiges of greasepaint are everywhere, from the carefully assembled period props to the entrances and exits’ (Shoard 2016: n.pag.). As the reviewer implies, too much careful ‘selection’ in the look of a film can appear to undermine its claims to be set in a ‘real’ environment. In the theatre, ‘effective theatre design is essentially the architectural manifestation of the psychological dynamics which operate in the total experience of theatre’ (Davies 1990: 7) whereas in most realist films, design shouldn’t be too ‘noticeable’ (Ede 2010: 23).
The necessity of the set design to communicate the ‘psychological dynamics’ of the play is fundamental to Wilson’s play Fences. The play was first produced in 1985 at the Yale Repertory Theater, directed by Lloyd Richards and then opened on Broadway at the 46th Street Theater on 26 March 1987. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1988 and has been frequently revived since then, most notably in the United Kingdom in 2012, in a production with Lenny Henry in the central role of Troy Maxson. Set at the end of the 1950s, the play explores how Troy’s life experience is shaped implicitly and explicitly by his conflicted Afro American identity in a pre-Civil Rights movement America. The play is set in the suburbs of Pittsburgh in 1957, in the ramshackle house Troy shares with his wife Rose and son Corey. Events happen off stage that affect the fate of the characters in the drama but are all played out in the same location, the porch and yard of the house. Key in the design, as the title suggests, is the fence that gets slowly built around the house as the action progresses. As the character of Bono says in the play, ‘Some people build fences to keep people out and other people build fences to keep people in’, and the poignancy of the last scene, after Troy has died, is that the fence that Troy never quite gets round to building throughout the play has been finished. Whilst all designs have to include the fence, most have shown a typical American porch and garden in various states of dilapidation, alluding to the Maxson family’s impoverished status. A designer for a production at the Pacific Conservatory Theatre in 2017 mentions trying to incorporate both ‘the gritty truth and poetic blues-scape of the Maxson family household which consists of an ancient two-story brick house in a dirt yard in the hill district of Pittsburgh in 1957’ (PCPA n.d.: n.pag.). The design for the original Washington/Davies stage production in New York in 2010 added a tree at the centre of the backyard because it ‘signified and concretized crucial themes of forgiveness, redemption and renewal that Wilson investigates throughout Fences’ (Wooden 2011: 124). These design ideas emphasize both the pragmatic and the poetic functions of the setting in the theatre: to enable audiences to understand the specifics of place in which the play is set but also the more universal questions about human experience that the play investigates.
The film adaptation was initiated
