go into production without a black director, writing in 1990 that in cinema, ‘whites have set themselves up as custodians of our experience’ (Shoard 2016: n.pag.). It was stalled for some time until after Wilson’s death when Denzel Washington took on the project as director and lead actor, having previously played the part on Broadway in 2010. Many of the same cast, including Viola Davis as Troy’s wife Rose, made the transition from this production to the film. The design for the film follows the play faithfully in recreating the yard, although it’s a back yard rather than a front porch and yard, and has a tree in the centre that Troy uses to hang his baseball bat on. However, the wooden fence exists with a number of other wire fences, which surround the property and are seen in the background as the main characters talk. This means, as one critic identified, that the building of the fence loses its central symbolic significance. ‘There’s a literal fence at the center of Fences, but it doesn’t resonate onscreen the way it does onstage. It’s not a living metaphor’ (Edelstein 2016: n.pag.). If design then cannot function in the same way as metaphor, how else does Washington invoke the metaphysical significance of Troy’s situation? One scene towards the end of the film is notable in this respect because unlike most of the rest of the film that almost replaces the proscenium arch with the frame of the screen, it breaks this ‘fourth wall’. After settling a fight with his son Corey, Troy grabs the baseball bat and looks wildly around him, shouting, ‘come and get me’, directly to the camera. This has the effect of boxing Troy in, whilst his gaze is directed out beyond the frame, which operates as
not only a gesture towards what is outside the film fiction (we, the viewer, the material act of filming and so on) but also as a potentially rich metaphor for the problems of vision (insight, foresight, other kinds of perceptiveness) that are often the internal currency of movie narratives.
(Brown 2012: xii)
The particular construction of this shot operates as a filmic equivalence to the metaphorical aspects of design and directs our attention towards the broader significance of Troy’s situation. He is physically constricted by the frame and looks beyond it into the unknown which he addresses as the Devil. As his wife Rose says earlier in both the play and the film, ‘Anything you don’t understand, you call the Devil’. The lack of ‘seeing’ implicit in breaking the fourth wall thus communicates the ‘problems of vision’ that characterizes Troy’s actions in the narrative and ultimately leads to his demise. The camera’s perspective is emphasized as it then sweeps up into a god’s eye view, as Troy follows the camera by looking upwards, making him ever more smaller and insignificant compared to his surroundings. It is also of course a perspective that could never be achieved in the theatre by placing the spectator above the action, and giving them an omnipotent perspective on the scene. Again, this change in the relationship between spectator and space effects a more contemplative attitude to what is being viewed, seeing Troy as not just an individual, but representative of a broader social environment, where a person’s fate is clearly shaped by subtle but all pervasive prejudice and racism.
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
