Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen

Victoria Lowe

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789387506, 9781789382334
• eBook ISBN: 9781789382341
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The book offers an introduction to adaptations between stage and screen, examining stage and screen works as texts but also as performances and cultural events. Case studies of distinct periods in British film and theatre history are used to illustrate the principle that adaptations can't be divorced from the historical and cultural moment in which they are produced and to look at issues around theatrical naturalism and cinematic realism. 

Written in a refreshingly accessible style, it offers an original analysis with emphasis on performance and event. It opens up new avenues of exploration to include non-literary issues such as the treatment of space and place, mise en scène, acting styles and star personas. The recent growth of digital theatre is examined to foreground the 'events' of theatre and cinema, with phenomena such as NT Live analysed for the different ways that 'liveness' is adapted.

Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen explores how cultural values can be articulated in the act of translating between mediums. The book takes as its subject the interaction between film and theatre and argues that, rather than emphasising differences between the two mediums, the emphasis should be placed on elements that they share, in particular the emphasis on  performance and the participation in an event. It uses a number of case studies to show how this relationship is affected by changes in technology – the coming of film sound, the invention of live-casting – and in the nature of the event being offered to particular audiences. These examples, ranging from the well-known to the obscure, are all treated with relevant and knowledgeable analysis and a strong and appropriate sense of context. 

The book offers a welcome overview of previous work in this area and demonstrates the importance of basing analysis on historical context, as well as giving new insights into some familiar examples. Discussion ranges from Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock to Robert Lepage and Ivo van Hove. There are detailed analyses of Alfie, Gone Too Far and Festen as well as authoritative analyses of NT Live performances and British New Wave cinema.

The book will be of primary interest to academics, researchers, teachers and students working in adaptation studies, film studies and theatre studies. Written in an accessible style it will appeal to teachers and students on A-level, undergraduate and postgraduate film, theatre, media and cultural studies courses. The chapter on digital theatres will add to the growing body of literature in this area and appeal to students and academics working on digital cultures and new media.

Live screenings of theatre events are becoming more widely available and increasingly popular, including some of the productions discussed. There is potential interest for a general audience interested in British films, theatre and actors.

Part One

Practices

1

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 a second-order status. This then leads to ‘acculturated reading strategies founded on the text as literary object’, which can obscure aspects of performance that the stage and screen have in common (Kidnie 2009: 104). This is not to say that the text only exists in performance, as Levin has identified because then ‘there would be no independent “reality” apart from the performance that could be understood’ (1986: 548). What does exist of the performance, and can to a certain extent be referred to in terms of a material object, is a ‘production’. As Osipovich argues, ‘a production is a series of acting, blocking and design choices that are rehearsed until the run of the show is set’ (2006: 464). Whilst each performance will have a unique quality that will be difficult to quantify, detailing these features ‘will still be vital for putting into context the unique character of every performance’ (2006: 464). The three features that Osipovich identifies will be the focus of this chapter although I will extend the analysis to include sound and music as both theatre and film often use aural elements to complement their visual means of communication. I do not deny the presence of the written text as this is one aspect of the ‘work’ as Kidnie would describe it, but neither do I allow the slipperiness of identifying the performance to preclude analysis of those qualities that are bound up with the written text but exist outside of it as well.

The first section of this chapter will examine the opening of stage and screen versions of Bola Agbaje’s British comedy Gone Too Far (2008/2013), firstly according to comparisons of space, time and structure, which is traditionally how stage-to-screen adaptations have been analysed (Bazin 1967; Manvell 1979; Davies 1990), but then extending the analysis to consider one crucial aspect of performance and how it is configured in the adaptation. Turning to August Wilson’s Fences (1987), I will examine how the stage design in various productions has been referenced in the film and look at how its function in the play is taken up by the mise en scène of a key sequence. This will be contrasted by looking at adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s Play (1966), which, because of the abstract nature of the space as conceived for the stage, raises certain challenges in its transfer to the screen. The next section will consider issues of acting and performance and the implications of the contribution of star discourses for fundamentally altering adaptations in their transition to the screen. Bill Naughton’s stage play Alfie (1963) will be examined for how the central character has been played across stage and screen. Finally, I will argue that sound has traditionally been overlooked in adaptation studies but that it often marks a key element of the negotiation of affect in the transition from stage to screen production. This will be discussed in reference to films where scores/sound effects are added in the film adaptation to convey character or theme. I will examine theatre and film versions of Amadeus (1979) and look at the integration of visual and aural elements in stage and screen versions of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).

Cardullo contends that analysis of stage-to-screen adaptations needs to consider how the film translates the theatre play’s structure and its utilization of time and space (2012). As Bazin argued, ‘there can be no theatre without architecture’ indicating that space for performance is organized in terms of the area/s for the actors, for the audience and optionally a setting for the dramatic action. He maintained that the consequences of this organization of theatrical space render the stage a ‘privileged spot removed from everyday experience which renders significant any object or action that appears on it’ (1967: 44). Davies argues that these elements of engagement with the space fundamentally change with the film and its audience calling it ‘a collusion with the cinematic medium – not with the director, designers and actors who present the dramatic work’ (1990: 6). With film the action is not bounded within a demarcated space but rather parts of it are captured; the audience must believe that reality goes on beyond what can be seen because, ‘the screen is not a frame like a picture but a mask which allows only part of the action to be seen’ (Bazin 1971: 105). The spectator of film can be put into a different relationship with the action depending on how that action is framed by the camera, and the variety of viewing positions available to the audience of the play in the theatre is denied by the fixed perspective of the camera.

Closely related to different organizations of space are theatre and film’s treatment of time. Just as film can offer different perspectives on the action from close up to long shot and is not bound to one continuous use of space, it is also not restricted to the continuous and sequential time marked by the duration of a play. As Cardullo identifies, the realization that whilst ‘on the stage, an actor crossing a room has to cross it step by step; on the screen, he can come in at the door and immediately be at the other side of the room’ was a key moment in the development of cinematic technique (2012: 25). Editing, both visually and sonically, can link two different times together, such as the move across two decades in Citizen Kane (1941) between Thatcher’s words ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘a Happy New Year’, which enables Kane to move sequentially in the drama from a child to a young man. Structurally, the play and film are also different with the shot being the key component of cinematic structure, against the scene, or more precisely as Cardullo contends, the ‘theatrical “beat” within the scene that introduces or resolves conflict’ (2012: 27).

Anthony Davies argues therefore that for adapters working on translating material from stage to screen, there are two strategies available to them. They can either

decide to treat dramatic action with the object of preserving its theatrical essence as far as possible by simply photographing the staged performance on the stage space [or] effect an entire visual transformation by moving the action from the confines of the theatrical enclosure and [create] new relationships between the actor and décor, between space and time and between the dramatic presentation and the audience.

(1990: 9)

Although Davies is rather binary in his arguments here (plays adapted for the screen might contain both a proscenium arch framing and a more mobile use of camera and that does not make them any less ‘cinematic’) his formulation offers a framework for thinking through how time, space and structure are adapted between theatre and film.

This can be demonstrated by an analysis of the opening of Bola Agbaje’s Gone Too Far, originally performed at the Royal Court Upstairs in 2007 and then adapted for the screen in 2013 by Agbaje and directed by Destiny Ekaragha. The play is about the conflict between two brothers, one British born and one who has just returned from living in Nigeria. It entertainingly dismantles the idea of a homogenous black ‘community’ showing characters whose sense of identity is contingent on how they relate to ideas of indigeneity and the diaspora. The Court’s production of the play had a simple set consisting of black drapes and props to help delineate particular places, such as the newsagents where the characters go to try and buy some milk. The Court production also interspersed the scenes with dance sequences where performers moved around the stage to a grime soundtrack to give a more abstract sense of youthful energy beyond the action of the play. The film on the other hand takes great pains to set the action on the streets and estates where the play was ostensibly set. The writer of both the play and screenplay emphasized how the South London setting was a key factor in the transfer of the play to the screen:

When I transferred it into a film all I needed to do was transfer it back into the setting that it originally came from […]. It was important to put that world on the screen – to make that world interesting because we wanted to put Peckham on the screen but in a really good light.

(Into Film Clubs 2015: n.pag.)

This ‘opening out’ is a common strategy of many stage-to-screen adaptations, as they connect with a world that is implied or referred to by the play but can be realized more effectively by using a photographic medium. In other words, as Palmer and Bray note, ‘the film medium possesses the ability to deepen the sense in which dramatic presentation depends on the interaction of characters with a world we can recognize fully as our own’ (2013: 10). The play’s first scene is set in Yemi’s bedroom, where the two brothers are unhappily sharing an obviously limited space. They are there to do squats administered as punishment by their mum, who is heard offstage admonishing them when their arguing gets too loud. Through the dialogue the differences 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.)....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Practices
• Part Two Histories
• Conclusion
• References
• Index