Modern British Drama on Screen

R. Barton Palmer, William Robert Bray

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781107001015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781107595910
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays offers the first comprehensive treatment of British and American films adapted from modern British plays. Offering insights into the mutually profitable relationship between the newest performance medium and the most ancient. With each chapter written by an expert in the field, Modern British Drama on Screen focuses on key playwrights of the period including George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Terence Rattigan, Noel Coward and John Osborne and the most significant British drama of the past century from Pygmalion to The Madness of George III. Most chapters are devoted to single plays and the transformations they underwent in the move from stage to screen. Ideally suited for classroom use, this book offers a semester's worth of introductory material for the study of theater and film in modern Britain, widely acknowledged as a world center of dramatic productions for both the stage and screen.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Modern British Drama on Screen
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 “That filth from which the glamour is not even yet departed”: adapting Journey’s End
• Chapter 2 Playful banter in Shaw’s Pygmalion
• Chapter 3 Knowing your place: David Lean’s film adaptation of Noël Coward’s This Happy Breed
• Chapter 4 The Browning Version revisited
• Chapter 5 Screening for serious people a trivial comedy: Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
• Chapter 6 The British New Wave begins: Richardson’s Look Back in Anger
• Chapter 7 The shift from stage to screen: space, performance, and language in The Knack . . . and How to Get It
• Chapter 8 See-thru desire and the dream of gay marriage: Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane on stage and screen
• Chapter 9 Sleuth on screen: adapting masculinities
• Chapter 10 Educating Rita and the Pygmalion effect: gender, class, and adaptation anxiety
• Chapter 11 The madness of Susan Traherne: adapting David Hare’s Plenty
• Chapter 12 “A Tom Stoppard Film”: agency and adaptation in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
• Chapter 13 Rewriting history: Alan Bennett’s collaboration with Nicholas Hytner on the adaptations of The Madness of George III and The History Boys
• Filmography
• Index