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adaptation in
theatre and
performance
adaptation
considered as
a collaborative
art
Process and Practice
Series Editors
Vicky Angelaki
University of Reading
Reading, UK
Kara Reilly
Department of Drama
University of Exeter
Exeter, UK
The series addresses the various ways in which adaptation boldly takes on
the contemporary context, working to rationalise it in dialogue with the
past and involving the audience in a shared discourse with narratives that
form part of our artistic and literary but also social and historical consti-
tution. We approach this form of representation as a way of responding
and adapting to the conditions, challenges, aspirations and points of ref-
erence at a particular historical moment, fostering a bond between thea-
tre and society.
Adaptation
Considered
as a Collaborative Art
Process and Practice
Editors
Bernadette Cronin Rachel MagShamhráin
Department of Theatre Department of German
University College Cork University College Cork
Cork, Ireland Cork, Ireland
Nikolai Preuschoff
University of Erfurt
Erfurt, Germany
New York University Berlin
Berlin, Germany
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
v
Contents
Introduction 1
Rachel MagShamhráin, Nikolai Preuschoff
and Bernadette Cronin
vii
viii CONTENTS
Adaptation: Television
Index 369
Notes on Contributors
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xv
xvi LIST OF FIGURES
R. MagShamhráin (B)
Department of German, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
e-mail: R.Magshamhrain@ucc.ie
N. Preuschoff
University of Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany
e-mail: nikolai.preuschoff@uni-erfurt.de
New York University Berlin, Berlin, Germany
B. Cronin
Department of Theatre, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
e-mail: b.cronin@ucc.ie
theatre front and centre. Perhaps more than any cultural form, the the-
atre is acutely aware of the collaborative and the adaptative dimensions
of all textual engagements, for both of these elements are fundamental to
its existence. It is the live presence of the theatre audience that drives
this home; their copresence in and compenetration of every theatrical
space inflects each unique performance. In theatre & audience, Helen
Freshwater writes, ‘[a]s Handke’s characters acknowlege in Offending the
Audience (Theater am Turm, Frankfurt, 1966), the relationship with the
audience provides the theatre event with its rationale. This relationship
is indispensible’ (Freshwater 2009: 2). Freshwater reminds us that other
writers have suggested that reader-response theory in general and Barthes
in particular might enhance our understanding of theatre: ‘Applying this
theory to theatre implies a shift in emphasis from preoccupation with the
biography and intention of the playwright or director towards interroga-
tion of the frames of reference which the audience brings to a show’ (ibid.,
12). Indeed, we might usefully see the audience as working in collabora-
tion with the director and performers in the co-creation of the theatrical
event for, unlike the missing but audible orchestra, the “no hay banda”
of the cinematized theatre in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001),
in the absence of an audience, there can be no theatre event. Iain Mack-
intosh sees this audience-performance relationship as a fusing of energy
akin to that experienced in the most intimate or spiritual of encounters:
Although this energy flows chiefly from performer to audience, the per-
former is rendered impotent unless he or she receives in return a charge
from the audience. This can be laughter in a farce, a shared sense of awe
in a tragedy and even a physical reciprocity to the achievement of dancer
or actor. The energy must flow both ways so that the two forces fuse
together to create an ecstasy which is comparable only to that experience
in a religious or sexual encounter. (quoted in Freshwater 2009: 10)
I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across
this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that
is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. (Brook 1984: 11)
now also inflect the work. Art measured by key performance indicators
cannot remain unchanged by the new yardstick. If we imagine the cultural
practitioner within the modern creative economy, their labour precarious,
casualised, their interconnectedness technologically enhanced, even to the
point of exhaustion, it comes as no surprise that these flexible cultural
practitioners, who are forced endlessly to improvise (and compromise),
and who must and can work across a variety of fields, are increasingly
reliant on collaboration to achieve the necessary economies of labour and
time. This environment favours an ‘open source’ approach to work, in
which boundaries between individual art workers and their individual and
original work are broken down in order, or so the logic, to achieve cre-
ative synergies that are seen as necessarily more productive simply by (mis-
placed) analogy to other forms of ‘productivity’.
As Maria Lind has argued, collaboration is the hallmark of modern
artistic practice:
Contributions
Reflecting the broad of range of disciplines, genres and media engaged
with in this collection, the contributions are grouped under seven head-
ings: Conversations with the Dead I; Adaptation: Drama and Theatre;
Adaptation: Literature and Screen; Adaptation: Screen and Politics; Adap-
tation: Screen, Fine Art and Theory; Adaptation: Television; and, finally,
bookending the volume, rounding it with a sleep, Conversations with the
Dead II. The volume furthermore encompasses the work of leading schol-
ars and practitioners in the field of Adaptation Studies such as Thomas
Leitch and Judith Buchanan, both keynotes at our conference, as well as
contributions from emerging scholars in the early stages of their career.
In his opening chapter, Conversations with the Dead I, Thomas Leitch
re-views adaptation anew, reading it as a collaboration with the dead, and
sometimes the imagined dead. Reflecting on the dead as often unacknowl-
edged collaborators, Leitch explores the ‘hypothesis that all apparently
independent agents are in fact delegated agents acting on behalf of oth-
er’. But then, Leitch asks, if we are never independent agents, and ‘are
always collaborating with the dead, how meaningful is it to say that we are
collaborating with anyone in particular on any particular endeavor?’ And
further, if all acts of creation, of translation and criticism are collaborations
with the dead, how can we describe the nature of collaboration, and how
does this collaboration force us to reconsider terms like creation, agency,
independence, performance and power? If ‘the “I” really does mean noth-
ing more palimpsestuous than me, myself, and I—then how many of the
acts we claim as our own are the product of collaborations with our other,
10 R. MAGSHAMHRÁIN ET AL.
depth than has been done before how Kubrick and his partner James B.
Harris created a film of significant philosophical richness from their noir,
crime-thriller source.
Donna Maria Alexander examines the adaptation of history in the
poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Danez Smith and Claudia Rankine. Each
poet engages with experimental styles, including documentary poetry and
script poetry, in order to adapt film and television sources into critiques
of racism. Chicana poet, Cervantes deploys experimental poetic modes of
adaptation, using documentary poetry to explore and deconstruct prob-
lematic representations of Latina women in the Americas. Black American
poets Smith and Rankine use script poems to recontextualise well-known
film and television sources and tropes in order to redirect their politics
and thereby critique attitudes towards Black Americans throughout his-
tory. While in a sense these poets collaborate with historical representa-
tions in film, news reels, television commercials and other literary and
social documents, they are ultimately adapting history itself, dismantling,
repurposing and repackaging it in order to deliver critiques of present-day
racism, against the intentions of the originals.
In ‘“His world had vanished long before he entered it.” Wes Ander-
son’s homage to Stefan Zweig’, Nikolai Preuschoff considers the 2014
feature film The Grand Budapest Hotel as a borderline and therefore
important case in the field of adaptation. While the film is loosely based
on a variety of Zweig’s ficitonal and autobiographical writings, it proudly
curates these ‘elements that were sort of stolen’ from Zweig, molding
them into to a rosy tribute to the Austrian writer. From its stylised cine-
matography, its choreographies and nested narrative structure to its satir-
ical, confectionery miniature worlds, the film sets out both to reanimate
and to comment on Zweig’s storytelling craft, while considering its own
operations upon that past as film. As a result, Anderson’s Grand Budapest
Hotel is as much an homage to Zweig and the lost Central European
world he lived in as it is a film about adaptation, with the film’s two
protagonists—a concierge and a lobby boy—allegorically playing with the
idea of adaptation as a ‘service’ offered to an honoured literary text, just
as hotel staff might serve a guest. While Anderson’s homage, his cabinet
of Zweig curiosities, his ‘exquisite corpse’, may not be an adaptation in
the narrowest sense of the term, it is a striking example of communica-
tion with the dead through multiple channels. A very obvious example
of this multi-channelling is the posthumous publication of a Zweig story
collection, translated into English by Anthea Bell, which appeared along-
side the film, both products together helping to forge a new audience for
the long-dead Austrian exile.
INTRODUCTION 13
*****
*****
Huomaamattaan otti hän kirjan, jota Samuel Stern juuri oli lukenut.
— Niin, minä teen aina kernaasti mitä hän pyytää. Hän alkoi nyt
kertoella Dyvekestä. Tuntui helpotukselta siirtyä toiseen asiaan.
— Kun vain se ilo ei olisi pian lopussa… Ihmiset saavat aina kaikki
liian myöhään. Niin on minunkin käynyt, olen vasta aivan äskettäin
saanut järkeä — ja samaten kävi myöskin esi-isämme Aadamin…
Ja tuo kaikkihan oli juuri päinvastoin kuin mitä hän oli tarkoittanut.
Kuinka mielellään olisikaan hän sanonut Samuel Sternille, että jos
olisi uskaltanut, niin olisi hän tullut tänne yksistään hänen tähtensä.
———
Hän nauroi. Miksi pitäisi hänen sitten saada tietää se? Eihän hän
välittänyt siitä rahtuakaan.
Nyt kun kaiken tuli olla voitettua ja loppuun kärsittyä — nyt oli
kaikki äkkiä muuttunut… käynyt entistä hullummaksi… Nyt oli heidän
välillensä tullut jotain uutta — jotakin, jota ei ennen ollut olemassa!
Olihan tuo taivaan lahja, että Dyveke piti hänestä. Hänen piti olla
siitä onnellinen, — ja sen piti riittää.
Tietysti hän koetti näyttää iloiselta. Mutta salaa hän toivoi että
pääsisi pois. Niin tuskallisen pitkä ei ollut mikään kesä vielä ollut.
Dyveke oli huolestunut, sillä pikku äiti oli jälleen alkanut nukkua
niin vähän.
Hän oli valvonut koko yön. Hän oli istunut akkunansa ääressä.
Vihdoinkin oli hän nähnyt Samuel Sternin palaavan vähän ennen
auringonnousua. Thora oli piiloutunut, sillä hän kulki aivan hänen
akkunansa ohitse. Hän näki hänet kumminkin selvästi. Samuel Stern
oli itkenyt.
Hän oli rukoillut että maan päältä löytyisi ihminen, joka voisi tehdä
hänelle jotain hyvää.
*****
— Mitä on tapahtunut?
Heinrich Cronen äiti oli hento, hieno, miellyttävä henkilö, jolla oli
kalpeat, lempeät kasvot.
Rouva Crone nousi paikaltaan. Hän tahtoi jättää koko asian rouva
Thammersin ratkaistavaksi. Mutta hänen täytyi tunnustaa totuus: hän
ei uskaltanut vastustaa Heinrichia. Se olisi vielä varmempi keino
menettää hänet.
Illallisen jälkeen kysyi hän häntä uudelleen. Silloin oli hän tullut
kotiin.