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adaptation in theatre and performance

contemporary approaches to adaptation in theatre EDITED BY K ARA REILLY

Adaptation in Theatre and Performance Series editors Vicky Angelaki Department of Film, Theatre & Television 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 n ­ arratives that form part of our artistic and literary but also social and ­historical constitution. We approach this form of representation as a way of responding and adapting to the conditions, challenges, aspirations and points of reference at a particular historical moment, fostering a bond between theatre and society. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14373

Kara Reilly Editor

Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre

Editor Kara Reilly Department of Drama University of Exeter Exeter, UK

Adaptation in Theatre and Performance ISBN 978-1-137-59782-3 ISBN 978-1-137-59783-0  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940614 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image designed by Eureka! www.eureka.co.uk Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

In memory of Professor Herbert Blau (3 May 1926–3 May 2013) who once wrote, “Things have changed, but the impossible takes a little time”.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the contributors of this volume for their patience with the editorial process. Thank you also to Liz Tomlin, Graham Saunders, Tomas Renè, Kate Newey, Adam Ledger, and Scott Proudfit for conversations during the process. I also appreciate the opportunity to coconvene the TaPRA Directing and Dramaturgy Working Group in 2014 with Jacqueline Bolton, Sarah Grochala and Vicky Angelaki where several of these papers were first written as early drafts. I’m grateful to all of the contributors for their patience with a long editorial process. My gratitude also to the anonymous peer reviewers whose reports helped the volume. All mistakes are, as always, my own. To paraphrase Samuel Beckett’s ghost: fail again, fail better.

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Contents

Part I Company and Directorial Approaches to Adaptation, Introduced by Scott Proudfit 1

Kneehigh’s Retellings 5 Heather Lilley

2

Collective Creation and ‘Historical Imagination’: Mabou Mines’s Devised Adaptations of History 25 Jessica Silsby Brater

3

Making Music Visible: Robert Lepage Adapts Aspects of Siegfried Without Shifting a Word 49 Melissa Poll

4

‘The Thrill of Doing it Live’: Devising and Performing Katie Mitchell’s International ‘Live Cinema’ Productions Adam J. Ledger

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Part II Re-mediating the Book to the Stage, Introduced by Frances Babbage 5

(Re)Mediating the Modernist Novel: Katie Mitchell’s Live Cinema Work 97 Benjamin Fowler

6

The Spirit of the Source: Adaptation Dramaturgy and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage 121 Jane Barnette

7

Have We Found Anne Frank? A Critical Analysis of Theater Amsterdam’s Anne 143 Samantha Mitschke

8 Adapting The Kite Runner: A Fidelity Project to Re-Imagine Afghan Aura 161 Edmund Chow 9

Fanny Hill Onstage: TheatreState and April De Angelis’s Feminist Adaptations 175 Kara Reilly

Part III Reinscribing the Other in Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy, Introduced by Eleftheria Ioannidou 10 Hypertheatrical Engagement with Euripides’ Trojan Women: A Female ‘Writ of Habeas Corpus’ 195 Olga Kekis 11 A Tale of Two Jordans: Representing Syrian Refugees Before and After 2011 213 George Potter 12 Homer in Palestine 231 Gabriel Varghese

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Part IV Postmodern Meta-Theatrical Adaptation, Introduced by Kimberly Jannarone 13 The Neo-Futurists(’) Take on Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude 251 Adrian Curtin 14 Theatrical Mash-up: Assembled Text as Adaptation in Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella 275 Scott Proudfit 15 Controversial Intentions: Adaptation as an Act of Iconoclasm in Rupert Goold and Ben Power’s Faustus (2004) and the Chapman Brothers’ Insult to Injury (2003) 295 Sarah Grochala 16 Multivalence: The Young Vic and a Postmodern Changeling, 2012 317 Nora J. Williams 17 Ensaio.Hamlet: Adaptation as Rehearsal as Essay 331 Pedro de Senna Index 349

Notes

on

Contributors

Frances Babbage is a professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of Sheffield, UK. She has published widely on performance, adaptation and rewriting and is the author of Re-Visioning Myth: Modern and Contemporary Drama by Women (Manchester University Press, 2011) and Augusto Boal (Routledge Performance Practitioners, 2004). Jane Barnette is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA. She produced an original adaptation of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, co-created with Michael Haverty for Kennesaw State and 7 Stages in Atlanta. Her book on Dramaturgy and Adaptation is under contract with Southern Illinois University Press. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Theatre Symposium, Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre Journal, and Theatre InSight. Jessica Silsby Brater is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the BA and MA programmes in Theatre Studies at Montclair State University, Montclair, USA. She is the author of Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work (Bloomsbury, 2016). Brater holds a BA from Barnard College and a PhD from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Edmund Chow  is an applied theatre practitioner who received his PhD at the University of Manchester. Under the supervision of Professor James Thompson, his doctoral research examined the representations of Afghan identities in theatre and the impact of its global circulation. xiii

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For more than a decade as an arts educator, he has taught in secondary schools, prisons, and universities in Singapore, New York, and Manchester. Edmund is a recipient of two scholarship awards from the National Arts Council. He is currently teaching at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Adrian Curtin is a Senior Lecturer in the Drama department at the University of Exeter, Exeter, UK. He is the author of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave, 2014), which won the 2015 Early Career Research Award, awarded by the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA). He has written several journal articles and book chapters on theatre sound, musical performance, and modernism. He is currently working on a book project that examines how modern dramatists and theatre-makers have explored issues relating to mortality in their work. He is the book reviews editor of Studies in Theatre and Performance. Pedro de Senna  is a theatre practitioner and academic. He was born in Rio de Janeiro, where he started performing in 1993, and has an MA in Theatre: text and production from the University of East Anglia, UK. He is a lecturer in Contemporary Theatre and Programme Leader for the BA Theatre Arts (Theatre Directing) at Middlesex University, London, UK. His research interests include Translation and Adaptation Studies, Directing and Dramaturgy, and Disability and Performance. His play A tragédia de Ismene, princesa de Tebas, a re-appropriation of the Theban myth, is published by Móbile Editorial (2013). Benjamin Fowler is a Lecturer at Sussex University, Brighton, UK. He recently completed his PhD at the University of Warwick, examining politics and perception in the work of Katie Mitchell and Thomas Ostermeier. He has worked as a freelance director and assistant director (at venues including the RSC, the Almeida and Opera Holland Park), and as a workshop leader for the National Youth Theatre. In 2012 he spent three months in Japan working alongside Jonathan Munby as Associate Director on a Japanese-language production of Romeo and Juliet, which played in Tokyo and Osaka. Sarah Grochala  is Lecturer in Writing for Theatre at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, UK. She was an associate artist with the theatre company Headlong. Her research examines the use of alternative dramaturgies in contemporary British and European

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theatre, particularly within the practice of playwriting. She is also a playwright herself. Her plays include S-27 (Finborough Theatre, London, 2009; Griffin Theatre, Sydney, 2010; Annex Theatre, Toronto, 2012), which won the Amnesty International Protect the Human Playwriting Competition and was shortlisted for the King’s Cross Award and the Leah Ryan Prize for Emerging Women Writers. Eleftheria Ioannidou  is lecturer at the University of Groningen in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media. Her book Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames: Rewriting Tragedy 1970–2005 was published by Oxford University Press. She was a lecturer at University of Birmingham from 2012 to 2015. From 2010 until 2012, she held a Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Freie Universitat, Berlin, and had previously studied theatre in Athens and Royal Holloway, London, and read for a doctorate at the University of Oxford, working on the reception of Greek tragic texts in recent decades. Her ongoing research focuses on the political and ideological appropriation of Greek tragedy under fascist regimes in the inter-war period and also explores the impact of the economic crisis on Greek theatre and culture. Kimberly Jannarone is a professor at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her book, Artaud and His Doubles (University of Michigan Press, 2010), interprets the theatre of Antonin Artaud in the intellectual and political history of interwar Europe. It won Honorable Mention for the Joe A. Calloway Prize for best book in drama and theatre. Her edited volume, Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right, examines avantgarde innovation in the service of right-wing regimes (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Her next book is Mass Performance, a cultural history that examines the phenomenon of thousands of people performing the same thing together at the same time. She has produced and directed collaboratively devised pieces, including The Odyssey (2016) and the Gynt Project (2013), with the UCSC Theater Arts and Digital Arts and New Media programmes. Olga Kekis is an independent scholar who holds a PhD in Drama from the University of Birmingham, Birmingham UK. Her doctoral studies explored contemporary radical adaptations of Athenian drama. Her research interests include the theory and practice of Theatrical Adaptation, Theatre History, and Museum Theatre. She has presented at IFTR and TaPRA as well as other national and international meetings.

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She is currently working towards the publication of her PhD Thesis in book form and at the same time she is involved in the local theatre scene in Hereford, where she lives. Adam J. Ledger  is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK. His research interests centre on performance practice: current publication projects include The Director and Directing: Craft, Process and Aesthetic in Contemporary Theatre and an edited collection on devising and adaptation. Adam has published frequently on the work of Odin Teatret. His search includes Caravania!, which toured nationally, and Igloo with The Bone Ensemble. Heather Lilley is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, where she teaches theory and practice on Drama and Performing Arts courses. Her practice and research focuses on devised theatre and applied drama; her publications include work on audience reception, contemporary devising companies including Kneehigh Theatre and adaptation. Heather established the Reminiscence Theatre Archive of Pam Schweitzer at the University of Greenwich, and continues to create theatre with and for the elderly. Samantha Mitschke is a playwright and theatre historian specializing in British and American Holocaust theatre. She is the author of a number of articles on areas ranging from the representation of the queer Holocaust experience to site-specific performance at Auschwitz, and a reviewer for New Theatre Quarterly and Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History. She is currently writing a book on empathy and Anglophone Holocaust theatre. Melissa Poll is an Adjunct Professor at Kansas State University. She received her PhD in Drama & Theatre from the University of London, Royal Holloway, London, UK. She has worked as a professional actor, dramaturg, and freelance theatre critic alongside her academic endeavours. Currently, Melissa is in the process of expanding her research into a book for Palgrave Macmillan, Robert Lepage’s Scenographic Dramaturgy: The Aesthetic Signature at Work, which interrogates how Lepage’s evocative scenography functions as an adaptive process and product. Melissa’s research on performance-making and interculturalism has been published in Body, Space & Technology Journal, Canadian Theatre Review, and Theatre Research in Canada.

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George Potter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, USA. Previously, he taught Middle Eastern film, literature, and culture at the Council for International Educational Exchange Study Center in Amman, Jordan. He has published in The British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Arizona Quarterly, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and multiple book collections. His current research focuses on economic and social geography in Jordanian film. Scott Proudfit is an Assistant Professor of English at Elon University, Elon, USA. He is the associate editor of A History of Collective Creation and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and the co-editor of Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Before obtaining his PhD from Northwestern University in 2008, he worked with the Actors’ Gang and the Factory Theater in Los Angeles and with Irondale Ensemble Project in New York, often on devised plays. In addition, for almost a decade he worked as an editor for the newspapers Back Stage and Back Stage West. Kara Reilly is a theatre historian and dramaturg. Her books include Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), and the edited collection Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). She is co-editor of the book series Adaptation in Theatre and Performance. Gabriel Varghese completed his doctoral studies on the history and development of Palestinian theatre in the West Bank after the Oslo Accords, supported by a scholarship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the Kenyon Insitute in Jerusalem (2016–2017). He is also the co-artistic director of Brighton-based Sandpit Arts, an award-winning cross-arts platform for showcasing the creative cultures of the Middle East and North Africa. His book Theatre’s counterpublics: Palestinian theatre in the West Bank after the Oslo Accords​ is forthcoming from Palgrave.   Nora J. Williams completed her PhD in Drama at the University of Exeter, Exeter, UK in 2016. Her thesis considers the intersections of performances, texts, and editions of early modern drama using Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling as a lens. She has recently published in Shakespeare Bulletin and is the current Chair of the STR New Researchers’ Network.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 13.1 Fig. 13.2

Mike Shepherd as a Love spotter, Tristan and Yseult, 2005 with generous permission from Steve Tanner and Kneehigh Theatre 12 Jesusa Rodriguez in Las Horas de Belén, 1999 with generous permission from Julie Archer 40 Siegfried (Der Ring des Nibelungen) featuring Eric Owens (Alberich) and Bryn Terfel (Wotan), 2011 60 The first entrance through the barrel is made by the puppet, manned by three puppeteers standing behind the barrel 127 The youth daydreams about the circus 129 Youth encounters his first actual battle, the animation continues to display his terror by morphing into the red animal 130 Bryan Mercer as ‘Tall’ in his death dance, the ‘hideous hornpipe’ 132 Two puppet designs by Tanner Slick 134 At the end of the play, the puppet carries a folded flag, marching through the portal 135 The flying of kites in The Kite Runner 164 Brendan Buhl as Sam Evans and Dean Evans as Mrs. Evans in Act 3 of the Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude 262 (L to R) Jeremy Sher, Merrie Greenfield, and Joe Dempsey in Act 6 of the Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude 264

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Fig. 13.3

(L to R) Jeremy Sher, Joe Dempsey, Brendan Buhl, and Dean Evans (with a Cabbage Patch doll) in Act 8 of the Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude 266 Fig. 15.1 Poster for Faustus, which premiered at Northampton in November 2004, used with permission of Scott Doran and Eureka! image design 299 Fig. 15.2 Faustus in his shadowy study, lit by a single candle 306 Fig. 15.3 Jonjo O’Neill (Dinos) and Stephen Noonan (Jake) 307 Fig. 15.4 Jake Chapman (Steven Noonan) and Helen/Helena (Sophie Hunter) in the studio 308 Fig. 15.5 Faustus 2007—Jason Baughan (Mephistopheles) and Michael Colgan (Faustus) 309 Photo 4.1 Screenshot detailing ‘Secret’ from Traveling on One Leg, with permission from Ingi Bekk and Lily McLeish 76 Photo 4.2 Rehearsal for Traveling on One Leg, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. Note shot number on screen 81

Introduction to Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation

This volume is called Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, because it offers readers 17 case studies that examine adaptation in the contemporary theatre. Adaptation is a slippery term, and like dramaturgy, it eludes definition because it is so context specific. This volume does not seek to narrow the definition of adaptation, but instead to expand it. The book is divided into four parts: Part I Company and Directorial Approaches to Adaptation, Part II Re-mediating the Book to the Stage, Part III Reinscribing the Other in Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy and Epic, and Part IV Postmodern Metatheatrical Adaptation. Each part is introduced in detail by a specialist in Adaptation Studies. Attempting to define what ‘counts’ as adaptation seems limiting at best, impossible at worst. Instead, focusing on a wide variety of approaches is a more open way to create a Socratic dialogue about adaptation. I would argue that even the ancient Greek playwrights can be seen as adaptors. Audiences knew the myths already and went to the theatre to see how the stories would be re-told. As postmodern American playwright Charles L. Mee writes about his re-making project: None of the classical Greek plays were original: they were all based on earlier plays or poems or myths. And none of Shakespeare’s plays are original: they are all taken from earlier work. As You Like It is taken from a novel by Thomas Lodge published just 10 years before Shakespeare put on his play without attribution or acknowledgment. Chunks of Antony and Cleopatra are taken verbatim, and, to be sure, without apology, from a contemporary xxi

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translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle is taken from a play by Klabund, on which Brecht served as dramaturg in 1926; and Klabund had taken his play from an early Chinese play.1

What Mee articulates here is that every great poet is also a thief. Shakespeare and Brecht were great playwrights and great adapters. In other words, theatre practitioners find inspiration and stimulus from already existing works of art. The notion of originality arises with Romantic poets, but the actual nature of the theatre is that it repeats. By knowing the stories and adapting them, new generations revivify them and breathe life into them, making them fresh, exciting and unique to the moment in which they are staged. To my knowledge, this is the first edited book collection that looks solely at theatre adaptations in the context of Adaptation Studies. Throughout the volume, authors reference Linda Hutcheon’s watershed book A Theory of Adaptation and Julie Sanders’s Adaptation and Appropriation. Theatre and performance studies has been given two key resources for engaging with adaptation in recent years: Katja Krebs’s edited collection Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film and Margherita Laera’s insightful collection of interviews Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Repeat, Rewrite. In these texts, adaptation is explored in context-specific productions. This is the only way to explore adaptation: through specific, material concrete examples that help us to build both archive and repertoire. This project and this book series both grow out of my own work as a dramaturg which began almost 20 years ago. During this time, I have seen that onto-epistemic mimesis shapes theatre artists. I have defined onto-epistemic mimesis elsewhere as representation or ‘mimesis that changes a person’s way of knowing and therefore their way of being’, and re-shapes the observers’ understanding of the world (Reilly 7). Adaptation allows the artist to celebrate history and the ephemeral quality of the theatrical medium. Adaptation acknowledges that we have been here before: in the theatre, engaged in telling this story. Pleasure comes through repetition with a difference and in haunting. This volume is dedicated to one of my mentors and teacher Herbert Blau. It was the haunting of the paternal ghost in Hamlet that inspired Blau to first turn the phrase ‘calling up the ghost’: The ghosting is not only a theatrical process but a self-questioning of the structure within the structure of which the theater is a part. What seems

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true in the play of appearances—as most ontological discourse has assured us in our time—is that there is no way in which the thing we want to represent can exist within representation itself, because of the disjuncture between words and things, images and meanings, nomenclature and being—all of which cause us to think that theater is the world when it’s more like the thought of history. (199)

Adaptation shows us the thought of history. More specifically, adaptation presents history’s ghosts to us as we perceive and interpret it in the contemporary moment. The concept of ghosting has since become popular in theatre and performance studies by way of Marvin Carlson’s Haunted Stage and the now emerging field of Spectrality Studies.2 Blau argues that ontological discourse after modernism—or writing that searches for ‘being’ and essence—only illustrates our lack: there is no solid being anymore. The grounds of certainty that human beings are at the centre of the universe radically shifted after the advent of Copernicus and Galileo during the Enlightenment. Since human beings are not at the centre of the solar system, there is a gap between the vision of theatre in the theatre artist’s mind and the actual theatre in representation—unfortunately, you can only get so close to your vision as a theatre maker. For Blau this was one of the reasons he stopped directing—the high quality of his imagined productions never matched what he saw onstage. I listened to him say on numerous occasions that he much preferred to stage a play in his mind as he read it rather than actually staging the play in the world. This gap in the representational power of theatre to translate the image from the mind’s eye onto the stage is similar to the distinct gap between words and things that typifies the beginning of Structuralism. After Ferdinand de Sassure demonstrated that the gap between the signifier and the signified, or the distinction between word and thing was random and out of alignment: one man’s mouton became another man’s mutton.3 Similarly the stage image created by the theatre maker may read very differently to audiences. The result of all of this uncertainty is that we are perhaps mistaken when we follow Jacques from As You Like It in saying that ‘theatre is like the world’. Instead, as Blau suggests, ghosting or adaptation shows us that theatre is much more like the thought of history. Each generation remakes the classics in their own image for their own contemporary moment, engaging with the texts of the past in the present. Performance’s ontology, as Peggy Phelan and others have demonstrated, is one of disappearance. Performance leaves traces of itself like history thinking out loud. The ephemeral quality of

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the theatre is by definition part of its condition for being. Ghosts are what performances evaporate and transform into in the mind’s eye as images of the theatre merge with our thoughts and transform us as subjects-in-process. As Derrida points out in Archive Fever: A scholar addressing a phantom recalls irresistibly the opening of Hamlet. At the spectral apparition of the dead father Marcellus implores Horatio: ‘Thou art a scholar, Speak to it Horatio’. I have tried to show elsewhere that though the classical scholar did not believe in phantoms and truly would not know how to speak to them, even forbidding himself to do so, it is quite possible that Marcellus had anticipated the coming of a scholar of the future who, in the future and so to conceive of the future, would dare speak to the phantom. (39)

Dramaturgs and adapters potentially are these scholars of the future, addressing these phantoms. Carlson argues that postmodern theatre is concerned with ‘recycling’ material and re-using it freely to create ‘new relationships, effects and tensions’ and to summon up traditional theatrical and historical ghosts.4 Carlson’s concept of the memory machine suggests a kind of technological element to adaptation. The root word of the Greek techne means art or craft, and adaptation is a sort of technology designed to engage audiences in hearing the story again. In Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’, he teaches us that ‘storytelling is always the art of repeating stories’. The storyteller repeats the story in order to make it his or her own. Adaptation is in part about repetition. One of our earliest technologies is storytelling; this was expressed in Robert Icke’s production of Annie Washburn’s Mr Burns, A PostElectric Play at the Almeida in 2014. After a nuclear apocalypse—caused in part by a deadly virus that makes it impossible to take care of nuclear reactors—a group of survivors huddle around a campfire retelling each other the plot of an episode of The Simpsons. By working collaboratively to rediscover the story, the participants remain calm for that moment: telling the story is a way to keep their fear at bay. Over the course of 82 years this form of storytelling leads the storytellers to create a theatre troupe, which develops into a kind of innovative abstract opera. The play suggests that The Simpsons becomes the basis of a new cultural mythology not unlike that of the Greeks. Retelling the story of The Simpsons in Mr Burns has helped create a new cultural mythos. As a result, people survive the trauma of their destroyed civilization.

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Rachel Carroll has written in her introduction to Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities that ‘all adaptations express or address a desire to return to an “original” textual encounter; as such, adaptations are perhaps symptomatic of a cultural compulsion to repeat (1). While Freud associated the repetition compulsion with trauma, he also recognized that playful acts of repetition might alleviate certain traumatic anxieties. For example, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud uses the example of a grandson who rehearses his mother’s disappearance by throwing a spool and holding onto the string, and announcing “Fort!” or “Gone!” Using the string, he then returns the object to himself with a resounding “Da!” or “Here!” The spool represents the mother. Part of what the child rehearses is the discomfort of the mother leaving—represented by the spool—but the child can return the spool to himself. This comforts him and he knows the mother will return: the game keeps his anxiety of abandonment at bay. Through this game of disappearance and return, the child calms himself by taking mastery over the situation. When Harold Bloom talks about the ‘anxiety of influence’ in relationship to writers feeling the oppressive weight of the canon, we might use the fort/da story as a metaphor for adaptation. The writer or devisers bring the story closer to themselves by inhabiting it and re-writing it. Part of the anxiety of influence that Bloom argues is the oppressive weight of the canon can also be seen as something that is rehearsed and played out in adaptation. This is certainly part of what T.S. Eliot discusses in his landmark essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” We get closer to the canonical or classic story through adaptation. As Julie Sanders suggests in Adaptation and Appropriation ‘adaptation becomes a veritable marker of canonical status; citation infers authority’ (9). The canonical authority is transferred onto the adapter. As Walter Benjamin wrote in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’: ‘every day the urge gets stronger to get hold of an object by way of its reproduction’. Here he was talking about painting and sculpture in the age of mass media; however, this passage applies equally to adaptation. Through retelling the canonical story, the teller takes on the mantle of the storyteller. The desire to get inside a story is born from the repetition compulsion and perhaps this compulsion is at the root of adaptation. When we repeat stories, doing so acts as a way of claiming ownership over them; we get inside their dramaturgy and make sense of them through direct engagement. But adaptation, as Hutcheon points

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out, ‘is not slavish copying; it is a process of making the adapted material one’s own’ (21). In each of the case studies in this volume, the adaptors re-make the story through their own novel approach to dramaturgy, sceneography, or by translating and re-mediating a story onto the stage. Mostly importantly, as Hutcheon argues, they make the story their own and therefore the act of adaptation should never be seen as secondary, but instead as a creative act in its own right.

Book Structure Part I Company and Directorial Approaches to Adaptation is introduced in detail by collaborative creation expert Scott Proudfit. The part opens with Heather Lilley’s insightful chapter ‘Kneehigh’s Retellings’. Informed by extensive personal interviews, Emma Rice says she prefers the term ‘retelling’ to adaptation. Kneehigh’s work is their version of the story, but the invitation is always there for other artists to make their own approach and retell that story in their own way. Jessica Silsby Brater’s chapter ‘Collective Creation and ‘Historical Imagination’: Mabou Mines’s Devised Adaptations of History’ closely examines two productions that ‘engage’ in feminist history: Ruth Maleczech’s Bélen: A Book of Hours and Joanne Akalitis’s Dead End Kids. Melissa Poll examines how Robert Lepage’s scenography can be considered a visual adaptation without changing a word of Wagner’s Siegfried. Finally, Adam Ledger uses material from his rehearsal observations and interviews in order to discuss Director Katie Mitchell’s devising process as a form of adaptation. Part II ‘Re-mediating the Book to the Stage’ is introduced by Adaptation Scholar Frances Babbage. The Part offers five case studies where novels or diaries have been remediated to the stage. In Chap. 5 Benjamin Fowler looks closely at Mitchell’s impulse to capture the ‘thought’ of modernist novels and how technology helps her to get closer to the novel. By including two chapters on Katie Mitchell, the volume offers two distinct insights into her dramaturgical and devising process. In Chap. 6 Jane Barnette writes about her experience adapting Red Badge of Courage and coins the portmanteau term adapturgy, which is adaptation and dramaturgy combined. Barnette explains the ways in which the skills of the production dramaturg and new play dramaturg collide and produce the stage play. In Samantha Mitschke’s chapter ‘Have We Found Anne Frank? A Critical Analysis of Theater

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Amsterdam’s Anne’, Mitschke analyses three different adaptations of the diary to the stage. She looks closely at issues of fidelity as does Edmund Chow who examines Matthew Spangler’s adaptation of Khaleid Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner. Chow examines Spangler’s desire ‘to be good again’ to the people of Afghanistan after the War of Terror through an ‘authentic’ adaptation of the novel. The final chapter in this part is my examination of two feminist adaptations of John Cleland’s notorious Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Part III ‘Reinscribing the Other in Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy’ is introduced by classical Greek theatre scholar Eleftheria Ioannidou. The three chapters in this part all examine adaptations of the story of the Trojan War, and more specifically the plight of the Other. Olga Kekis examines two adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women: Kaite O’Reilly’s Peeling and Christine Evans’s play Trojan Barbie. Both plays offer a radical re-envisioning of the The Trojan Women for the contemporary moment. In George Potter’s chapter ‘A Tale of Two Jordans: Representing Syrian Refugees Before and After 2011’ he juxtaposes the pre- and post-2011 Jordanian imagination of Syrians in three productions. Gabriel Varghese looks at the international collaboration between Border Crossings and Ashtar Theatre in the creation of This Flesh is Mine, an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad. Part IV ‘Postmodern Metatheatrical Adaptation’ is introduced by modernism expert Kimberly Jannarone. The part examines five contemporary postmodern productions as case studies. This part sets out to show the connections between ghosting, adaptation, and postmodern appropriation in the conceptual underpinnings behind those practitioners whose work is self-consciously metatheatrical. Adrian Curtain examines the Neofuturists’ re-staging of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude arguing that the company makes the anti-theatrical play speak to a contemporary audience in this irreverent and playful adaptation. Scott Proudfit looks closely at Bill Rauch and Tracy Young’s Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella as a popular theatrical mash-up. Sarah Grochala examines Rupert Goold and Ben Power’s adaptation of Faustus, which juxtaposed the Chapman brothers’ rectification of Goya’s etchings with the story of Faustus. Nora J. Williams also looks at the radical postmodern adaptation of The Changeling at the Young Vic in 2012. Finally, the volume closes with Pedro de Senna’s exploration of Brazilian theatre ensemble Companhia (Cia) dos Atores Ensaio Hamlet as an essay, a rehearsal, and an ‘autopsy’ of the play. The volume closes with the idea that canonicity is something

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artists must dissect and transform in order to revivify texts and make them wholly relevant to the contemporary moment. Adaptations provide us with insight into the dramaturgical imaginations of artistic creators. The productions analysed here demonstrate some of the wide variety of approaches available to adaptors in the contemporary moment. Indeed the editorial goal here is one of plenty— there are multiple ways into the volume just as there are multiple approaches to adaptation. The approaches in these chapters are offered as investigations for adaptation as the thought of theatre history, ghosting, and the rich possibilities adaptation holds for tomorrow’s theatre. Kara Reilly

Notes 1. This forms a key part of Charles L. Mee’s manifesto for his (re)making project, much of which is documented here. See http://www.charlesmee. org/about.shtml. 2.  See Pilar Blanco and Peeren’s The Spectralities Reader (2013) for the emergence of the field. Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994) was also critical. For specifics to theatre studies see Luckhurst and Morin Theatre and Ghosts (2014). 3. Sassure Course on General Linguistics: ‘You take on the other hand a simple lexical fact, any word such as, I suppose, mouton–mutton, it doesn’t have the same value as sheep in English. For if you speak of the animal on the hoof and not on the table, you say sheep’. 4. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: Theatre as a Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003) 168.

References Benjamin, Walter. 2002. The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov. In Illuminations. New York: Random House. Benjamin, Walter. 2002. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations, trans. New York: Random House. Blau, Herbert. 1982. Take Up the Bodies. Carbondale: University of Illinois Press. Bloom, Harold. 1987. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carroll, Rachel. 2009. Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities. London: Continuum.

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Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2015. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. London: Dover. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge. Krebs, Katja. 2014. Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film. London: Routledge. Laera, Margherita. 2014. Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat. London: Bloomsbury. Luckhurst, Mary and Emilie Morin. 2014. Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Phelan, Peggy. 1999. Unmarked. London: Routledge. Pilar Blanco, María del and Esther Peeren. 2013. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London: Bloomsbury. Reilly, Kara. 2011. Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Sanders, Julie. 2005. Adaptation and Appropriation. Abingdon: Routledge. Sassure, Ferdinand De. 1960. Course on General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Reidlinger. London: Owen Press. Washburn, Anne. 2014. Mr Burns: A Post-electric Play. London: Oberon.

PART I

Company and Directorial Approaches to Adaptation, Introduced by Scott Proudfit

Company approaches to adaptation in the theatre may seem antithetical to directorial approaches, at first glance. The former suggests a creative process based on decentralized authority and diverse responses to a source text or narrative, while the latter suggests a single authority in the creative process with a guiding ‘take’ on the source. This particular supposition about the group creative process stems from the common belief that a natural distinction exists between company-generated and director-generated work in the theatre, a belief that perhaps unintentionally has been reinforced by histories of devised theatre and collective creation that adopt as their starting point 1960s’ avant-garde performance in Europe and the Americas. The communitarian ideals of a small number of Western theatre collectives during this decade seem particularly symbiotic with the hypothesized ‘postdramatic turn’ in the modern theatre. The influx of improvisation and chance as guides in the creative processes of a number of visible 1960s’ theatre collectives suggest that the embrace of physical theatre coincided with the rejection of the primacy of the text, an anti-authoritarian impulse that led to the director rapidly becoming as unnecessary and unwelcome in the rehearsal room as the playwright. Following this narrative, in the contemporary theatre, the company and the director have become opposing forces: the former disseminating authority, the latter consolidating it.

2  PART I 

COMPANY AND DIRECTORIAL APPROACHES TO ADAPTATION ...

However, as the chapters in this part demonstrate, theatre history that acknowledges the roots of contemporary company-generated devising and adaptation in an earlier ‘wave’ of collaborative impulses—at the beginning of the twentieth century—demands that group-centred and directorial approaches are rarely antithetical. It was, after all, the rise of the modern director in the late nineteenth century that demanded a new kind of collaboration with designers, writers, and performers in order to achieve the total artwork. The legacy of this collaborative impulse in the early twentieth century was not only a new reverence for the authority of the director-auteur but also simultaneously a transfer of authority in the generative process from directors and playwrights to performers who took a new responsibility for their creative work—performers who acted as creators of their own individual mise en scene. This more-accurate lineage of collaborative work in the modern theatre can be perceived in Melissa Poll’s chapter, ‘Making Music Visible: Robert Lepage Adapts Aspects of Siegfried Without Shifting a Word’, which looks at Lepage’s production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Metropolitan Opera. Poll connects Lepage’s interactive scenography, in which performers’ vocal intonations are immediately reflected in the flow of 3D images projected from the mobile planks that form the various settings of Wagner’s opera cycle, to the productions of Adolphe Appia. For his 1920s’ revivals of Wagner’s works, directordesigner Appia is credited with more fully realizing the composer’s dramaturgy than even Wagner was able to at Bayreuth. Appia, like Lepage, is a director whose strong scenographic concepts were recognized in his time, while his empowerment of actors (in Appia’s case, an empowerment he considered necessary so that actors might mediate between Wagner’s music and the physical space) has been often overlooked. As Poll writes, Appia viewed performing bodies as the material expression of the music and scenography as an extension of the actor, he sought to enhance the meaning-making interactions between the actor and the stage space through sets and lighting.

From Wagner to Appia to Lepage, Poll traces the development of a type of adaptation of Wagner’s operas that relies on ‘bodies in motion’ to rewrite and thereby adapt the composer’s canonical works. Related to Lepage’s interactive scenography, the ‘live cinema’ productions helmed by director Katie Mitchell, as described in Adam Ledger’s chapter ‘“The thrill of doing it live”: Devising and Performing Katie Mitchell’s International “Live Cinema” Productions’ may seem

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to depend on a director’s singular vision, when actually they are generated through Mitchell’s extensive collaboration with ‘technicians, camera operators, sound artists, musicians, and actors’. Only multilayered group collaboration could achieve the type of minutely choreographed and technologically assisted productions that Mitchell has become known for, in which audiences divide their attention between a carefully constructed ‘film’ of the live narrative performance and the stage presentation itself. As a starting point, these collaborative adaptations often utilize as their source texts a single novel or short story. Since ‘live cinema’ relies heavily on the cinematic close-up, thereby focusing on the psychology of a single character, it is appropriate that Mitchell’s work with actors descends ‘in large part from Stanislavski’, combining the creation of ‘precisely detailed’ biographies of characters created in rehearsals with improvisations that explores these proposed character histories. Mitchell’s collaboration, though, is as much with the camera operators and technicians capturing these performances as it is with the actors performing. The result, as Ledger points out, is adaptation as ‘collective labour, in which matters of authorship and production are devolved through pockets of expertise’, Such collaboration is better understood by tracing it back to the forebears Mitchell herself acknowledges, early-twentieth-century directors such as Stanislavski who first pursued the collaborative impulse in the modern theatre, than to collective-creation practitioners of the mid-twentieth century. Mitchell’s reliance on her actors to ‘work in groups to produce performance proposals’ connects her ‘live cinema’ adaptations, which previously have been misread as solely products of Mitchell’s individual vision and style, to Kneehigh Theatre’s popularist retellings of folklore under the direction of Emma Rice—as detailed in Heather Lilley’s chapter ‘Kneehigh’s Retellings’. The similarities in process between Mitchell and Rice are striking, reinforcing the fact that an assumed necessary division between director-centred and company-centred work is problematic at best. As with Mitchell’s ‘live cinema’, there is no doubt that Kneehigh’s work is ‘director-led’, whether it is Rice or Mike Shepherd leading. As a leader, Rice describes her role as fundamentally concerned with delegation and enablement. Whether collaborating with her writers, her actors, or her designers, Rice’s job primarily is ‘setting them tasks’. Mitchell’s description of her own work as a director echoes Rice’s closely. As with Rice, Mitchell insists that the generating of ideas in her process has to come from the group not from the director. In past productions, she explains, ‘I proposed very little—I set tasks’.

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COMPANY AND DIRECTORIAL APPROACHES TO ADAPTATION ...

At the same time, unlike the productions of Mitchell and Lepage described in these chapters, the Kneehigh Theatre adaptations that Lilley highlights do not begin with a single, identifiable source. Rather, the company takes as it source texts ‘cultural memories that have pluralistic resonances for individuals and within interpretive communities’. As Rice puts it, ‘I don’t believe anybody owns a story’. Nevertheless, as Lilley reveals, Rice is clearly at the centre of Kneehigh’s ‘tightly structured and yet playful exploration of performance material’. The question, then, is not whether contemporary company-devised adaptation in the theatre has leaders but rather the degree to which these leaders share the generating of these adaptations with their fellow artists. On the far end of the spectrum, in terms of decentralized authority in the creative process, is Ruth Maleczech, whose directing at Mabou Mines is profiled in Jessica Silsby Brater’s chapter ‘Collective Creation and “Historical Imagination”: Mabou Mines’ Devised Adaptations of History’. More than her fellow co-artistic directors JoAnne Akalaitis or Lee Breuer, Maleczech describes her philosophy of directing as handing off authority: ‘Neither one of them involves their collaborators at the level that I do’, she notes in Brater’s chapter. ‘The collaborators have completely free rein’. Connecting the ‘historical pastiche’ of Mabou Mines’ 1980 production Dead End Kids with the ‘partisan iconography’ behind the creative process of its 1999 production, Belen: A Book of Hours, Brater describes an ethos of adaptation that has moved even further than Kneehigh’s from the single-source adaptations of canonical texts by Mitchell and Lepage. At Mabou Mines, the source material in adaptation is disrupted, challenged, and amended. As Brater describes it, Belen, which tells the story of a Mexico City sanctuary-for-women turned prison ‘function[s] as an excavation of sorts, unearthing fragments of personal histories and daily living and then inventing characters and stories that tell us who these women were and how they spent their days’. Ultimately, as these four chapters suggest, it may be that the creative work at Mabou Mines and Kneehigh Theatre clearly looks more decentralized because their sources are multiple, diverse, and therefore encourage a process in which the inevitable leaders in the adaptation process collaborate with their fellow artists in particular ways. In the end, the type of source (or sources) and the treatment of these sources in adaptation may be the most important factors when explaining the extent to which a director or a company becomes the more visible ‘brand’ behind a series of productions.

CHAPTER 1

Kneehigh’s Retellings Heather Lilley

Kneehigh Theatre have been telling stories since 1980, and from the very beginning a large proportion of those stories have been adaptations, or what joint artistic director Emma Rice would prefer to call ‘retellings’.  I don’t know why I use the word adaptation, I much prefer retelling, I feel that’s what we do; we retell stories. And so using the word ‘adaptation’ is already making it more reverent than I feel. In truth, I don’t really feel irreverent, I just think it is my turn. I am already looking forward to someone else telling it next and three cheers for whoever does!… They are retellings and I don’t believe anybody owns a story. (Rice, author interview, 2014)

In a comprehensive history of Cornish theatre, Alan Kent has charted the development of the company in three distinct phases that loosely follow changes of company members and subsequent shifts in the company’s interests and theatrical styles. Interestingly, each of these three phases—children’s theatre and development of site-specific work; collaborations with playwright Nick Darke on Cornish themed work; and Emma Rice’s artistic directorship—have included adaptations or what

H. Lilley (*)  Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_1

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she would prefer to call retellings. Kent attributes Kneehigh’s commitment to retelling stories to the importance of ‘fairy tales, folk tales, myths and legends’ in defining Cornish identity (Kent 2010, p. 749). The period I am focusing on in this chapter is that identified as the third phase by Kent, in which Rice, and founder member Mike Shepherd, have jointly led the company to increasing critical acclaim, with coproductions at Britain’s National Theatre and major regional theatres, far-reaching international tours and the creation of their own nomadic performance venue, The Asylum. The original interview material that underpins this chapter is all from this phase, dating from 2004 to 2014, prior to Emma Rice’s tenure at the Globe beginning in 2016. During this period, the company were particularly prolific, producing a number of adaptations, gaining recognition as one of Britain’s leading devising companies, and publishing a number of co-authored/collaboratively created play texts. During the phase of work that I am concerned with in this chapter —from 1999 to 2011—the company published an anthology of four, devised adaptations, The Kneehigh Anthology Volume One, with accompanying forewords offering ‘insight into Kneehigh’s approach to making theatre, revealing how a script can emerge from a collaborative devising process’ (Kneehigh Theatre 2005, p. 209). In programme notes and press material for shows during this time, both Rice and Shepherd have aligned their work with a folkloric, oral tradition of reshaping stories and making them relevant for new generations. This folkloric tradition has an intrinsic multivocality that marries perfectly well with devising, as practiced by Kneehigh as a collaborative process of shared authorship that includes, but is not limited to: director, writers, performers, designers, composers, and musicians tasked with exploring their own personal relationship to the material and their collective consciousness of it within contemporary culture. Furthermore, placing the work within this context of oral storytelling leads us away from the branch of adaptation studies concerned with origin, ownership, and fidelity, towards a much broader conceptualization of source texts as cultural memories owned by no-one and everyone, that have pluralistic resonances for individuals and within interpretive communities. At the heart of Kneehigh’s approach to adaptation is a desire to explore the mutability of stories, revealing and reinvigorating their relevance within contemporary culture, through exploration of their personal resonance.

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When I decide to do a story, I don’t tend to go and read or watch it, I tend to work on what my cultural memory of it is, because that’s my truth … my foundation will be my memory. And I’m sure that’s one of the reasons why I do adaptations—I want to work with that emotional memory. (Rice in Radosavljevic 2013b, p. 103)

Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation, a leading text in the move away from a bias towards ‘fidelity’, is therefore a useful text for unpacking Kneehigh’s processes of adaptation. Hutcheon’s emphasis on adaptations as entirely new pieces of work, and her attempts to analyse the changes that take place across mediums and genres, and through ‘different personal artistic filters’ are relevant to Kneehigh’s approach (Hutcheon 2006, p. 84). Interviewing Rice and writer Carl Grose in 2014, has revealed the extent to which the company’s creative process changes for different projects. In describing the creative practices involved in making a Kneehigh retelling, Rice spoke of a spectrum with wholly, group devised work at one end and written adaptation—as a solo, pre-rehearsal activity—at the other. Her conceptualization of this spectrum seemed to relate to the extent that the company had co-authored the performance text in the rehearsal room, and also the extent to which the adaptation could be said to be either loosely based on a story without any particular ‘original’ source text or much more tightly scripted from one or more immediately recognizable versions. However, Rice and Grose’s attempts to plot the company’s shows along this spectrum proved difficult as none seemed to fit particularly neatly into such categorization. Liz Tomlin has carefully argued in Acts and Apparitions, that the drive to fit new works into a binary system, which includes devised theatre against text-based theatre, seems bound up with the particular agendas of producers, funders, and critics rather than theatre makers or audiences (Tomlin 2013, p. 9–10). I might add a further binary regarding adaptation here, with adaptations that seek to replicate a singly authored ‘original’ in a new medium against looser ‘retellings’ that present audiences with new works of fiction, significantly re-authored by their makers. I would argue that Rice’s notion of a spectrum is the consequence of those same agendas identified by Tomlin. Categorizing their works in this way is no doubt useful to Kneehigh in signalling some of the differences between shows to programmers and co-producing venues, such as the level of fidelity to a source text, or the likelihood of a finished script

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before rehearsals start. However, this detracts from the complexity of the company’s adapting and devising methodologies. Placing works at either end of this spectrum reinforces simplistic notions of a singular, original source text and also the restrictive binary of devised theatre against textbased theatre, both of which are actually challenged and complicated by Kneehigh’s work and Rice’s desire to be a ‘reteller’ rather than an adapter. As Radosavljevic states in Theatre-Making, devising, and in relation to Kneehigh we should add adapting, ‘increasingly requires to be seen as a ubiquitous creative methodology rather than a genre of (nontext-based) performance’ (Radosavljevic 2013a, p. 68). Interviewing Rice during the 2004 run of The Bacchae at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, highlighted the company’s resistance at that time to categorizing their work and Rice talked of trying ‘desperately not to define what we do’, while at the same time having to explain the collaborative authoring processes of their shows in order to be able to publish play texts of their adaptations (Rice, author interview, 2004). The desire to publish these texts has pushed the company to articulate their views on devising and adapting a little more clearly, and has led Rice to the ‘retelling’ term as a way of signally the company’s alliance to an oral storytelling tradition in which intertextuality, narrative mutability, and shared cultural ownership of stories is prioritized over single authorship and fixed originals. Rice’s conceptualization of herself and Kneehigh as retellers rather than adapters seems to be a more accurate and revealing articulation of their practice than the notion of a devised–adapted spectrum. By calling themselves retellers the company are asserting their long-held desire to ‘keep affirming the group not the individual’ in all of their working methods (Rice, author interview, 2004). As retellers, Kneehigh put their source texts through the ‘artistic filters’ of a director-led collaborative practice in which performers, writers, musicians, and designers engage in tightly structured and yet playful exploration and creation of performance material. Devised adaptation as practiced by Kneehigh is a complex, collaborative process of recreating myths, fairy tales, classic texts, and films as popular, accessible, and often both celebratory and subversive theatrical experiences. This chapter is a study of Kneehigh’s creative processes alongside analysis of several of the works that they have generated since 1999, all of which might be termed devised adaptation, providing we remember that this does not signify a singular, fixed practice, but rather a pluralistic, personalized and ever emergent set of approaches to retelling known tales.

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Retelling in the Context of Adaptation Studies In order to analyse their process and performance work, it is useful to examine Kneehigh’s general approach to retelling stories in relation to adaptation studies. Like researchers in the field of contemporary performance, scholars of adaptation have shifted their focus away from attempts to categorize works into a fixed genre, towards developing greater understanding of the creative processes involved in adaptation, in terms of both production and reception.1 Similarly, as definitions of devising have been usefully expanded to account for a diversity of practice, the focus of adaptation studies has been expanded beyond the bounds of ‘fidelity criticism, a paradigm that measures the success of an adaptation by its level of fidelity to the “original” text’ (Lefebvre 2013, p. 2). As Rice has indicated, Kneehigh’s interest in retelling stories is not driven by a desire to replicate an assumed ‘original’. Their process begins with exploration of personally inflected retellings and a keen interest is taken in how stories might change to reflect differing perspectives and differing contexts. ‘Fidelity criticism’ would, therefore, be an inappropriate theoretical framework for the study of their processes and productions. Radosavljevic’s critique of press reviews for Kneehigh’s version of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (2006), supports this assertion and reveals that ‘various types of bias about adaptation and even staging a classic play still exist’ among theatre critics and audiences, which will no doubt prove interesting given Rice’s appointment as Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe in 2016 (Radosavljevic 2013a, p. 68). In Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practice, Govan et al. also refer to a tendency among conservative critics to judge adaptations as ‘poor copies’ of their source texts, but argue strongly that expecting any devising company to even attempt to authentically recreate an ‘original’ is entirely futile. How can devised performance possibly adapt fiction to create an authentic replica? Or indeed should it? The format of the original, as a piece of narrative, and the copy, as a dramatic form, dictates that there will be a number of differences. The characteristics of these two modes mean that it is impossible for a stage version of a piece of fiction to be faithful, or authentic. (Govan et al. 2007, p. 94)

Ignoring fidelity discourses, Kneehigh approached their adaptation of Cymbeline in their usual idiosyncratic manner, by finding their own

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personal connections to the material and using those to make an accessible and relevant retelling for a contemporary audience. For Rice, as director, this meant focusing on its foreboding fairy tale atmosphere, and ‘families as we know them, damaged, secretive, surprising and frustrating’ (Rice, in Kneehigh Theatre 2007, p. 5). For writer, Grose, the attraction was its Pulp Fiction-like ‘violence and weird humour’ with its ‘three bizarre narratives that all kind of collide at the end’ (Grose, author interview, 2014).2 This description exemplifies Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, in which source materials are ‘filtered’ through the adapters’ personal ‘intertexts’. The creative transposition of an adapted work’s story and its heterocosm is subject not only to genre and medium demands … but also to the temperament and talent of the adapter—and his or her individual intertexts through which are filtered the materials being adapted. (Hutcheon 2006, p. 84)

Two seminal Kneehigh productions—Tristan and Yseult (2003) and Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter (2005)—exemplify this idea of ‘cultural memory’ as a source text particularly well. The creative process for these adaptations was quite different, and yet there are some strong similarities between the resulting productions in terms of the relationships created with the audience, and the use of performance space to add layers of meaning and enhance the audience’s awareness of intertextuality at play. The company’s retelling of the epic Cornish myth, Tristan and Yseult was based rather freely upon a children’s version of the myth and company members’ varied knowledge of other versions. The performers improvised a chorus of love spotters, in anoraks and colourful balaclavas, to retell the myth from the perspective of the ‘unloved’ in a Tarantinoinspired world of sharp suits and violent passions. Aside from the love spotters’ improvisations, the story was brought to life through fragments of text written in isolation by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy, music composed by Stu Barker and Bill Mitchell’s set designs. Tristan and Yseult was originally an outdoor production at Restormel Castle in Cornwall and Rufford Abbey in Nottinghamshire (2003), and these stunning settings were incorporated into the action, blurring the stage– audience boundaries and enhancing the epic and romantic nature of the myth. When the production was revived as an indoor show for national and international touring (2005) the company replicated this to some

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extent by making use of auditorium space as ‘the club of the unloved’. This creation of a club setting playfully involved the audience in the action and allowed for explicitly intertextual visual referents, such as the vinyl sleeve for Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (Fig. 1.1). By way of contrast, the script for Brief Encounter had to be fixed in advance, and was based much more closely on two textual sources: Coward’s screenplay and his earlier stage play Still Lives. Rice explained however, that while she ‘wouldn’t call it [Brief Encounter] a devised show’ she would still call it a ‘devising company’ (Rice, author interview, 2014). Even creating something as outwardly traditional as Brief Encounter you try and have actors that are going to bring something new into the space, something surprising, and understand the language of devising. (Rice, author interview, 2014)

While a script, adapted in advance from the two written sources, was in place for the rehearsal process, Kneehigh’s version also engaged fully with the status of the film as a British classic. The performance drew heavily on memories of the film and also on a shared nostalgia for the cinematic experience of the 1930s and 1940s. In performance Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter utilized London’s Haymarket Cinema to create an evocative, cinematic, and self-referential retelling realized through simultaneous use of stage, screen, and auditorium space that enhanced the audience’s sense of the piece as a shared cultural memory.3 By focusing on a collective cultural consciousness, Rice sees Kneehigh as following in the footsteps of all storytellers, including Shakespeare and Brecht, in taking known stories and reshaping them for new audiences. The company’s approach to storytelling is also popularist, with Shepherd and Rice sharing a strong aversion to any sense of elitism in the arts. The choices of source text therefore, often relate directly to popular culture, such as Kneehigh’s adaptations of well-known fairy tales and films. Retellings of well-known fairy tales have included Cry Wolf, based on Little Red Riding Hood (2003), Rapunzel (2006), Hansel and Gretel (2009), and a Cinderella story, Midnight’s Pumpkin (2012). Fairy tales suit the company’s performance style because of the direct nature of the storytelling that translates well into direct address to the audience; the scope for physical comedy, music, song, tricks, and stage magic; and for their thematic exploration of the ‘inner landscapes’ of human

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Fig. 1.1  Mike Shepherd as a Love spotter, Tristan and Yseult, 2005 with generous permission from Steve Tanner and Kneehigh Theatre

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experience.4 Retellings of well-known films include Brief Encounter and also Powell and Pressburger’s quintessentially British, wartime classic A Matter of Life and Death (2007). These retellings assume a certain amount of recognition from the audience and playful intertextual references are made in each, not only to the meaning or particular style of original versions, which in the case of fairy tales are often explicitly subverted and reversed, but also to the genre and historical context that the originals are embedded in. To borrow Hutcheon’s terms, Kneehigh’s retelling of popular works create ‘the doubled pleasure of the palimpsest: more than one text is experienced—and knowingly so’ as the audience enjoy the playfulness of ‘repetition’ and of ‘difference’ between versions (Hutcheon 2006, p. 116). However, as Hutcheon’s also asserts, ‘for an adaptation to be successful in its own right, it must be so for knowing and unknowing audiences’ and this presents a greater challenge when a source text is likely to be well known by some, but completely unknown to others, as in the case of less canonical myths and fairy tales and classic texts (Hutcheon 2006, p. 121). With regards to fairy tales, the extent to which the audience know a particular tale may not be that significant a factor, as the tropes of the genre are so engrained within our cultural consciousness that the audience can still enjoy a sense of intertextual play. As Julie Sanders argues in Adaptation and Appropriation, fairy tales ‘participate in a very active way in a shared community of knowledge, and have therefore proved particularly rich sources for adaptation’ (Sanders 2006, p. 45). Indeed, Rice demonstrates this point herself when she says that ‘I didn’t know the story of The Red Shoes, but I knew what it meant somehow, as it’s in our cultural psyche’ (Rice, author interview, 2014). Whether or not audience members were familiar with Hans Christian Andersen’s version or Powell and Pressburger’s film, they could still recognize the subversive nature of Kneehigh’s retelling in which cross-gender casting and cross-dressing highlighted social constructs and challenged aspects of Christian morality. Where Kneehigh have tackled weighty classics, Rice believes that the company’s task has been to ‘reveal’ the meaning of the sources as clearly as possible and to attempt to emphasize human themes, such as love, family, loss (Rice, author interview, 2014). I think I am by nature populist, I don’t always get the classics. I often find them impossible to understand and I don’t enjoy things being so difficult

14  H. Lilley that you can’t ‘get in’, that you can’t enjoy … I don’t think that’s dumbing down, I think its saying there’s all sorts of richness that we can absolutely celebrate and explore, but that there is no elite club, everybody is in this club. Everybody has to be able to enjoy this night [a given performance night] on some level. (Rice, author interview, 2014)

This does not mean, however, that Kneehigh’s adaptations of classic texts are not challenging and do not offer interesting and sometimes provocative critiques of contemporary society. Their version of Euripides’ The Bacchae (2004) is an excellent example of a retelling that was both accessible and challenging, as audiences were invited to celebrate lighthearted bacchic revelry—through audience participation including drinking wine with Dionysus and singing comic songs with ‘his women’—that turned sharply to unsettling chaos and then brutal violence at the end of the play. This dramatic change of register was at the centre of theatre critic’s responses, for example Lyn Gardner remarked that Rice ‘lulls us into a false sense of security … when it reaches its malignant climax you are quite taken by surprise. After the furious storm comes the terrifying silence’ (Gardner 2004). Rice’s approach to the piece was to view the subject of femininity through the lens of a cross-gender chorus, all male performers with bare chests and tutus exploring why a grandmother, a teenager, and a menopausal woman might be tempted to leave society and seek excitement on the wild mountain. This chorus led the audience through the complex narrative of the Greek tragedy, at one point in the style of a school lesson on the blackboard. Reflecting on the production Rice described how the company had devised this scene in response to their own attempts to unravel the complex narrative. My job is to reveal, not to conceal. And in something like The Bacchae that was so simple that structure … we all sat down and we couldn’t understand it, so we sat in that room [at the Barns] with the blackboard and said ‘let’s get this straight. Who’s who? Who was Zeus?’ And we literally did it on the board, and there’s me thinking well if we had to do this, how can I expect anybody who comes into the theatre to understand it? (Rice, author interview, 2014)

This exemplifies Kneehigh’s approach to retelling as a process of revealing and simplifying that should not be dismissed as ‘dumbing down’,

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because the result is accessible, non-elitist, and popular theatre that can be moving and thought-provoking. This example also reveals the suitability of devising methodologies as valuable collaborative processes for unlocking and reimagining source texts.

Devising Retellings Through Three Stages of Development Through my research I have come to think of Kneehigh’s adaptation process as loosely divided into three key stages: (1) The director develops his/her concept for the show in collaboration with core members of the company and/or co-producers, and exploration of the chosen source materials begins. This may or may not include the writing of either fragments of text, or a more substantial script, (2) An ensemble of core members, cast and crew embark on two weeks of intensive, creative work at the barns; and (3) What we might consider to be a more standard rehearsal period ensues, often at a co-producing venue, and the structure of the piece is fixed ready for performance. This third stage might also be said to encompass the run of the show itself, where the audience are invited into the process of retelling through pre-performance activity in and around venues, through direct address and participation during the performance, and indeed through that ‘pleasure of the palimpsest’ that characterizes the reception of an adaptation (Hutcheon 2006, p. 116). The artists involved in each stage of development, and the manner of their involvement, can vary from one production to the next, as Kneehigh operate on a core and pool structure: ‘common to many British theatre companies where there is a small permanent core, usually made up of founder members, almost always including an artistic director. Individual projects may bring together a larger number of participants and these will normally be people to whom the company returns again and again’ (Mermikides and Smart 2010, p. 16). At present, Kneehigh’s artistic directors, Rice and Shepherd, head the company and very much lead the devising process; both are performers, and when not directing, Shepherd still performs in most Kneehigh productions. The contribution of other writers and performers that might be said to make up the company’s ‘pool’ should not be underestimated however, as many have a longstanding affiliation to the company and clearly share a vocabulary of practice.

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In Kneehigh’s published play texts credit is always attributed to the contribution of the whole company in creating the work, and Shepherd founded the company upon principles of collaboration and community. In describing their collaborative practices, Kneehigh often draw on conceptions of space; the space of their rehearsal Barns as ‘elemental’ and ‘inspiring’; the space of Cornwall as ‘outside’ of London and as ‘a place where you can make things happen’; and the creative space of rehearsal where the company comes together to devise. On their website, Kneehigh define themselves in the following way: We are based in a collection of barns on the south Cornish coast, they are at the top of a hill where the road ends and a vast horizon stretches far beyond Dodman Point. By their very nature the barns let the weather in and out again. A large multi-fuel burner needs to be stoked and fed for rehearsals; there is barely any mobile phone reception and nowhere to pop out for a quick cappuccino. The isolation of the barns, and the need to cook and keep warm provides a real and natural focus for our flights of imagination. This is not a conceit; it is a radical choice that informs all aspects of our work. Although much of our work is now co-produced with larger theatres, we always try to start the creative process at these barns, to be inspired by our environment and where we work. This creative space is at the heart of how we create and conceive our work. (Kneehigh Theatre 2014)

Kent also describes Kneehigh as an artistic community, and visiting the Kneehigh barns at Goran Haven, where the creation of all their shows begins, makes it immediately apparent that Kent’s description is not an idealized version of a vague company ethos, but rather relates directly to the practical way in which Kneehigh still approach making performance: [Shepherd] developed a belief in an assembly of actors who lived, worked and ate together in a communal way, making energised creative space. Pieces of theatre would develop organically and through ‘communion’ in the art of theatre … underlying the organic development are research, experiment and an emphasis on crafting work. (Kent 2010, p. 746)

Research clearly dominates the first stage of the creative process that I have identified, with the director working in a fairly isolated way on the germination of an idea for a show. Kneehigh Theatre’s work is strongly director led, either by Shepherd or Rice, whose sensibilities drive the

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shape and aesthetics of their productions. In the first phase of the process much of the work is carried out individually by the director and through discussion with other company members who might begin to work on writing text, composing music, or designing for the piece. As Rice describes her chosen source texts as ‘cultural memories’ her preference is to conceptualize the piece from her own memory of the text or film she is going to adapt, or, in the case of some myths (Tristan and Yseult) or classic texts (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Euripides’ Bacchae), to work from a children’s version (Rice, author interview, 2014). Rice admits to doing very little research and stresses that working too cerebrally, with multiple versions or academic articles, carries a danger of making her ‘feel stupid or invalidated’ and distancing her from her instinctual attraction to a particular story (Rice, author interview, 2014). Rice does concede however, that other members of the company balance her emotional and instinctive approach. Grose for example likes to undertake a lot of research, always working directly with the source text, and taking confidence from knowing as much about it as he can. Within this first phase it is usual for these different kinds of research to go on independently, as an initial concept for the retelling begins to be formulated. Rice has spoken candidly in interviews about her approach to directing as quite authoritative in terms of creatively authoring the show (in distinction to the play text) and taking responsibility for making final decisions. Rice believes that through strong leadership she is able to create ‘an environment in which people have good ideas’ and actually feel freed up within the process to be creative, thoughtful, and playful (Rice, author interview, 2014). At its heart, the word devising is of great importance at the very seed of the show. So you’re telling the actors ‘this is not something I’m going to tell you to do’, so you say ‘we’re going to devise it’. Even if it is a script, it’s a useful word to say this is not set, this is not decided. (Rice, author interview, 2014)

Having participated in two devising workshops run by Shepherd, I can say that he shares this aim with Rice and his approach is intended to free actors up to take creative risks and to offer ideas with a sense of ‘generosity’, ‘lightness’, and ‘mischief’ (Shepherd 2010). Govan et al. suggest that the creative play and improvisation used in early devising companies to author work, is now a prevalent methodology in the rehearsal room of

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director led and scripted productions (Govan et al. 2007, p. 39); and in Devising in Process, Mermikides and Smart highlight a sense of creative play as one of the shared characteristics of many contemporary devising processes. What we mean by ‘play’ is both the willingness to improvise around ideas and the degree of strategic flexibility purposefully left within the process, with many companies delaying fixing their pieces until a very late stage. (Mermikides and Smart 2010, p. 24)

Their definition relates well to Kneehigh’s use of devising within what I have identified above as the second phase of their creative process. It is during this second phase that the director opens the act of reimagining and retelling out to more participants, through devising methodologies. Some might simply call this period the start of rehearsals, but this would not necessarily signify the important focus placed on building an ensemble, and on the kinds of exploration of source materials that we might be more used to associating with R&D (research and development) periods. Who exactly is involved, and what exactly takes place during this period, is of course variable and project specific. However, there are certainly common elements that reveal the journey of a given source text through what Hutcheon would describe as the director’s ‘personal artistic filters’; then the personal emotional memories and shared cultural consciousness of the cast and crew; before finally, the wider interpretive community of the audience (Hutcheon 2006, p. 84). As Rice describes it: The next thing that I would always do is start building the foundations of ‘why’. Now I’ve made an awful lot of decisions, and I know the world, I know why I’m doing it, but what I do next is try and get the ensemble to key into why they might do it and to begin to fill in the blanks. (Rice, in Radosavljevic 2013b, p. 101)

By outlining specific exercises that the company use in this phase to explore their source texts, we are able to see how their aim—to retell stories in a non-elitist, relevant, often celebratory and sometimes challenging way—influences and is manifest in their creative practice. Attending a two-day devising workshop with Shepherd, at Beintheworkfest in Berlin (2010), I was able to experience a condensed version of this second phase of the process, where the focus is jointly on building an ensemble

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and inspiring creative ideas; opening up the source text via interpretive and representational activities. The workshop was based on Gabrielle Garcia Marquez’s short story, ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’, which is a story that Shepherd has returned to several times. He and Bill Mitchell devised an outdoor production called Windfall in 1993, before returning to the story as part of the 3 Islands project between Cornwall, Malta, and Cyprus in 2003; and Shepherd directed a production of it in association with Little Angel Theatre in 2011, written by Anna Maria Murphy with puppets by Sarah Wright. With Little Angel Theatre, four puppeteers retold the story through a whole community of puppets living in a grey-washed, rain-soaked, crab-invested fishing village. In this retelling, the fate of the village—visited by a suspected angel, overrun with miracle seekers and tourists, and at the mercy of dubious religious leaders and bankers—resonated with the changing landscape of many British coastal towns courting tourism and development. While our workshop and the subsequent puppet version with Little Angel were not linked, participating in the workshop and then later watching the production has brought into clearer focus the relationship between developmental stages of devising and finished performance. Unlike at the barns, we were not sharing accommodation, cooking together, or running along the Cornish cliff tops in the mornings, but essentially the progression of work that we undertook mirrors Rice and Shepherd’s description of beginning work at the barns, with care taken to unite the participants as an ensemble. The atmosphere of the workshop was light hearted, gleeful even; we sang a lot and we played a lot of games, not just initially, but throughout the two days, in order to become comfortable with each other, to keep ‘charging the space’ and to ‘re-energize’ ourselves. However, storytelling always remained our primary focus and many of the games revolved around what Shepherd calls ‘storying’ (Shepherd 2010). Shepherd described ‘storying’ as ‘exercising our storytelling muscles’ and he tasked us to create stories from the contents of our bags, from sculptures, from simply positioning actors on a marked-out stage. We then applied many storytelling techniques to Marquez’s text, engaging in what Kneehigh actress Joanna Holden has described, in relation to Hansel and Gretel (2009), as ‘finding ways you want to tell the story—whether it’s through puppetry, whether it’s through music, whether it’s through movement, whether it’s through you as a performer’ (Holden, in Radosavljevic 2013b, p. 110).

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Some key elements of Kneehigh’s approach to adaptation emerged, such as a preference for instinctive, immediate responses. These responses were placed very simply under headings such as: Themes/ Characters/Design. These were explored through quick imaginative tasks, such as drawing striking images from the story. Finally, they were condensed into bullet points of action from which we created little picture books. The materials that were generated soon supplanted the text itself and, displayed around the rehearsal room, these became our points of reference. Several of the ideas that emerged from these storytelling exercises pointed towards the retelling that Shepherd went on to create with Little Angel. Such as the nosey neighbour as narrator, the mother’s entrepreneurial desires as a significant turning point in the action, and the strong sense of a community caught up in consumerist greed that only serves to reveal people’s fickleness and teach them about the ambiguity of capitalist and religious figures of authority. My experience of the workshop thus exemplified how Kneehigh’s approach ensures that the finished production is inflected with the interpretations and interests of the cast as they emerge during the collaborative play of this second phase of the creative process. However, had a version of the story been fully created from this workshop, it would certainly have differed a great deal to Little Angel’s puppet play in form, aesthetic, and thematic character, because Kneehigh’s devising exercises focus not only on retelling the story, but also on exploring the cast’s personal connections to it through their collective artistic skills. A lot of time is devoted to finding that shared sense of ‘why’ and following that ‘why’ off in interesting tangents. For example, one of the workshop participants related the story to aspects of his childhood in communist Poland. He felt that his desire for consumerist goods and his longing for the consumer choice of the West, was reflected somewhat in the villagers’ dreams and aspirations. Shepherd asked the participant to retell his story in Polish with another performer improvising an on-the-spot translation. Then, because we were an international group with quite varied levels of performance experience, we repeated the exercise in other languages and in an invented ‘gobbledegook’—this exercise was one of several that helped to relieve the pressure of improvising dialogue and suggested ways in which we might find our own unique playing style. All of the storytelling exercises—creating and costuming characters, bringing those characters to life, and devising scenes complete with puppets, lights and music—while never really at odds with

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Marquez’s story, were characterized by our own interpretations, our own strengths as performers, and our natural characteristics. It was very clear how Kneehigh’s approach to exploring source material could evoke personal responses that, once shared and explored, give performers a strong sense of investment in the material. Rice describes the material generated at this stage of a show’s formation as a ‘fertile palette of words, music and design’ (Kneehigh Theatre 2014). Writer Anna Maria Murphy, speaking specifically of The Red Shoes, supports this description. Everything in this company’s work tells the story: the actors, the set, the music, the costume, the props. A living script grows with Emma [in the case of The Red Shoes] and the actors, through devising, improvisation and the poems. Each plays an equal part. I say it is living, as it’s always changing and we all own it. (Murphy in Kneehigh Theatre 2005, p. 179)

The inclusion of writers within devising processes is extremely common, and as Mermikides and Smart point out, has its precedent in many of the devising collectives of the 1970s (see Mermikides and Smart 2010, p. 12). Rice has spoken of casting the writers for a project in the same way that she would cast the performers, and claims to work with them in a very similar way, by setting them tasks. These tasks might include observing and writing up scenes devised by performers or generating fragments of text inspired by the source material. Grose describes his experiences of writing text for Kneehigh as quite varied. Within one production he explains that Some of it [the script] is written by me pre-rehearsals, some of it is improvised, the actors come up with stuff, and some of it is improvised and then I write it. (Grose, author interview, 2014)

When writing text and lyrics for the fairy tale adaptation The Wild Bride (2011) Grose wrote a lot of material independently in advance, which was then given to Rice to ‘cut and paste it and put it together and use what she wanted, and she would say look “this bit is all gonna be image, this is all gonna be dance, so we don’t need that”’ (Grose, author interview, 2014). The Wild Bride’s central character—represented by three actresses—did not speak, therefore much of the action was devised through physical theatre and dance; the fact that Grose is accustomed to

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working with Kneehigh as a deviser/performer as well as writer, meant that Rice could create the adaptation and final script using his text quite freely. This supports Mermikides and Smart’s assertion that: The simple presence of the playwright in rehearsal opens up a dialogue which can offer different perspectives and opportunities to explore ideas physically, visually and interactively before the script is finalised. (Mermikides and Smart 2010, p. 22)

Tom Morris, writer for several Kneehigh adaptations, gives a detailed description of this process as he experienced it with The Wooden Frock (2003), which was based on the short story ‘Wooden Maria’ from Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales. The devising team (four actors, a designer, a composer, a lighting designer, Emma and myself) told the story to each other while Emma and Bill [Mitchell, founder member and designer] evolved a vision for the world in which our play would take place … Before a word was written Mike Shepherd was wearing a wimple and neat Moroccan slippers and answering to the name of ‘Nursey’. In this way, the characters and the story were cooked up together by the group. As the people of the play emerged, I wrote words for the scenes they were improvising. (Morris, in Kneehigh Theatre 2005, p. 124)

Kneehigh’s core and regular company members share a working vocabulary and practice, which Grose calls ‘a kind of shorthand’ that inspires confidence and a sense of freedom within the process (Grose, author interview, 2014). The director of each Kneehigh show leads the creative process from the front, but relationships between all of the roles are rich and productive, and the input of each collaborator is valued as they approach the task of retelling a story from a shared consciousness of it. As Rice says: Kneehigh is a team. The shared imagination is greater than any individual’s, so we begin the rehearsal process by returning to the story. We tell it to each other, scribble thoughts on huge pieces of paper and relate it to our own experience. We create characters, always looking to serve and subvert the story. (Rice, in Kneehigh Theatre 2005, p. 13)

Devising and adapting are intrinsically linked within Kneehigh’s creative processes, as methods for interpreting, revealing, and sharing

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a story, regardless of whether they have (1) a vague or specific source text(s) , and (2) fragments of dialogue, lyrics, and poetry or closer to a full script to work with. Both their devising and adapting strategies are very securely founded on the principle that, while individual artists might own their creations or versions, nobody in fact owns a story. Studying Kneehigh reaffirms the value of stories as mutable and transferable across history, contexts, and media. Kneehigh’s retellings remind us that for some the joy of adaptation is in the pleasure of acknowledgement, recognition, and comparison of intextualities, but for others, retellings offer the pleasures of discovering a story that was not or only vaguely known, and of having something revealed and made relevant that was assumed to be archaic or too difficult to be understood and enjoyed; Kneehigh’s retellings attempt to reach and satisfy both of these audiences.

Notes 1. For a concise overview of this shift see Lefebvre, Benjamin, ed. Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature: Adaptations, Translations, Reconsiderations. New York and London, Routledge, 2013 (Lefebvre 2013). 2. For further discussion of Kneehigh’s Cymbeline, see Radosavljevic, Duska. Theatre-Making: Interplay between text and performance in the twentieth century. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 (Radosavljevic 2013a). 3.  For detailed analysis of Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter, see Georgi, C. “Kneehigh Theatre’s Brief Encounter: ‘Live on Stage-Not the Film’”. Raw, L. and Tutan, D. The Adaptation of History: Essays on Ways of Telling the Past. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co Inc., 2012. pp. 66–78 (Georgi 2012). 4. Rice often aligns Kneehigh’s view of fairy tales to Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (1978), which offers a reading of fairy tales as psychological aids, particularly to children, in coming to understand the social world. For detailed analysis of Cry Wolf see Lilley, Heather. “Everyone in the Room has a Connection to the Story”, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance. 5.2, 2012. pp. 149–166 (Bettelheim 1978; Lilley 2012).

Works Cited Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London: Penguin Books, 1978. Gardner, Lyn. (2004). “The Bacchae”. Guardian, Web. 2 October 2014.

24  H. Lilley Georgi, C. “Kneehigh Theatre’s Brief Encounter: ‘Live on Stage-Not the Film’”, in Raw, L. and Tutan, D. ed. The Adaptation of History: Ways of Telling the Past. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co Inc., 2012, pp. 66–78. Govan, Emma, Nicholson, Helen, and Normington, Katie. Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practice. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Grose, Carl. Author Interview. 2014. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Kent, A. M. The Theatre of Cornwall: Space, Place, Performance. Bristol: Westcliff Books, 2010. Kneehigh Theatre. Kneehigh Anthology Volume One: Tristan and Yseult, Red Shoes, The Wooden Frock, The Bacchae. London: Oberon Books, 2005. Kneehigh Theatre. Cymbeline. London: Oberon Books, 2007. Kneehigh Theatre. (2014). Company Website, http://www.kneehigh.co.uk/ page/the_barns.php, accessed 29 May 2014. Lefebvre, Benjamin, ed. Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature: Adaptations, Translations, Reconsiderations. New York and London: Routledge, 2013. Lilley, Heather. “Everyone in the Room has a Connection to the Story”. Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 5.2, (2012): pp. 149–166. Mermikides, Alex, and Smart, Jackie. Devising in Process. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Radosavljevic, Duska. Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century. Bassingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013a. ———. The Contemporary Ensemble: Interviews with Theatre-Makers. London and New York: Routledge, 2013b. Rice, Emma. Author Interview. 2014. Rice, Emma, and Shepherd, Mike. Author Interview. 2004. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Shepherd, Mike. Beintheworkfest Workshop. 2010. Tomlin, Liz. Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory, 1990–2010. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013.

CHAPTER 2

Collective Creation and ‘Historical Imagination’: Mabou Mines’s Devised Adaptations of History Jessica Silsby Brater

The American avant-garde theatre company Mabou Mines was founded in 1970 as a collective; each founding member was a co-artistic director. This structure of collective creative leadership has endured throughout the company’s history. Each artistic director, past and present, has provided Mabou Mines with an independent yet interrelated artistic approach to both process and production. The company is known for producing original works by a single author (most frequently co-artistic director Lee Breuer) and for wildly imaginative adaptations of plays, including classics such as King Lear (Lear 1987) and A Doll’s House (Mabou Mines’ DollHouse 2003). But the work of several of the co-artistic directors also reveals a common interest in adapting people and events of the past into contemporary characters and stories for the stage. The resulting body of unconventional history plays are often devised through processes of collective creation.

J.S. Brater (*)  Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_2

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JoAnne Akalaitis’s, Ruth Maleczech’s, and Julie Archer’s work for the company on Dead End Kids (1980) and Bélen: A Book of Hours (1999) illustrate Mabou Mines’s interest in devised adaptations of history by troubling the relationship between women and conventional master narratives about the past. These productions exemplify Mabou Mines’s intensively collaborative process and commitment to producing original, American work for the stage. This chapter explores each production’s distinctive approach to devising and adaptation as a mode for reimagining women and events of the past. In Dead End Kids and Belén, Mabou Mines changes identifiable historical source material to challenge accepted notions of history, confronting audiences with new perspectives on people and events of the past and undermining the authority of traditional master narratives. Each production illuminates a different facet of their approach to the collaborative process and adaptation: Dead End Kids, with its intricately embroidered patchwork of adapted research material and invented scenarios, uses historical pastiche. Meanwhile, Belén’s imagistic fictionalized scenarios are better described as partisan iconography. In Past Performance: American Theatre and the Historical Imagination, Roger Bechtel writes that his aim is to investigate and understand what I perceive to be new and complex theatrical strategies for representing—or perhaps a better word might be engaging—history. History, in the plays and productions I examine, is not understood as a mere reference to the historical record; rather, these productions marshal historical reference to interrogate history—the idea of history, its uses and abuses, as Nietzsche would have it, rather than its facts alone—and our relation to it. (Bechtel, 16)

This is a useful framework for examining Dead End Kids and Belén within the milieu of historical drama. These productions take an energetic and muscular approach to wrestling with their respective histories, inserting themselves assertively into the record of the past and insisting that we do not take the idea of history or the figures and stories it has documented for granted. Dead End Kids and Belén lend weight to the importance of these women’s histories by going through the motions of representation night after night, for different spectators. As Freddie Rokem writes of

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the repeated appearance of the ghost in Hamlet in Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre: What can be seen in Hamlet is how a burden (some kind of unfinished business from the past) becomes transformed into an actor’s being and doing ‘this thing’ on the stage, appearing again in tonight’s performance, continuously performing a return of the repressed on the theatrical stage. History can only be perceived as such when it becomes recapitulated, when we create some form of discourse, like the theatre, on the basis of which an organized repetition of the past is constructed, situating the chaotic torrents of the past within an aesthetic frame. (Rokem, xi)

Likewise, the female figures and stories in these productions haunt the stage to remind us of those who have been ignored, such as the prisoners of Belén and those, such as Marie Curie, whose discoveries unwittingly led to tragedy. These figures also ask us to re-examine the traditional master narrative, pointing us toward a feminist historiography by intertwining the personal with the political and reorganizing hierarchical arrangements of historical reference. Although Mabou Mines is organized as a collective, not every artistic director participates in every production and projects have resulted from collaborations of almost every imaginable combination of artistic directors and associates. There is, nonetheless, a shared set of concerns among the co-artistic directors: a dedication to language and research, an interest in a multi-media approach to storytelling (though not necessarily conventional narrative), a blending of comedy and sentimentality, a highly collaborative development process that in some cases borders on collective, a rehearsal process that integrates design elements with performance, and an emphasis on giving performers significant power in shaping and guiding artistic decisions. These characteristics have tended to influence the approach to making the work rather than resulting in a ‘house style’; though Breuer and Maleczech are both founding artistic directors, it is hard to imagine two productions more dissimilar in mood, style, and scope than her 1999 production of Belén: A Book of Hours and his 2003 DollHouse, despite the fact that both engage with questions about the representation of gender. Breuer suggests that if there is a common stylistic thread among productions, it may come from the sheer number designed by former co-artistic director Julie Archer during her tenure with the company from the late 1970s until her resignation

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in 2013. In describing Mabou Mines’s lack of a unified house style, Breuer suggests that the distinctive approach of the Wooster Group is attributable to the company’s sole artistic director: ‘I honestly don’t think there is a discernible Mabou Mines style that spreads to a number of different people, just like there is no Wooster Group style—it’s just Liz [LeCompte]’.1 Mabou Mines is distinct from the Wooster Group, of course, because of its structure of shared artistic directorship, but Breuer is pointing to the discrete nature of the aesthetics of the Mabou Mines co-artistic directors. Mabou Mines does, however, have a strong tradition of textual adaptation, and the use of historical source material in the collectively created projects examined here can be considered in the context of productions such as Akalaitis’s work with Colette’s writing in Dressed Like an Egg; Maleczech and Breuer’s reimagining of Shakespeare in Lear; Breuer’s inventive take on Ibsen in DollHouse and on Tennessee Williams in Glass Guignol; and Maleczech’s Imagining the Imaginary Invalid, which combines Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid with material drawn from texts on the history of medicine. Because each artistic director has contributed an autonomous aesthetic and methodology, the two case studies that follow do not represent overarching approaches to devising and adaptation for the company. Instead, their development processes and characteristics in production point to similarities as well as to original, distinctive qualities of particular productions in Mabou Mines’s body of work. Dead End Kids is one of the most famous productions in Mabou Mines’s history. Conceived and directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, it was developed and produced at New York City’s Public Theater during the company’s extended residency there, premiering in November 1980 and was adapted into a film in 1984. The company of actors researched, wrote, and helped to develop scenes and text. Maleczech played Marie Curie. This role, which emphasized Curie’s contribution to science as well as elements of her biography, proved to be central to Akalaitis’s version of the history of nuclear power and its relationship to patriarchal and capitalistic structures of authority. With Belén: A Book of Hours the company took up gender, power, and history again under Maleczech’s direction with a design by Archer. The production, which premiered in March 1999, was performed bilingually in Spanish and English and based on Mexican history. It also expands Maleczech’s assertion that the company ‘makes American work’, to include the USA’s southern neighbour, as Maleczech had already done

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in Sueños, a piece about the life and work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1989). Belén featured poems by US poet Catherine Sasanov and performances by Mexican artists Liliana Felipe and Jesusa Rodriguez.2 Belén was performed internationally, opening in Mexico City as part of XV Festival del Centro Storico at El Claustro de Sor Juana. The US premiere took place in April 1999 at Mabou Mines’s former ToRaNaDa studio at PS 122 in New York’s East Village. The production also toured to Chicago, San Francisco, the University of California at Northridge, and back to Mexico City (this time to Rodriguez and Felipe’s Teatro de La Capilla), and then back to PS 122 in 2000. The Catholic Church built Belén in 1683 as a refuge for prostitutes and pregnant, indigent women. It quickly underwent changes that made life for the women there increasingly restrictive as clergy who ran the institution, initially founded as a sanctuary, began to search the streets for women they deemed undesirable, abducting and imprisoning them. As the Belén production program explains, ‘once a woman entered, she could never leave’.3 Belén was converted into a prison for men and women in 1860 by the Mexican government and became so notorious as a site of torture that it was torn down in 1935. In contrast to the famous Marie Curie, the lives of Belén women have been lost to history. The research, development, and production of this piece functioned as an excavation of sorts, unearthing fragments of personal histories and daily living and then inventing characters and stories that tell us who these women were and how they spent their days. Dead End Kids and Belén are history plays that establish an interrogative relationship with the past. The nature of this relationship is different in each case; each production establishes a distinct methodology particular to its perspective on the history it investigates. Nonetheless, these productions have certain characteristics in common. They are not realistic attempts at historical reconstruction. Neither do they pretend to be objective. They are, as Peter Weiss described his documentary drama, frankly ‘partisan’ (Weiss, 294). Dead End Kids Akalaitis created Dead End Kids as a “response to the tremendous political movement” in the USA surrounding the use of nuclear power.4 “It seemed kind of natural to me that Ruth would play Marie Curie,” she says, describing the similarity in looks between the women and Maleczech’s facility with accents. Curie provided the fulcrum for

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Akalaitis, and when the director adapted the work to film in 1984, she expanded Maleczech’s role. Curie was, Akalaitis says, “a woman who was a pre-eminent scientist and basically killed herself doing her work, who was incredibly important in a world where women are not important.” Greg Mehrten, a former company member who also performed in Dead End Kids, remembers that Maleczech was intent on learning the science behind the activities she portrayed onstage as the Nobel Prize-winning chemist and physicist. ‘She had this scene where she was taking the radioactive elements and she really learned how to do that’, Mehrten says. The science that secured Curie’s entry into the historical record was crucial to Maleczech’s portrayal of the important figure. In reviews of the production, Akalaitis is often credited with writing as well as directing Dead End Kids as she is in the film version, although the Mabou Mines website attributes the text to Akalaitis ‘with the company’, with excerpts from other documents written by a lengthy list of figures from Paracelsus to General L.R. Groves.5 Akalaitis agrees that the script was indeed written ‘with the company’. Collaborators recall that the performers immersed themselves in the research process alongside Akalaitis. The subject was ‘too vast for one person to do all the research’, Maleczech said, ‘it needed all the people in the piece to do it’.6 Mehrten recalls a process of interdisciplinary collaboration: Originally it started out as a workshop where a lot of people who weren’t in Mabou Mines were invited to think in collaborative ways—musicians and filmmakers, all kinds of people—because it wasn’t meant to be like a normal play. It had all these vignettes from different periods in history all around the subject of nuclear power.7

The development process, with its heavy emphasis on research, was one to which Maleczech readily responded. According to Maleczech, she developed a performance that eventually became scripted, while Akalaitis remembers the performance as ‘always slightly improvised’. Maleczech’s attention to the research that facilitated her creation of Curie is an early example of Mabou Mines’s investment in this phase of the process. Maleczech’s costume for Curie, the performer recalled, was copied from a dress that she and Akalaitis had seen slung over the back of a chair when they visited the scientist’s former home, now a museum in Paris. Akalaitis, according to Maleczech, selected material she wanted to include in the piece from the research brought in by the company and

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put it in order. ‘JoAnne is a structuralist’, Maleczech said in describing Akalaitis’s directorial approach, she structures everything. She doesn’t ever want anything on the stage that isn’t a structure. It can be an emotional structure, it can be a physical structure, it can be a movement structure, it can be a language structure, but it’s got to be structured. That’s where her heart goes. When we made The Red Horse Animation we each had a part of the red horse. David Warrilow’s part was the Story Line. My part was the Heart Line, and JoAnne’s part was the Outline. And it’s very appropriate that that was her part.

Mehrten’s description of Akalaitis’s process for Dead End Kids in which artists from various disciplines came together to collaborate, is also characteristic of Maleczech’s directorial approach. But where Akalaitis actively shapes the contribution of her collaborators, Maleczech worked with what she got. ‘Julie Archer could have made any set for Belén’, Maleczech said, ‘it’s up to her what she makes. She makes it, I’ll work with it’. Maleczech’s description of divergent directorial inclinations highlights the distinct nature of aesthetic prerogatives among co-artistic directors as well as resulting stylistic differences.

A Staged History of Nuclear Power Much of the critical attention surrounding Dead End Kids centres on the notorious scene in which David Brisbin’s sleazy stand-up comedian leads a naïve female audience member, played by Ellen McElduff, through a series of sexually exploitative manipulations of a raw roasting chicken as he suggestively reads excerpts of a document describing the consequences for livestock in the event of a nuclear war. In ‘Staging the Obscene Body’, Elinor Fuchs describes her own discomfort as an audience member during this sequence and the widespread disdain with which critics greeted the scene. In the end, however, Fuchs writes, ‘most critics, sympathetic with the director’s political intentions, finally “allowed” it on political grounds’. Fuchs also documents an audience walkout during a presentation of the scene: In an interesting sequel, the nightclub scene was presented as a single excerpt at a joint anniversary celebration of the War Resisters’ League

32  J.S. BRATER (WRL) and Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament in May 1983 … women in the hall began to shout to the female character, ‘Don’t do it honey, don’t let him do it to you!’ Within moments, accompanied by mounting booing and hissing, there occurred a full-scale feminist walkout from the hall … The performance was broken off and an angry confrontation with the director followed. (Fuchs, 36)

The melee Fuchs describes followed a presentation of the scene outside of the context of the play, but Akalaitis subsequently developed a reputation for controversy—she is now the veteran of a showdown with the Beckett estate over her production of Endgame (1984) and an infamous ousting by the board of the Public Theater which ended her brief and tumultuous tenure as the only female Artistic Director in the organization’s history. It should come as no surprise, then, that this earlier, intentional provocation was so successful. The confrontational nature of this scene makes it an excellent microcosm for examining the larger patterns at work in the piece. Dead End Kids puts familiar figures, images, and histories together in a provocative and uncomfortable way. The result disrupts what we know about the appearance of nuclear power on the political landscape and points to our complicity, as well as that of the scientific community, in its proliferation. One mode of disruption in Dead End Kids is Akalaitis’s emphasis on comedy, a strategy that Mabou Mines has relied on regularly for the purposes of distancing and juxtaposition. Dead End Kids avoids the polemical by incorporating satire and parody as well as visual gags, as when Marie Curie appears with a black poodle (on a walk through Central Park in the film version), book-ended by scenes of Faust and Mephistopheles (the latter in human form). Akalaitis even parodies comedy itself with Brisbin’s decidedly unfunny stand-up comedian. But Maleczech’s adaptation of Curie is funny, and her ability to control the comedy invests the figure with power. Akalaitis recalls that Maleczech employed ‘a kind of comedic Polish accent. It was very, very funny and I have no idea how she did it, but she did it’. Maleczech remembered a process that relied on a collective adaption of historical information. ‘She had a Polish-French accent’, Maleczech explained, and of course I’d never heard Polish, so I would make it up! And then in the Faust section, which was done in German, I was the translator—Marie Curie was the translator—and so I had to translate Goethe’s Faust …

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But it had to be funny, so at first it was improvised and eventually it was scripted because I said the same thing over and over.

Although no video survives of the stage production, the film adaptation is now available for purchase.8 It opens with a scientist drawing on a chalkboard and delivering an enthusiastic explanation of the atom. Less than five minutes later, the late Mabou Mines co-artistic director Fred Neumann’s cigarette-smoking armchair intellectual sets the stage for a historic reconstruction of medieval-looking attempts at the alchemical transformation. An evening talk show dedicated to pseudo-scientific inquiry (‘Welcome to the incredible, unbelievable world of alchemy’, one co-host beams) in which a magician makes a handkerchief into a dove and enacts other improbable feats and the co-hosts discuss the history of alchemy. Then, of course, there is the stand-up comedian. These narrative threads establish surprising juxtapositions between familiar situations and figures, pairing birthday party magicians with ancient alchemical theory. In fact, such contrasting scenes highlight another unlikely and ultimately lethal pairing: the US government’s machismo and jingoism and its access to science with the capacity to create an atomic bomb. As Fuchs notes, despite her discomfort with the too-stupid audience member and the too-seedy comedian, she ‘recognized … the most unsettling version of the connection Akalaitis had been making all along between the war state and the sexist state, male nuclear fantasies and the exploitation of women’.9 Thus, Dead End Kids develops two trains of thought. One has to do with the abuse of nuclear power, both in the real world and in male fantasies. The other has to do with how we ended up with the capacity to make a nuclear bomb in the first place. The latter question takes us all the way back to Aristotle and other Classical proponents of alchemy. The first third of Dead End Kids functions as a sort of history of alchemy or perhaps as a history of the gestational period of science. As the drama unfolds, alchemy and modern science collide with the introduction of Marie Curie. Once she appears on the scene in Dead End Kids she continues to lurk around the corners of the production, demonstrating the centrality of this character to Akalaitis’s conception of the project. Later Curie tells her own story, one that resonates with an overlapping of interconnected personal and professional triumphs. She describes meeting her husband, Pierre Curie in terms that glow with a shared

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commitment to science, not the traditional language of romance. ‘A conversation about science began between us,’ says Maleczech’s Curie, ‘soon he caught the habit of speaking to me about his dream of a life consecrated entirely to scientific research and he asked me to share that life’. Among the Dead End Kids cast of characters, only Curie possesses this sense of an integrated professional and personal life, and Maleczech and Akalaitis are careful to embed this intersection throughout Curie’s story in the film. This distinguishes her even among the female characters; we are not, for instance, privy to the home life of Ellen McElduff’s teacher or the professional life of McElduff’s naïve female audience member. Curie and her husband Pierre worked in a shed that served as their laboratory, just outside the home they shared with their daughter, we learn. ‘It was in this abandoned shed that the best and happiest years of our life was spent entirely consecrated to work … This period was for my husband and myself the heroic period of our common existence’. In this shed, Curie decided to ‘devote’ herself to the purification of radium. ‘In 1902 I possessed one decigram of radium. It had taken me four years to produce it’, she continues, The baby had been put to bed and cried again. I stayed with her until she fell asleep then I went down and tried to sew, but I was too restless. I suggested to Pierre that we go to the laboratory. We opened the door in the dark. I begged Pierre not to light the light. The reality was more entrancing than we had wished. It was spontaneously luminous.10

Here, Curie’s husband, child, and scientific innovation are linked together in the pride she feels for her accomplishments. Maleczech’s voice is warm, and we have the sense of Curie as a particularized individual because of her slightly untraceable yet charming accent. She describes the qualities of radioactivity, its ability to make images on photographic plates through black paper and to disintegrate the paper in which it is wrapped as if she is a parent talking about a precocious child. ‘What could it not do?’ she asks proudly.11 Marie Curie is the only character in Dead End Kids whose view of science and domesticity are so irrevocably interwoven. This makes her the ideal figure to haunt the later, post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki scenes. As a mother, she is a poignant presence in the doorway of the auditorium where she watches the schoolteacher played by McElduff read eyewitness accounts of the horrors of Nagasaki aloud to children in a

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singsong voice. McElduff holds a large picture book and pauses occasionally to make sure the children understand the more difficult words. ‘Those people who managed to get out by some miracle’, she reads in a sweet, soothing voice, ‘found themselves surrounded by a ring of fire and the few who did make their way to safety died twenty to thirty days later from the delayed effects of the deadly gamma rays’.12 Marie Curie looks on with a mixture of regret and wonder. The sinister intermingling of sophisticated nuclear activity and innocent daily life also inserts itself into a scene in which high school girls, played by Maleczech and Akalaitis’s daughters, Clove Galilee and Juliet Glass, respectively, demonstrate the wonders of nuclear power in a science fair exhibit. They admiringly describe a nuclear-powered coffee pot, plutonium-heated long johns, and a nuclear-powered pace maker. ‘Radiation is the most recent step in man’s ancient quest to preserve food’, they rave, eating irradiated hamburgers.13 We see Marie Curie in the film version staring out the window at a nuclear power plant as she travels past it in a train and again, sitting in an armchair and watching another television program in which McElduff plays a crazed mother who helps her son to assemble a hydrogen bomb as a scout project. Curie’s repeated appearances, in which she silently observes the consequences of her scientific contribution, are infused with regret. They leave the impression that Curie is haunting the history she handed down, unable to detach herself from her beloved radium and the series of consequences she could not have foreseen. Although Marie Curie may be at the centre of the drama for Akalaitis and for the audience, Dead End Kids is, without a doubt, an ensemble piece. It makes use of the pastiche that has resulted from its process of collective creation, presenting its story of nuclear power as a collage of fact, fiction, science, and stage magic. By blending selected history with imaginative invention, Dead End Kids suggests that we can alter the course of the future. The juxtaposition Fuchs identifies between Curie’s maternal presence and the ‘manifestations of the sexist state’ is a unifying motif that functions to humanize a political problem of colossal proportions. Akalaitis’s imaginative coupling of real and fictional scientists and narratives underscore Dead End Kids as story of nuclear power rather than of a history of it, just as the subtitle suggests. Akalaitis and company are adapting historical sources, not staging history to provoke the audience into taking action.

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In Search of Lost Time: Belén’s Book of Hours Belén: A Book of Hours In 1995, Maleczech was in Mexico City on a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowship to observe the work of performer and political activist Jesusa Rodriguez. While visiting El Habito, the political cabaret that Rodriguez ran with her partner Liliana Felipe, Maleczech first saw Felipe perform songs she had also composed. Maleczech knew that she wanted to collaborate with Felipe, though on what she was not yet sure. Coincidentally, Maleczech was staying in the same hotel as the American poet Catherine Sasanov, who was also in Mexico City on an NEA fellowship. Over lunches and dinners during their stay, Maleczech and Sasanov talked about Mexico City. ‘One night’, says Sasanov, I told Ruth about something from Mexico City’s history that interested me greatly, and that I was sleuthing around, trying to find out more about, el Recogimiento de Belén (the sanctuary of Bethlehem), a Catholic run sanctuary for women without means of support, run like a prison, and eventually, turned into a secular prison.14

This conversation, which began as an earnest personal conversation between artists working in different mediums would blossom into a theatrical collaboration. Six months after parting ways in Mexico City, Maleczech contacted Sasanov to say that she was interested in Belén and to ask her if she would like to write a libretto for a theatre piece about it. Felipe would set the poems to music that she would sing live; Rodriguez would also perform. Because Felipe didn’t speak English, Sasanov would work with a translator so that Felipe could compose the music and perform the poems in Spanish. Maleczech recalled that Sasanov sent her a number of poems, almost all of which Maleczech promptly returned because she thought Sasanov could do better. Sasanov recalls an interactive fluidity in the early days of the process: I would write a poem, then pass it by Ruth for her blessing. We might talk about a type of poem she would like to see in the piece (or a tone, a viewpoint), and I would go back with that and see what I could do (this became more common as the piece began to take form; at the beginning,

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I was free to see what I came up with). If she liked the poem, it then went to the translator.

Maleczech worked in a similar manner with the five writers she gathered together to create the poems for Mabou Mines’s Song for New York, which premiered in 2007.15 The artistic team on Belén worked by mail until being granted residencies in 1998 at the Sundance Theatre Laboratory in Utah and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center at Lake Cuomo in Italy, where they spent concentrated time working with each other and with Archer, the designer, who had done her own visual research in Mexico. In fact, Maleczech had drawn Archer into designing for the theatre in a similarly intuitive manner. Initially Archer was a babysitter for Maleczech and Akalaitis’s respective children when the women’s two families shared an apartment in New York’s East Village in the 1970s. Maleczech discovered through conversations with Archer that the latter was a sculptor. When a Mabou Mines sculpture piece for Akalaitis’s Dressed Like an Egg (1977) was in need of repair, Maleczech suggested Archer for the job. Maleczech and Archer teamed up for the OBIEAward winning design of Vanishing Pictures (1980), Maleczech’s directing debut, and continued to collaborate until Maleczech’s death in 2013. According to Maleczech, during the developmental residencies for Belén, Sasanov and a translator, Luz Aurora Pimentel, worked in the mornings, handing translations off to Felipe in the afternoon. Maleczech and Rodriguez worked throughout the day, developing a scripted series of gestures and movements depicting household chores that would unfold in a non-verbal parallel track as Felipe performed the songs. Sasanov, who is nearly fluent in Spanish, recalls working closely with the translator ‘to make sure each translation was as close as possible to the original’. When they were satisfied with the translation, it was passed to Liliana to set to music. Amazingly, it was rare that Lili needed to make much of any change in wording for the music to fit. Once she had a song ready, we gathered around her and listened (or, if we were all scattered long distance, we listened via cassette tape). At this point, Jesusa and Julie Archer, came in, thinking about movement and visuals. I was exceedingly lucky to be present at all the rehearsals as Belén was created. I loved how the work came together, all very organic. I didn’t just write a finished piece and pass it on to Ruth. Each of us had our part with

38  J.S. BRATER each individual song/poem that I created. At times, I might make suggestions of images I had seen that my collaborators might be interested in working with or incorporating into the visuals or as part of the movement of the piece. Or I might bring up one of my obscure details that we’d consider working into the piece.

This overlapping interchange—cultural, linguistic, and multi-media in nature—was crucial to Belén’s development. It also proved to be characteristic of the final product, which capitalizes on the porous boundary between translation and adaptation. A note in the programme describes the process: A challenge in developing a theatre piece with artists that speak different languages is to work in a way that the collaborators are not struggling with language as they create. Catherine Sasanov wrote the twelve poems in English. Ruth Maleczech suggested they be translated into Spanish so that Liliana Felipe could freely set them to music. Julie Archer then worked to integrate the English of the poems into the visual life of the work. Ruth Maleczech wrote a silent scenario for Jesusa Rodriguez to be understood by all. By this process Las Horas de Belén - A Book of Hours became a truly bi-lingual, bi-national, bi-cultural collaboration.16

This international, intercultural exchange was successful for audiences and collaborators alike; Felipe and Rodriguez were given OBIE Special Citations for their performances, becoming the first Mexicans to receive the award, and Sasanov says ‘working on Belén was one of the great events of my life’. Contrasting her own directorial approach to Akalaitis’s and Breuer’s, Maleczech explained, ‘neither one of them gives their collaborators the leeway I do, but it’s not leeway really—that’s not the right word because it sounds like permission. No, neither one of them involves their collaborators at the level that I do. The collaborators have completely free reign’. Perhaps this is why, throughout her career, Maleczech was drawn to artists with backgrounds in more independently created forms of art, such as sculpture and poetry. And perhaps this is why Sasanov, a poet, and Archer, who began as a sculptor, responded so keenly to Maleczech’s directorial inclinations. Maleczech sought out collaborators who bring a strong point of view into the room. ‘I like it when it’s feisty’, she said, ‘and I like it when things are messy for a long time … I’m a real

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appreciator of people rooting around and coming up with whatever comes to mind and then trying to figure out why exactly that came to mind and how it crosses with somebody else’s passion’. In Belén, the indignities perpetrated against Rodriguez’s character are unfurled in the guise of normality, unfolding as part of the rhythm of daily life. The sense of the quotidian surrounding episodes of oppression and abuse underscores the production’s explicit message that subjugation is, in fact, part of habitual life for many women. The subtitle of the play, ‘A Book of Hours’ refers to Christian devotional books, drawing attention to the religious origins of the institution in which these women find themselves. It also underscores the hours that made up the days and years spent at Belén in captivity. Sound, light, projection, and performance are all calculated to invoke this reference, astonishingly clear even in a recorded version of the performance at the ToRoNaDa. Before the lights come up on stage, a projection appears on the wall: ‘like certain refined forms of torture, household chores must be repeated as soon as they are done’.17 The words disappear abruptly, accompanied by a jarring aural effect that seems a cross between thunder and the door to a prison cell clanging shut (Fig. 2.1). This aural trope will recur throughout the performance. As the play begins, four distinct tracks emerge. Felipe, at a piano, sings Sasanov’s poems in Spanish while the English translations are projected on the wall. Meanwhile, Rodriguez enacts a variety of household tasks— the ones we were warned about in the opening projection. Sometimes she is the woman in the poems and sometimes she is another woman, engaged in routine work that parallels the lines of the poem in some way, and who, according to Maleczech, may not even know the women at Belén. All of this is punctuated by outbursts in English delivered by a woman, our contemporary, who is looking back over the past history of Belén. The fourth track is provided by Archer’s design. Images collected by Archer of saints and photographs of women line the walls. Projected outlines of plants and flowers, giant in scale, infiltrate the stage with a mysterious menace. In her review of Belén for the Village Voice, Alisa Solomon writes ‘sound, text, and movement follow separate trajectories that sometimes intersect, sometimes run parallel, and sometimes, by contradicting each other, collide.’ Solomon argues ‘the clash and confluence of these events’ results in

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Fig. 2.1  Jesusa Rodriguez in Las Horas de Belén, 1999 with generous permission from Julie Archer

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a complete, disquieting universe. More associative than narrative, the performance never actually tells the history of Belén. Rather, it summons Belén’s ghosts—and their cousins from all the places women have been tormented—for a ghoulish yet gorgeous encounter.18

Space is crucial in the encounter Solomon describes; although Rodriguez and Felipe are near to each other, it is clear that they inhabit separate areas. The outbursts, performed by Monica Dionne, come from a lofted space above and away from Rodriguez and Felipe, while the projections appear on every available surface, including Rodriguez’s body. Solomon’s description recalls Rokem’s notion of staged spectres haunting history, one that reverberates with Marvin Carlson’s Haunted Stage. Here, however, Belén’s ghosts have gathered to haunt us with unfamiliar spirits: women whose records were long ago expunged; their histories deemed unimportant to Mexico City’s scribes. In her 2001 article for Theatre Journal, Roslyn Costantino mines the production’s visual imagery for its subversive retelling of the history of racism that played an insidious role in the oppression of women in Mexico. In one particularly arresting scene, Rodriguez sets out flour and whisks eggs. We expect her to make bread. Instead, she undresses, smears herself with beaten egg, and covers herself in flour, whiting herself up before our eyes. Though this exploration is based in Mexican history, the production’s imagery is expansive enough to evoke struggles of women throughout time and across the globe. ‘Without speaking a word during the play’, writes Solomon, Rodriguez enacts women’s timeless chores—ironing, sewing, cooking—in exacting ways, sometimes transforming these labors into stark images of women’s subjugation. Her movement, neither realistic nor romantic, jerks and sputters ever so slightly, as if to emphasize the archetypal nature of this endless drudgery. Maleczech likens it to Meyerhold’s biomechanics; Rodriguez says she found inspiration in watching stop-action films of growing plants.19

Rodriguez’s distancing style of performance is juxtaposed with Felipe’s impassioned singing and the tortured outbursts. Maleczech’s use of binary tension, the alienating style of Rodriguez’s performance, and epic storytelling techniques force the audience to confront a brutal history of women without sentimentality.

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Where Dead End Kids makes use of ensemble playing to re-envision the past and present of nuclear power, Belén relies on virtuoso performances to magnify the lives of women who have been swept aside in history: Rodriguez’s striking physical performance, the forceful and exuberant cabaret style music composed and performed by Felipe, and prominent and arresting projections by Archer that appear and disappear as if they have a life of their own. Sasanov’s poems permeate the stage. They are sung by Felipe, projected on the wall, and wordlessly enacted by Rodriguez. Maleczech and company make the lives of their subjects in Belén as large in performance as they have been small in recorded history. Maleczech’s direction in Belén creates a space between the performer and her enactment and between the performers and each other, thereby augmenting the scale of presentation. The space between performers is emphasized by Felipe’s singing and Rodriguez’s near silence, the fact that Rodriguez appears not to be aware of Felipe’s presence, and by placing Monica Dionne in an entirely separate area above and away from Rodriguez and Felipe for the outbursts. The projections, which give an impression of giant, two-dimensional puppets, seem driven by an unseen exterior force and help to create a sense of hyper-reality in which images and emotions are invested with acute intensity. It is Rodriguez and Felipe’s performance styles that establishes room between each of them and the audience. Rodriguez, Maleczech noted, is a seasoned cabaret performer and her natural instincts were for a broad, bold, and fluid physicality. Maleczech worked with Rodriguez to circumvent her physical routine, breaking her movement down into a precise unfolding of tiny gestures that add up to a larger picture. What results here, a physical landscape that seems to unfold in time lapse, has a jarring effect on the viewer. Felipe’s singing and piano playing are so ferociously forceful that they prevent the audience from slipping into the easy comfort that performance by such an accomplished musician can induce. Felipe’s passion and volume in the small space of the ToRaNaDa juxtaposed with Rodriguez’s finely tuned alternation between stillness and hyperactivity and the grim humour that is incorporated into most of her scenarios keep the audience engaged but at bay, providing them with room to process what they are experiencing on an intellectual level. The images projected onto Rodriguez’s body are part of a pattern of tactics underscoring her corporeal presence. Roslyn Constantino’s 2001 article makes the case that Rodriguez’s figure embodies the struggle of Mexican feminist activists:

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for the last 30 years in Mexico, where the female body has served as the stage upon which national identity has been constructed, feminist scholars, writers, and artists have devoted much energy to the task of locating the persistence of women’s intervention into spaces to which they supposedly denied access as well as to representing women’s resistance to systems designed to control every aspect of their life.20

The episode in which Rodriguez whites up with flour and the one in which she dances in her underwear with a knife, holding its glinting form against her skin, are also associated with this trope, as is her nudity in such close proximity to the audience. These images serve to spotlight Rodriguez’s body, making it appear to be hypersensitive to stimuli and emphasizing its subjectivity to outside forces. These forces are what consigned the women of Belén to be prisoners. ‘The hand that stretches out to strangle operates in full daylight and has many names’, a projection warns us, ‘Oppression, Poverty, Injustice, Dependence’.21 Both Dead End Kids and Belén make use of everyday life as a backdrop for the horrors that Maleczech and company require the audience to acknowledge. In Dead End Kids, manifestations of daily life appear as distinct episodes, such as the high school science fair. Other scenes, such as the one in which Mephistopheles appears to Faust with nine heads, are infused with a magical feeling. In Belén, there is no escape from the ominously ordinary. Every day elements may take on surreal qualities, but this is because of the way in which Rodriguez and Maleczech manipulate familiar objects. A trench coat on a hanger begins as a sewing project and becomes a dance partner and later a rapist. Costantino reports that the collaborators were moved by the then current news about ‘unsolved rapes and murders of hundreds of young women working in the maquila factories in US-Mexico border towns. Official indifference to this violence echoed the stories that they were uncovering about’ Belén’s women.22 In this imagined version of another time and place, elements of everyday life morph into monstrosities. As if nightmarish versions of recognizable objects weren’t enough, a calculated strategy of interruptions further unsettles the audience. Flashes of light, the clanging sound that repeatedly signals the end of an episode, and the outbursts from the chained contemporary woman (Dionne) above our heads create a feeling of disjunction. Even Rodriguez’s stop motion movement style keeps the audience from settling in. For the US audience, the singing in Spanish and outbursts and

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projected words in English also amount to an interruptive strategy; although the projections of the poems mean that non-Spanish speakers can understand the words, the simultaneous use of two languages also establishes a complex process of reception, especially for bilingual members of the audience. These interruptive techniques unravel narrative threads and disrupt our sense of time. Maleczech’s unmooring of linear time gives the audience a taste of what it might be like to spend life in prison; routine days, with little to distinguish one from the next, Maleczech and her collaborators suggest, have deprived Belén’s women of their sense of progression. Maleczech’s strategy of interruption is also a practiced method of undermining conventional narrative structure, one that has long been advocated by feminist critics as a tactic for promoting non-patriarchal representation on stage.

‘History Nibbled into Beds’ The close of the first poem in Belén, ‘A Memory of Things to Come’, reads From Belén, I can see how they’ll lock prisoners away in the arms of a star Rats will nest in the archives: Our history nibbled into beds.23

Here Sasanov speaks simultaneously to a desire for acknowledgement of lost histories and the improbability of recovering records that would make such recognition possible. In Belén and Dead End Kids Akalaitis, Maleczech, and their collaborators sift through scraps of the past and piece them together to revisit forgotten episodes or reconstruct them from a point of view that has been relegated to the off-site storage of history. What these artists lack in historical documentation they make up for with political conviction and theatrical imagination. Although Dead End Kids’s historical pastiche is distinct from Belén’s partisan iconography, both productions ask audiences to formulate their own ‘idea’ of internationalized American history. This is no less than what the highly collaborative development process for each production

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demanded of its co-creators. The eclectic artistic backgrounds of these collaborators makes them particularly suited to such a task, providing them with a variety of approaches with which to interrogate research and respond theatrically. Mabou Mines insists upon a place for these figures and stories in the collective historical record by assuring their place on the stage night after night in performance. Where Akalaitis’s project in Dead End Kids is more overtly political, Maleczech’s is in part a recuperative effort to revitalize forgotten and misunderstood figures, though her engagement with the famous scientist Marie Curie demonstrates that her initiative is a more expansive one. What distinguishes Mabou Mines’s staging of history is the degree to which interpretations are shaped by the contributions of collaborators working in concert. The results are representations that encompass a range of points of view about Mabou Mines’s subjects, insisting that historiography must acknowledge the multiple perspectives of its players and storytellers. While Dead End Kids insists that the audience confront the dangers of nuclear proliferation and the patriarchal structure that enables it, Belén demands that the audience recognize the institution’s female ghosts, who have haunted the outskirts of history. By recognizing them, we assign them their rightful place in our record of the past and acknowledge the significance of subjugated women around the world and across time. These productions, furthermore, ask us to reimagine the contours of the historical narrative. By incorporating women’s work—baking, sewing, mothering—into the staged lives of their central characters, Belén and Dead End Kids interrogate the very meaning of what Bechtel describes as historical reference. What do we record, these artists ask us, why do we record it, and who creates accepted ideas about our shared history? Rather than present audiences with neatly bundled packages, Maleczech, Akalaitis, and Mabou Mines send us home with a puzzle, inviting us to participate in constructing another possible configuration of the past.

Notes

1. Lee Breuer, interview with the author conducted in May 2012. 2. Felipe was born in Argentina though she lives and works primarily in Mexico.

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3. Program, Belén: A Book of Hours, presented at Teatro de La Capilla in Mexico City in 2000, Mabou Mines office archives. 4. All quotations by JoAnne Akalaitis in this chapter are taken from an interview conducted by the author in December 2011. 5. The Renaissance physician Paracelsus is credited with founding toxicology and studied alchemy and the occult, among other fields. General Leslie Richard Groves oversaw the secretive US government initiative to develop atomic weapons during World War II, known as the Manhattan Project. 6. All quotations by Ruth Maleczech in this chapter are taken from interviews conducted by the author between July 2011 and March 2012. 7. All quotations by Greg Mehrten in this chapter are taken from an interview conducted by the author in July 2011. 8. Dead End Kids is available for streaming through Cinema Guild at http://store.cinemaguild.com/nontheatrical/product/1144.html. 9. Ibid. 10. Dead End Kids, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis (New York: Cinema Guild, 1986), VHS. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. All quotations by Catherine Sasanov in this chapter are taken from e-mail correspondence between Sasanov and the author in November and December 2011. 15. Song For New York featured poems by Migdalia Cruz, Maggie Dubris, Patricia Spears Jones, Karen Kandel, and Imelda O’Reilly. 16. Programme, Belén: A Book of Hours, presented at Teatro de La Capilla in Mexico City in 2000, Mabou Mines office archives. 17.  Belén: A Book of Hours (Mabou Mines, 1999), DVD. Copy provided to the author by Mabou Mines. 18. Alisa Solomon, “Prison Prayers,” Village Voice, 25 May 1999. 19. Ibid. 20. Roselyn Costantino, ‘Embodied Memory in Las Horas de Belen. A Book of Hours.’ Theatre Journal 53, no. 4 (2001): 608. 21.  Belén: A Book of Hours, DVD. 22. Costantino, 608. 23. Catherine Sasanov, Belén: A Book of Hours. Printed in production programme supplement by Mabou Mines, Mabou Mines office archives.

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Works Cited Bechtel, Roger Past Performance: American Theatre and the Historical Imagination (Lewisberg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), Print. Belén: A Book of Hours (Mabou Mines, 1999), DVD. Fuchs, Elinor. ‘Staging the Obscene Body,’ TDR 33, no. 1 (1989): 36, Print. Rokem, Freddie, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), Print. Weiss, Peter, ‘Notes on the Contemporary Theater,’ tr. Joel Agee, in Essays on German Theater (New York: Continuum, 1985), Print.

CHAPTER 3

Making Music Visible: Robert Lepage Adapts Aspects of Siegfried Without Shifting a Word Melissa Poll

Featuring a US$ 16 million budget, six years in development and a 45 ton set, Ex Machina’s co-production of Richard Wagner’s sixteenhour Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Metropolitan Opera hinges on director Robert Lepage’s interactive scenography as a form of adaptation. This chapter, which is based on my experience auditing rehearsals at the Metropolitan Opera in October 2011 and January 2012, posits that Lepage’s scenography, built via an architectonic set and performers’ bodies in space, adapts Siegfried by developing Wagner and Appia’s prescribed aesthetics and subverting aspects of the opera’s potentially problematic politics of representation.1

M. Poll (*)  Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_3

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On Adaptation and Scenography The upsurge in theatre centred on physical performance texts in the last fifteen years contextualizes this chapter’s understanding of adaptation.2 Published in English in 2006, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre examines contemporary performance’s shift toward ‘dissolving the logocentric hierarchy and assigning the dominant role to elements other than dramatic logos and language’ (Lehmann 93). By stressing that ‘the text is no longer the central and superior factor’ in theatre (Lehmann and Primavesi 2014, 3), Lehmann invites us to reconsider the essential tools necessary to make theatre. Though adaptations are often defined by alterations to the dramatic text, mise en scène (particularly that of auteur-directors such as Benedict Andrews, Julie Taymor, or Robert Lepage) is increasingly being seen as an adaptive language and form of authorship in its own right, capable of reconfiguring canonical texts through non-logocentric means. As highlighted by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, adaptation occurs ‘not only between verbal [dramatic] texts, but between singing and speaking bodies, lights, sounds, movements and all the other cultural elements at work in theatrical production’ (7). Collectively, these elements inform my understanding of scenography, which follows on Tali Itzhaki’s definition of the term as ‘Everything on stage that is experienced visually—in essence, a human being in a human space’ (qtd. in Howard, xv). This chapter explores how Lepage adapts extant texts through the visual world of the play— the bodies, objects, and medias employed on stage and their dialogic interplay in space—rather than shifts to the written play or opera text. In other words, adaptation is considered here through a re-evaluation of what constitutes authorship and an investigation of how adaptations are, in and of themselves, original works. By accepting that forms of authorship exist beyond the literary text, such as ‘the arrangement of the stage, the shapes and rhythms of the bodies on stage and the idiom and texture of the performance’ (Shepherd 153), we can read Lepage’s scenographybased adaptations as new works. My research also turns to the etymological root of the verb ‘adapt’ to further develop what the term might include. Hailing from the word adapter (French), and adaptare (Latin), adapt means ‘to fit’ (Oxford, ‘adapt’). Like Linda Hutcheon, who employs adaptation’s etymology to ‘think of narrative adaptation in terms of a story’s fit and its process of mutation or adjustment … to a particular cultural environment’ (31),

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I frame Lepage’s scenographic adaptation as a way for a canonical text to evolve via the visual language of its adaptive period and the performance-making process it undergoes. While the story and script may remain the same, the scenography employed in Lepage’s Siegfried contributes new material to the extant text, be it ‘added backstory, characteror world-development’ (O’Flynn 193; Dena 151). As my later discussion of Lepage’s rendering of the Ring’s potentially anti-Semitic characters will demonstrate, his theatrical process and product not only adapt the Ring’s possibly problematic politics of representation, revealing new interpretations of central characters, but also challenge contemporary standards of opera production. Non-traditional casting and the narrativebuilding development of physical sequences, both components of the scenography or the ‘visual direction of the stage’ (Mitsuri Ishii qtd. in Howard xv), are essential to Lepage’s adaptation.

Lepage’s Ring and Its Inherited Aesthetic Throughout his thirty-year career as a theatre-maker, Robert Lepage has employed scenography as the central tool with which he devises new works and radically reconfigures extant texts. Among the results are The Nightingale and Other Short Fables, a signature re-envisioning of Stravinsky’s opera that centres on Lepage’s highly aestheticized ‘twenty-first-century chinoiserie’ (Gilbert, Rossignol 1) and Elsinore, a one-man adaptation of Hamlet crafted through the dialogue between a performer and a scenic machine. To create the Ring set, Lepage and his Ex Machina team members travelled to Iceland, home of the poetic and prose eddas that informed Wagner’s narrative. Lepage describes the terrain as ‘a land of fire and ice … where nature speaks to you, so it gives you a plethora of ideas for image, set design, music, sound effects’ (Gilbert, ‘Behind the Ring’). This trip led Lepage and his set designer Carl Fillion to two ideas: ‘One was that the [Ring] scenery … would come from the landscape of Iceland, and the other was to create one basic set that could be used throughout the four operas … to display the 30 plus locations that appear in it’ (Gilbert, ‘Behind the Ring’). Inspired by the idea of Iceland’s shifting tectonic plates, Lepage and Fillion crafted their set from 24 moveable, 726-pound fiberglass and aluminium planks. The planks would transform physically to summon the Ring’s various settings and act as a screen for interactive, threedimensional video projections, which were ‘applied in a major theatrical

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environment for the first time—without the need for glasses to experience it’ (Lederman). At first glance, Lepage’s set is a complicated and visually overwhelming contraption, a fact that, alongside its propensity to malfunction in performance, prompted the Metropolitan Opera singers to come up with the somewhat ominous nickname ‘the machine’.3 And yet, as the upcoming discussion will demonstrate, the scenography for Ex Machina’s Siegfried offers both the evocative scenic atmosphere and kinetic environment ultimately suggested but never physically realized by Wagner and Appia. When it came to producing the Ring, both Wagner and Appia struggled with the limitations of popular nineteenth-century scenography, which privileged historical exactitude and lavish décor while relying on two-dimensional, painted flats. For the inaugural 1876 Bayreuth production, Wagner had asked for sets mirroring his score’s modulating leitmotifs through the changeability of nature, making ‘air, earth, fire and water … symbolic correlatives’ to his characters’ inner emotional states (Carnegy, Wagner 77–78); nonetheless, because his request conflicted with the dominant design aesthetic of the era, Wagner found himself working with pictorial, two dimensional sets (Millington, ‘Faithful’ 271).4 He became convinced that nineteenth-century technology and the popular aesthetics of German Romanticism and grand opera were incapable of giving the Ring a fitting visual score. For his 1882 production of Parsifal at Bayreuth, the composer and his design team forsook the ‘grandiose effect to a future opera’ and adhered to the ‘undeviating principle of reverent simplicity’ (Wagner, ‘Parsifal’ 309). An 1887 essay on Wagner’s Parsifal staging emphasizes how the composer’s scenic use of ‘vertical and horizontal lines’, shadows and light, and ‘a great void’ of open stage space successfully reflected the contrasting musical leitmotifs dictated by the score (Beckett 92). These aspects of Parsifal’s scenography, which were guided by music and suggested, rather than literally represented by the setting, embodied what Wagner saw as ‘the right kind of “visibility” for his musical deeds’ (Carnegy, Wagner 119). Adolphe Appia would also seek to craft a visual world for the Ring’s music. When he first saw the Ring in a Dresden production modelled after Wagner’s Bayreuth staging, he was inspired by the score but found himself frustrated by the fundamental stylistic disconnect between the Ring’s music and the production’s reliance on popular, nineteenthcentury design aesthetics that hampered the expressive potential of the score:

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Does the vision he [Wagner] applied to the stage match all the power he unfolds in his score? Today nobody could hesitate to say that the master put his extraordinary work in a traditional stage frame of his period … while everything in the auditorium of Bayreuth expresses his genius, everything behind the footlights contradicts it. (Appia, ‘Comments’ 91)

In sketching and theorizing a new form of scenography, Appia brought focus to what he viewed as the Ring’s need for scenic leitmotifs, which paralleled Wagner’s repetition and variation of central musical themes: ‘Appia viewed the setting of Brunhilde’s rock as something akin to a visual leitmotif … [its] visual form associates different episodes with one another, allowing them to assume greater levels of meaning with each appearance’ (Buller 1998, 44). For Appia, because Brunilde’s rock would need to consistently take the same minimalist shape in its every appearance, shifts in the lighting’s intensity, colour and direction would therefore embody the leitmotifs’ changes in tone and mood, playing a vital role in terms of expressing the music’s inner drama. The performer would then act as ‘the intermediary between the music and its physical setting’ (Beacham 126); because Appia viewed performing bodies as the material expression of the music and scenography as an extension of the actor, he sought to enhance the meaning-making interactions between the actor and the stage space through sets and lighting. Parallel principles are brought to the stage through Lepage’s Siegfried scenography. Its foundation resides in distinct configurations representing the Ring’s main leitmotifs and settings. Ex Machina’s production manager, Bernard Gilbert notes, ‘Throughout the process we discovered that the visuals reflect and mirror the leitmotif system that Wagner invented for his music’ (‘Behind the Ring’). As described by Lepage, scenic discoveries unfolded in the following way: We said, ‘What if we give ourselves a set of rules, that are at least in the same nature as those leitmotivs? Let’s say we have a very classical bare stage, with 24 movable planks. What different combinations can we make to find an image to accompany that leitmotiv?’ We just kind of played with that … So with one shape we said, ‘Okay, those are the hands of the giants. What are the giants about?’ They’re just two giant hands saying: ‘We want to be paid’ … Every time a shape triggered that kind of rich argument, we would keep it. We discovered a forest, and a staircase down to Nibelheim, and the spine of the dragon, and the horses of the Valkyries. (in Everett-Green)

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Of the plank configurations employed in Siegfried, the forest and Brunhilde’s rock are, in their expansive minimalism, among the most effective scenic layouts. For the forest, ‘the planks … rose to become a huge movie screen depicting Fafner’s forest in saturated emeralds and blues’ (Cohn) while Brunhilde’s rock brought the planks into a slightly angled, broad formation. These canvas-like configurations, used more frequently in Siegfried than in any other production in the 2010–2012 cycle (Tommasini ‘Dragons’), provide simple, open spaces upon which Lepage’s design team can project the ‘wild grandeur and the infinite changeability of nature’ that Wagner sought to express his music and his characters’ shifting inner states (Carnegy Wagner 77). While Lepage’s planks craft concrete signposts for Siegfried’s leitmotifs and corresponding settings, Étienne Boucher’s lighting and Pedro Pires’s video design signal the musical themes’ evocative shifts. Cohn writes: These projections used 3D technology to give the leaves and roots a tactile immediacy, with the Forest Bird flying in space between its branches. The forest for once truly seemed enchanted—an impression buttressed by the lustrous sounds that conductor Fabio Luisi was drawing from the Met Orchestra. The Forest Murmurs held the audience rapt; we lingered with Siegfried in this magical space, waiting to discover what he discovered.

The Forest Bird’s light and airy theme, crafted by woodwinds and shimmering strings, takes literal shape as the three-dimensional bird soars across the expansive plank formation, coming to rest and preen his feathers in Siegfried’s lap. Light and projections serve a similar role during Siegfried and Brunhilde’s initial meeting on her rock. When revisited in Lepage’s production, Brunhilde’s rock remains encircled in vivid, crackling images of flames, licking the edges of the expansive plank formation to embody Wagner’s magic fire leitmotif. Once Siegfried has successfully crossed the fiery boundary, breaking Wotan’s spell, he discovers Brunhilde arising to greet daylight ‘with a flurry of harps … in a bright C major’ (Millington, ‘Leitmotif’). Lepage and his designers establish the mood of this life-altering new day by encircling Brunhilde in a dynamic atmosphere—as the harps pluck out her theme, she arises from her sleep surrounded by rich, verdant grounds and leaves playfully tumbling across the landscape. As the scene advances and the love leitmotif is introduced, the lighting becomes progressively warmer and the surrounding flowers

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bloom, reflecting the rising intensity of Brunhilde and Siegfried’s mutual attraction. Though the aforementioned sound and light cues operate independently of the action on stage, in Siegfried, Lepage also employs interactive scenography that reacts to the singers’ sounds and movements; as per Appia’s theory, the performing body acts as an intermediary between the music and its physical space. In this, we witness the ways in which adaptations are ‘directly and openly connected to recognizable other works’ (Hutcheon 21). These ‘other works’ are not just confined to operas, literature, or films; Appia’s evocative sketches and theories for the Ring can be seen in Ex Machina’s production though they were never materially realized by the designer.5 An example of this interactive scenography occurs after Siegfried has stabbed the malevolent Fafnercum-dragon and the dying giant appears in human form to convey his plaintive final notes. As the failing Fafner (Hans Peter König) emerges from his cave and crumbles to the earth, motion sensors cue video images prompting the clear blue forest stream directly above König’s head to gradually run a vibrant red that saturates the planks with blood. Such expressive scenography powerfully underlines the music and brings its related drama to the fore, prompting critic Roberta Smith to comment: ‘I “got” both the musicality of the “Ring” and its tragic, nearly Shakespearean magnitude as never before’. Interactive technology is also at work when Siegfried gazes into a pool of water, questioning his identity—Lepage’s scenography allows Siegfried’s live mirror image to gaze back blankly through the crystal stream. Here, Siegfried’s bravado and charm falls away, presenting the confused and disconnected young man at the heart of Wagner’s drama. Beyond these instances, another stunning use of interactive scenography in Siegfried occurs in the third act’s overture when the score builds to a powerful reassertion of Wotan’s theme. This is foreshadowed in Lepage’s production as the entirety of the planks’ broad surface becomes the Rhine and two large ravens fly over its expanse. When Wotan appears and the theme peaks, he slowly draws his arm over the water, causing a series of concentric circles to ripple outward. Craggy mountains then to rise up from the river’s depths while lightning pierces the sky, a clear sign that the apocalypse is looming. As Smith notes: These are not, perhaps, subtle effects, yet they sharpen your understanding of what’s going on in the moment, unfolding as the music and the drama,

56  M. Poll so inextricably entwined, also unfold. In a sense they function similarly to the seat-back titles: enriching meaning and making it more accessible. And they bring the eye into the already complex interaction of mind and ear that Wagner’s art so lavishly stimulates. (R. Smith)

Beyond its ability to interact with singers, Lepage’s set possesses the technological capacity to develop Appia’s theories on interactivity by creating a dynamic interchange without the actor/intermediary: For its visual sleight of hand, the 3-D technology being deployed at the Met will also interact with the movement of the set. The set uses a bank of projectors, motion-capture cameras and computers to fashion the images. The tilt on the stage allows for hundreds of different projections, changing in slivers of a second, at the different depths to help create, say, the colour, shading and contour of a rock, or at least to convince the eye. The imagery is rendered in realistic detail using fractals: fractured geometric shapes that keep iterating reduced-size copies of themselves according to mathematical formulas. When the fractals are programmed into the computerised light system, the result is a dense symphony of geometric detail, giving the illusion of three dimensions. (Wakin and Lohr)

This effect unfolds thanks to technology crafted expressly for Ex Machina’s scenography-driven adaptations. Sensei software’s ‘motion and sound-detecting equipment, along with a special encoder to correct perspective distortion’, dictates and distributes shifts in the vibrant digital images (Lentz), exemplifying the ways in which adaptation can unfold within specific media. As Andy Lavender writes: Adaptation describes not only a process of dealing with source texts and artifacts, reshaping them for different media and new audiences; it also describes the way in which different media evolve by adjusting to changing technological arrangements and aesthetic affordances. (499–500)

Lepage uses this technology during the final section of the orchestral overture for Siegfried, in which no performers are present. Siegfried’s overture features a ‘subdued drum roll and a pair of brooding bassoons, setting the scene in the dark forest, where the dragon Fafner has his lair, and, at the same time alluding to the crafty scheming of the dwarf Mime’ via contrabasses (Millington, ‘Leitmotif’). Through Lepage’s use of motion sensors, these shifting musical leitmotifs and

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the set’s reconfiguration into a giant vertical wall trigger the appearance of an underground world populated by three-dimensional snakes, grubs, and other subterranean bugs. As the aforementioned leitmotifs are brought to the fore, interactive sound technology highlights them, allowing different creatures to navigate the planks in ways that best parallel the music, be it scuttling speedily or slithering dopily along. ‘Now the 3-D projections can lend this metallic surface an appearance of depth and movement. Thus, in the brooding opening measures of Acts 1 and 2, snakes and other creepy-crawly creatures really seem to be writhing through a thickly wooded terrain’ (Silverman). Here, Lepage adheres to Wagner’s appeal for ‘deeds of music made visible’ (‘Destiny’) and, without a performer, gives the music a physical presence on stage.6

Subverting Accepted Readings Through Casting and Physical Performances Though Lepage’s scenography develops and innovates Wagner and Appia’s theories on the Ring, there are aspects of Wagner’s source text that the Québécois director’s staging appears to purposely subvert. Hutcheon notes that adapters are ‘just as likely to want to contest the aesthetic or political values of the adapted text as to pay homage’ (20). In this case, the extant text is adapted by breaking with accepted casting norms and developing characters’ back stories (Dena 151). Like any artistic team facing the Ring cycle, Peter Gelb, Robert Lepage, and the Metropolitan Opera’s principal conductor, James Levine, were presented with Wagner’s problematic caricatures of Jewishness through the characters of Alberich and Mime.7 Their decision on how to move forward as well as Lepage’s work with the singers playing these characters would be influenced by the professional and cultural climate in which the Ring was produced and received. As Linda Hutcheon notes, ‘an adaptation, like the work it adapts, is always framed in a context—a time and a place, a society and a culture’ (142). Enduring debates have centred on sensitivities around the issue of anti-Semitism in opera with questions surrounding producing works that arguably traffic in problematic renderings continuing to arise today. In 2010, charges of anti-Semitism in Wagner’s Ring sparked protest when a production of the cycle opened in Los Angeles. ‘One [protester’s] banner read: “Wagner: Loved by Nazis, Rejected by Humans”’ (Ng).

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Resistance also accompanied the Metropolitan Opera’s 2014 production of the Death of Klighoffer. Composed by John Adams, Klinghoffer dramatizes the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship and the murder of a Jewish-American passenger by the Palestine Liberation Front. When first produced in 1985, Klinghoffer prompted outrage. Many viewers ‘felt it unduly favoured the Palestinian point of view’ (Ross, ‘Klinghoffer’).8 After discussions with the Anti-Defamation League in 2014, the Metropolitan Opera cancelled all simulcasts of its upcoming production. Regarding this decision, Peter Gelb noted that he did not think that the opera was anti-Semitic but, referring to the Israel-Palestine conflict, stated that going forward with the broadcast ‘would be inappropriate at this time of rising anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe’ (in Cooper). Given these reactions against Wagner’s Ring and Adams’s Death of Klinghoffer, the decision made by Gelb, Levine, and Lepage to cast Eric Owens, an African-American singer, as Alberich points not only to Owens’s formidable talent but also to consideration of the potential challenges of producing the tetralogy and a conscious effort to subvert them. The effectiveness of adding Owens to the visual world of the play in a reinterpretation of Alberich would hinge, in part, on broader casting/representational norms in twentieth- and twenty-first century opera. For African-American male performers, breaking colour barriers is a continued challenge in the entertainment industry, particularly at the Metropolitan Opera. Though singer Robert McFerrin was scheduled to be the first African American to perform in a leading role at the opera house in 1955, the company made a last minute decision to engage a black female singer (Marian Anderson) three months prior to McFerrin’s planned debut.9 In an article charting the history of black male performers at the Metropolitan Opera, Wallace Cheatham identifies a possible link between the decision to replace McFerrin with Anderson and the insecure ‘position and image of black males in opera’ thirty-two years later (6). By 1987, over three decades after McFerrin’s 1955 debut, the Metropolitan Opera had cast only four African-American male performers in lead roles (Cheatham 3). Just under ten years later, the status quo had not shifted. In her 1997 article ‘Black Male Singers Feel Like “Invisible Men” of U.S. Opera’, Verena Dobnik presents the continued difficulties faced by African American male singers in the country: ‘This season [1996–1997], the Met, with almost 200 men on its solo roster, has one black tenor, two baritones and a rarely used countertenor. At Chicago’s Lyric Opera, there isn’t a single black male cast in a leading

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role, and the Houston Grand Opera has one, a bass-baritone’. Dobnik also references conductor James Levine’s twenty-fifth anniversary performance at the Metropolitan Opera in 1996, which lasted eight hours and featured ‘scores of singers’ but ‘not a single black man sang’ (Dobnik). Recently, in a 2012 joint interview, the editors of Blackness in Opera, Naomi André, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor, reiterated the on-going nature of the problem: ‘A long-standing problem is that while black women have had the most success as singers in opera (and it is not like there is an over-abundance who have made it to the top at any given moment), there are fewer black men who have been able to break into this profession … There is much room for improvement here’ (emphasis in original). And, though the Metropolitan Opera was applauded in 2015 for presenting the first major production of Verdi’s 1887 Otello that did not use blackface makeup on the lead singer (Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko), no major opera house has ever seen a black singer in the title role (André in Lunden). Because of the limited performance opportunities afforded to black male opera singers in the USA and at the Metropolitan Opera, having Owens play Alberich, a central role in the Ring cycle, adds an incisive, metatheatrical layer of meaning to the character’s position as an outcast (see Fig. 3.1). Tommasini writes, ‘his race lent an intangible depth and complexity to the portrayal. This Alberich truly seemed an outsider, someone who has been wounded by prejudice and is hungry for revenge’ (‘Casting’). This is representative of a gradual shift shaping contemporary opera production: Directors and conductors who make casting choices, along with opera audiences, can truly never be ‘blind’ to a singer’s race. It is a major component of any artist’s presence and personality. And productions these days can take advantage, in a sense, of the racial makeup of cast members to deepen our understanding of certain roles and stimulate new takes on a complex opera. (Tommasini ‘Casting’)

Tommasini’s comments follow on Angela C. Pao’s work on race in contemporary US performance; of an all-black Broadway production of Guys and Dolls in 1976, she cites critic Mel Gussow in noting that non-traditional casting itself can act as an adaptation of a text, with ‘reinterpretation taking place on all levels’, including the particular meanings spectators ascribe to characters (193). Of course, casting

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Fig. 3.1  Siegfried (Der Ring des Nibelungen) featuring Eric Owens (Alberich) and Bryn Terfel (Wotan), 2011. Photo Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Eric Owens does not, in and of itself, subvert the anti-Semitism that is at play in Wagner’s dramatic text and, arguably, traffics in another form of racism, substituting one minority for another.10 Nonetheless, Owens’s well-drawn and unique portrayal of Alberich, rooted in the distinct physicality he crafted with Lepage, announced ‘the emergence of a new major Wagner singer’ whose performance promises to become ‘part of the history of opera’ by helping to destabilize Alberich as a stereotypical, onedimensional caricature (Ross‚ ‘The Depths’ 2014). A villainous dwarf who is debatably one of Wagner’s most antiSemitic caricatures, Alberich is powerfully re-appropriated here through the evolution of his character’s physicality over the course of the cycle. As described by Ring production manager Bernard Gilbert, during the earliest rehearsals for the Ring, Lepage began immediately by focusing on characters’ bodies and, as is his practice, built performances from the outside in:

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When rehearsal began on any given scene, he first placed entries, exits and scenic movements for all characters. Scene by scene, he placed each singer and directed all movements, explaining why as they went along, answering the singers’ questions, etc. … Characters were built from there, i.e. motivations, emotions, relationships appeared from the initial blocking. (‘Ring Question’)

This focus on physicality was fruitful for Owens, who has said that he learned ‘quite a bit’ from Lepage. As Alberich, Owens palpably summons a complex inner power that is simultaneously strengthened by frustration and cannibalized by loneliness and pain. When Alberich is challenged in his attempts to navigate the mocking Rhinemaidens in Das Rheigold, Owens is far from the muttering, hunched villain and, instead, blends regal posture and status-asserting stillness with bursts of determined and furious clambering up the set’s steep incline to pursue the gold. Tommasini writes ‘Mr. Lepage deserves credit for coaxing vivid portrayals from his cast … Mr. Owens’s Alberich was no sniveling dwarf, but a barrel-chested, intimidating foe, singing with stentorian vigor, looking dangerous in his dreadlocks and crazed in his fantasy of ruling the universe’ (‘New Ring’). It is not until, Siegfried, however, that the breadth of Owens’s journey as Alberich begins to take hold. Here, Owens employs physicality to demonstrate how years of building resentment towards Wotan have taken a physical toll on Alberich. Now older, Owens’s Alberich remains proud but there is a slight slump to his shoulders and his broad-chested bravado is less prominent. Combined with an often-vacant gaze, this creates a powerful air of dejection. And yet, as his confrontation with Wotan unfolds in Siegfried, Alberich’s unyielding appetite for what, in Lepage’s production, seemed to be warranted revenge promptly re-emerges (Tommasini ‘Casting’). Cohn notes, ‘When Wotan (Bryn Terfel) goaded … Alberich (Eric Owens), the performers’ movements and reactions gave a sense of the complex history that had provoked their mutual animosity. Their interactions now seemed determined by the issues at stake’. In his interaction with Wotan, Alberich’s anger manifests itself in a ‘bilious spite’ (S. Smith), revealing that beneath Mr. Owens’s controlled but charged exterior, every muscle in Alberich’s body is vibrating with rage. This brings new insight to the fact that Alberich is the last and only being standing when the world of Wagner’s Ring implodes; rather than the product of dumb luck (or forgetfulness on Wagner’s part), Alberich

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remains, rendered indestructible by his unrelenting hate and conviction to wield power. Owens’s ‘chilling and uncommonly dignified Alberich’ was viewed by The New York Times, among other publications, as destined for ‘the annals of Ring greatness’ (Tommasini, ‘Spin Cycle’), an indicator that the nature of the encounter with a canonical text can have a number of outcomes, among them productive disruptions and powerful reframings (Vînaver in Pavis 2008‚ 119). In this, Owens’s unique, physical interpretation answers contemporary adaptation studies’ call for an exploration of adaptation ‘not as a one-way transport from source to result, but as a two-way, dialogic process’ as per the question: ‘Should we not admit that the adaptive process is dialectical and that the source text is changed in the process of adaptation as well?’ (Hanssen 2013, 9). When approaching the equally problematic character of Mime, the dwarf who steals and raises Siegfried, Lepage also turned to performing bodies to subvert the character’s usually one-dimensional, reductionist rendering. During the first half of the overture for Siegfried, Lepage has performers silently enact the action that, in his mind, has unfolded between the final scene of Die Walküre and the first scene of Siegfried. As the curtain rises, we see the dying Sieglinde laid out perilously on a rocky cliff (created by another plank formation) with the infant Siegfried in her arms. Suddenly, the dwarf Mime appears and snatches the baby from Sieglinde, rushing off to let her die alone and childless. In the sequence that follows, a young Siegfried (played by a child) emerges from the wings and dashes across the stage, happily thrusting his sword at imaginary monsters while a doting Mime shuffles after him. Lepage’s use of these two physical sequences offers a characterization of Mime that differs productively from usual interpretations. In Siegfried’s libretto, Mime explains to the teenage hero that although he is not Siegfried’s father, he nursed Sieglinde during childbirth and through her final hours—this is Wagner’s only reference to Mime’s history with Sieglinde and, in past productions, its status as a fact has remained ambiguous. Through the added baby-snatching sequence and subsequent scene featuring a playful, young Siegfried dashing across the stage with his guardian in fretful pursuit, Lepage develops Mime’s character, emphasizing his malevolence but also adding a parental connection with a junior Siegfried in a way that acknowledges Mime’s status as a kidnapper but also demonstrates the sense of absence leading to his behaviour. Mime’s cruel act is tempered by his clear psychological motive

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for taking the child—isolation. This complicates Wagner’s otherwise one-dimensional, anti-Semitic characterization of Mime as a ‘hypocritical, cowardly, and repulsive’ Jewish dwarf (Coren 1982, 20). Though Lepage’s Mime will still knowingly attempt to sacrifice Siegfried in exchange for the ring, Lepage’s use of physical performances to establish a longstanding family bond between Siegfried and Mime works towards crafting a complex human character out of Wagner’s otherwise one-dimensional caricature. Moreover, Mime’s scene with Sieglinde complicates Siegfried’s backstory, making his slaying of Mime a form of retribution rather than a callous act. Of these scenic additions during the overture, one critic writes: ‘Though the title character can seem like a heartless bully who kills his surrogate father after dispatching the dragon, the production’s prologue puts everything in perspective. I won’t spoil it for you; just don’t be late’ (Stearns). The Ex Machina/Metropolitan Opera co-production of Wagner’s Ring was contentious on many fronts, be it the monstrous set or the equally monstrous bill. For opera lovers, the source of the greatest disappointment was the fact that Lepage’s bold re-envisioning of a classic text seemed to ignore the original Bayreuth production. And yet, in doing so, Lepage emancipated the Ring, particularly Siegfried, from the weight of historicized fidelity narratives. Lepage’s adaptation of Siegfried represents the high point in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010–2012 Ring cycle, seeing Ex Machina make a significant contribution to the high-tech evolution of the music-made-visible aesthetic. Through the combination of cutting-edge, interactive technology and an open, minimalist stage space, Lepage and his design team have developed a way for the actor to engage in an evocative dialogue with the music and the scenic space, following on Wagner’s desire for an expressive aesthetic and Appia’s view that the performer’s body should act as an intermediary between the Ring’s score and its scenography. Moreover, Lepage’s scenography advances Appia’s suggested aesthetic by crafting a meaning-making exchange built exclusively on the relationship between the music and the set. In doing so, Lepage solves one of the Ring’s greatest challenges, establishing an effective and evocative solution to Siegfried’s many settings and the constant atmospheric shifts they undergo to directly reflect Wagner’s iconic leitmotifs. In addition, the physical scores created in this production powerfully overwrite the opera’s problematic politics of representation to offer multi-dimensional characterizations. Through all of

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these scenographic choices, Lepage adapts Wagner’s iconic opera without shifting a word.

Notes













1. My engagement with Siegfried includes a three-week ‘observership’ during which time I audited rehearsals led by Lepage and the conductor, Fabio Luisi, on stage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Siegfried is the third opera in the Ring cycle. I also attended rehearsals for Götterdämmerung, the final opera in the cycle, in January 2012. 2. My scenography-based theory of adaptation is also outlined in my article ‘Adapting the “Le Grand Will” in Wendake: Ex Machina and the Huron-Wendat Nation’s La Tempête’ in Theatre Research in Canada 35.3 (2014): 330–351. 3. Each of the set’s 24 planks ‘is 2 inches wide, 29 inches long, and weighs 726 pounds. The axis is 5 inches wide. The planks can revolve a full 360 degrees. The set, which sits directly upstage of the deck where most of the action takes place, changes position every five to ten minutes throughout Das Rheingold’ (Barbour 54). 4. Wagner’s use of musical themes is distinct as it constructs ‘the entire musical fabric of the score’ (Grey 88), making the appearance, reappearance, and modulations of leitmotifs the opera’s central dramatic component. Although instantly recognizable in any form (regardless of key or instrument), leitmotifs would develop alongside the characters they represented, rising an octave in tender moments or moving into a minor key to foreshadow trouble ahead (Metropolitan Opera). Wagner’s musical themes were crafted to give the listener clues to the actions, thoughts, and emotions of the scene (Metropolitan Opera). 5. For further reading on the early technological innovations that enabled aspects of Appia’s Wagnerian theory to take shape on stage, see Brandin Baron-Nussbaum’s chapter ‘Forgotten Wizard: The Scenographic Innovations of Mariano Fortuny’ from Kara Reilly’s edited collection Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology. 6. This is not to suggest that interactive technology can replace the performer on stage; instead, my argument simply highlights the fact that Appia’s desire for interactivity can now be carried out through interchanges between three-dimensional scenic devices. 7. In the introduction to a series of letters for The Wagner Journal, the following question is succinctly posed: ‘Nobody denies that Wagner was an anti-Semite. But was his anti-Semitism expressed in the works themselves?’ My chapter does not answer this question but instead flags the problematics of established representations of Alberich and Mime and

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looks at possible ways of subverting them in production. For a thorough debate on the topic of anti-Semitism in Wagner’s operas, see the online exchange between Barry Emslie and Mark Berry at: http://www.thewagnerjournal.co.uk/wagnerandanti-se.html. 8.  Ross, Alex. ‘The Met’s “Klinghoffer” Problem’. The New Yorker. 24 June 2014. Web. 1 July 2014.http://www.newyorker.com/culture/ culture-desk/the-mets-klinghofferproblem. 9.  Theories on why McFerrin was supplanted by Anderson include that the Metropolitan Opera felt engaging a female African-American singer would result in a smoother transition for its patrons (Cheatham 6). Other sources cite the influence and power of persuasion of Anderson’s agent, Sol Hurok (Keiler 419). 10. Moreover, as costumed in Lepage’s Ring, Owens appears wearing long dreadlocks, a design choice that is arguably reductive.

Works Cited ‘adapt, v.’ Oxford Dictionaries Online. Oxford University Press. 2012. Web. 5 Nov. 2014. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/ adapt. André, Naomi, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor. ‘Q & A with Blackness in Opera editors’. University of Illinois Press. 13 July 2012. Web. 8 July 2014. http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=9847. Appia, Adolphe. Music and the Art of the Theatre. Trans. Robert W. Corrigan and Mary Douglas Dirks. Ed. Barnard Hewitt. Florida: University of Miami Press, 1962. Print. ———. ‘Texts on Theatre and Eurhythmics’. Adolphe Appia: Artist and Visionary of the Modern Theatre. Trans. Richard C. Beacham. Trans. Richard C. Beacham. Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994. 115–119. Print. Barbour, David. ‘The Road to Valhalla’. Lighting & Sound America 52 (2011): 52–59. Web. 13 May 2014. http://www.lightingandsoundamerica.com/ LSA.html. Baron-Nussbaum, Brandin. ‘Forgotten Wizard: The Scenographic Innovations of Mariano Fortuny’. Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology: Historical Interfaces and Intermedialities. Ed. Kara Reilly. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 73–93. Print. Beacham, Richard C. ‘Adolphe Appia and the Staging of Wagnerian Music Drama’. Opera Quarterly 1.3 (1983): 124–139. Oxford Journals Online. Web. 21 July 2013. Beckett, Lucy. Richard Wagner: Parsifal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Print.

66  M. Poll Buller, Jeffrey L. ‘Spectacle in the Ring’. Opera Quarterly 14.4 (1998): 41–57. Oxford Journals Online. Carnegy, Patrick. ‘Designing Wagner: Deeds of Music Made Visible?’. Wagner in Performance. Ed. Barry Millington and Stewart Spencer. London: Yale University Press, 1992. 48–74. Print. ———. Wagner and the Art of the Theatre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Print. Cheatham, Wallace McClain. ‘Black Male Singers at the Metropolitan Opera’. The Black Perspective in Music 16.1 (1988): 3–20. JSTOR. Web. 11 Sept. 2013. Cohn, Fred. ‘Siegfried’. Opera News. 27 Oct. 2011. Web. 3 Sept. 2013. http:// www.operanews.com/Opera_News_Magazine/2012/1/Reviews/NEW_ YORK_CITY__Siegfried.html. Cooper, Michael. ‘Metropolitan Opera cancels telecast of Klinghoffer’. The New York Times. 17 June 2014. Web. 20 June 2014. http://www.nytimes. com/2014/06/18/arts/music/met-opera-cancels-telecast-of-klinghoffer. html. Coren, Daniel. ‘The texts of Wagner’s “Der junge Siegfried” and “Siegfried”’. 19th Century Music 6.1 (1982): 17–30. JSTOR. Web. 15 Sept. 2013. Dena, Christy. Transmedia practice: Theorising the practice of expressing a fictional world across distinct media and environment. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sydney: 2009. Web. 1 Nov. 2015. https://dl.dropboxusercontent. com/u/30158/DENA_TransmediaPractice.pdf. Dobnik, Verena. ‘Black Male Singers Feel Like “Invisible Men of U.S. Opera”’. The L.A. Times. 26 Jan. 1997. Web. 25 June 2014. http://articles.latimes. com/1997-01-26/news/mn-22265_1_black-male. Everett-Green, Robert. ‘Robert Lepage Brings Wagner to New York’. The Globe & Mail. 10 Sept. 2010. Nexus UK Global News & Business Service. Web. 24 Sept. 2010. Fischlin, Daniel, and Mark Fortier. Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. Gilbert, Bernard. Interview with The Avant Garde Diaries. ‘Behind the Ring Cycle: Bernard Gilbert’. The Avant Garde Diaries. 14 May 2013. Web. 20 July 2013. http://www.theavantgardediaries.com/en/article/301/BEHI ND+THE+RING+CYCLE%3A+BERNARD+GILBERT/293. ———. Le Rossignol, Renard et Autres Fables. Québec: Alto and Ex Machina, 2011. Print. ———. ‘Re: Ring Question’. Message to Melissa Poll. 14 July 2014. Email. Grey, Thomas S. ‘Leitmotif, temporality and musical design in the Ring’. The Cambridge Companion to Wagner. Ed. Thomas S. Grey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 85–114. Print. Hanssen, Eirik Frisvold. ‘There and Back Again: New Challenges and New Directions in Adaptation Studies’. Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New

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Directions. Ed. Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 1–16. Print. Howard, Ken, Ex Machina, and the Metropolitan Opera. Figure 1. Production still from Siegfried. 2011. JPEG files Howard, Pamela. What Is Scenography? London: Routledge, 2002. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Keiler, Allan. Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Print. Kernodle, George. ‘Wagner, Appia and the Idea of Musical Design’. Educational Theatre Journal 6.3 1954 (October): 223–230. JSTOR Web. 14 July 2014. Lavender, Andy. ‘Modal Transpositions Toward Theatres of Encounter, Or, in Praise of “Media Intermultimodality”’. Theatre Journal 66.4 (2014): 499–518. Project Muse. Web. 14 Aug. 2015. Lederman, Marsha. ‘Quebec Maestro Bring 3-D Siegfried to Met’. The Globe & Mail. 17 February 2011. Nexus UK Global News & Business Service. Web. 22 July 2013. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jür-Munby. London: Routledge, 2006. Print. Lehmann, Hans-Thies, and Patrick Primavesi. ‘Dramaturgy on Shifting Grounds’. Performance Research 14.3 (2009): 3–6. Web. JSTOR. 15 April 2014. Lentz, Linda C. ‘Building a Valhalla That Links Generations’. Architectural Record 199.3 (March 2011): 35. Nexus UK Global News & Business Service. Web. 15 Sept. 2013. Lunden, Jeff. ‘Farewell To Blackfaced Otellos At The Met’. NPR Music. 21 Sept. 2015. Web. 22 Dec. 2015. http://www.npr.org/sections/ deceptivecadence/2015/09/21/442279816/farewell-to-blackfacedotellos-at-the-met. Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. ‘Wagner’s Ring Cycle Leitmotifs’. youtube. 19 May 2011. Web. 2 Aug. 2013. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wvA54D2Gz3E. Millington, Barry. ‘“Faithful, all too faithful”: Fidelity and Ring Stagings’. The Opera Quarterly 23.2–3 (Spring-Summer 2007): 265–276. Project Muse. Web. 23 Aug. 2013. ———. ‘Leitmotif’. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. 1992. Web. 24 Aug. 2013. Ng, David. ‘L.A.’s Ring cycle begins with protests outside, mixed reaction inside’. Culture Monster. 30 May 2010. Web. 21 June 2014. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/05/las-ring-cycle-begins-with-protests-outside-mixed-reaction-inside.html. O’Flynn, Siobhan. ‘Epilogue’. A Theory of Adaptation. Linda Hutcheon. 2nd edition. London; New York: Routledge, 2013. 179–206. Print.

68  M. Poll Pavis, Patrice. ‘On Faithfulness: The Difficulties Experienced by the Text/ Performance Couple’. Theatre Research International 33.2 (2008): 117–126. International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance. Web. 15 February 2014. Pao, Angela Chia-yi. No Safe Spaces: Re-Casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Print. Ross, Alex. ‘The Depths: Eric Owens dominates the Met’s “Rheingold”’. The New Yorker. 18 Oct. 2010. Web. 25 June 2014. http://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2010/10/18/the-depths. Shepherd, Simon. Direction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. Silverman, Mike. ‘Siegfried: Lepage’s 3-D Opera is Eye-Popping’. The Huffington Post. 28 Oct. 2011. Nexus UK Global News & Business Service. Web. 18 July 2013. Smith, Roberta. ‘Video as Art in Lepage’s ‘Ring’ at the Metropolitan Opera’. The New York Times. 13 May 2012. Nexus UK Global News & Business Service. Web. 18 Oct. 2015. Smith, Steve. ‘The Big Bad Bass-Baritone’. The New York Times. 17 Feb. 2012. Nexus UK Global News & Business Service. Web. 19 Oct. 2015. Stearns, David Patrick. ‘The Met’s “Siegfried” is Dazzling’. The Philadelphia Inquirer. 3 November 2011. Nexus UK Global News & Business Service. Web. 2 Sept. 2013. Tommasini, Anthony. ‘Colour-blind casting opens up whole new world for performers’. The New York Times. 22 Dec. 2012. Nexus UK Global News & Business Service. Web. 20 Jan. 2014. ———. ‘Dragons, Dwarfs and Demigod: It Must Be Wagner’. The New York Times. 29 Oct. 2011. Nexus UK Global News & Business Service. Web. 20 Sept. 2013. ———. ‘Met’s “Ring” Finishes the Spin Cycle’. The New York Times. 25 Aug. 2012. Nexus UK Global News & Business Service. Web. 10 April 2012. Wagner, Richard. ‘The Destiny of Opera’. Trans. W. Ashton Ellis. The Wagner Library. Ed. Patrick Swinkels. 2008. Web. 9 May 2011. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagdest.htm. ———. ‘Parsifal at Bayreuth’. Trans. W. Ashton Ellis. The Wagner Library. Ed. Patrick Swinkels, 2001. Web. 10 July 2013. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/articles/ney44184.htm. Wakin, Daniel J., and Steve Lohr. ‘3-D Comes to the Met Opera but Without Those Undignified Glasses’. The New York Times. 15 Feb. 2011. Web. 22 Aug. 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/arts/ music/16siegfried.html. Waleson, Heidi. ‘Of Gods and Monsters’. The Wall Street Journal. 1 November 2011. Nexus UK Global News & Business Service. Web. 1 Aug. 2013.

CHAPTER 4

‘The Thrill of Doing it Live’: Devising and Performing Katie Mitchell’s International ‘Live Cinema’ Productions Adam J. Ledger

As one of Europe’s most prolific directors, Katie Mitchell has a deserved reputation for aesthetic experimentation combined with rigorous textual analysis, and an interest in how the psychology of behaviour informs acting process (Mitchell 2008).1 While Mitchell has at times been myopically labelled an ‘auteur’ in the UK because of her obvious vision and textual interventions (Billington; Spencer), her innovations have met with acclaim elsewhere.2 Alongside her other theatre work, Waves (National Theatre, London, 2006), an adaptation from Virginia Woolf’s novel, began a body of work now termed ‘live cinema’, whereby action on stage is coupled with visible, roving film cameras, sometimes using Foley or, often, extensive recorded sound, in order to realize the action as a ‘live’ film projected above the stage level.3 Since then, Mitchell has built up a significant oeuvre of live cinema productions in the Germanspeaking theatre, where she continues to innovate the form she introduced with her collaborators. For Mitchell, the use of cameras within

A.J. Ledger (*)  University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_4

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live action enables close-up observation of minute shifts in behaviour; her aim is ‘to get the audience close enough to the face of the character so that we believe the thoughts’ (2013), which are not, Mitchell claims, detectable at the long-range of traditional theatre spaces (Siéfert, n.d.). While only part of Mitchell’s prolific multimedia practice (and ignoring her live cinema work in opera), the German-language productions offer a new area for discussion since, as I suggest, they demonstrate identifiable shifts in process and performance choices, not only in relation to Mitchell’s earlier work but also between each other.4 Here, I draw too on my observation of rehearsal, as well as discussions with Mitchell in order to offer the director’s insight into the making of live cinema. Given Mitchell’s body of work as an original practitioner and the complex live cinema making approach, which implicates text, actors, and film crew, I suggest live cinema can be described as a devised genre. At the beginning of rehearsal, no shot plan exists, nor knowledge of how to move cameras in the live performance (there are typically three cameras), nor how voice-overs match other elements; as Mitchell puts it, ‘day one of rehearsals looks like a full tech’ (2013), and I have heard her use the term ‘devising’ in rehearsal of the work herself. In the context of discourses of adaptation, to discuss live cinema as a devised process, as well as one that concerns how actors shift performance modes, expands preoccupations with the relationship between text and performance, authorship, fidelity, and change, since the intermedial adaptation is produced through rehearsal only if, perhaps unusually for devising, some form of script exists at the outset of the process. With the exception of Birringer (2014) and briefly in Mitchell and Rebellato (2014), commentators have primarily focussed on Mitchell’s early, UK live cinema work (Clements; Friedman; Hadjioannou and Rodosthenous; Jefferies; Rebellato; Sierz) particularly Waves and the later …some trace of her (National Theatre, 2008).5 I concentrate on Mitchell’s more recent German work, including an adaptation of Peter Handke’s novella A Sorrow Beyond Dreams: A Life Story [Wunschloses Unglück] (Burgtheater, Vienna, 2014) and Traveling on One Leg [Reisende auf einem Bein], an adaptation of Herta Müller’s novel (Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg, 2015). I also discuss Mitchell’s version of Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper [Die Gelbe Tapete] for the Schaubühne Berlin (2013) and, given the limits of space,

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make only some reference to the version of Friedericke Mayröcker’s Night Train [Reise durch die Nacht] (2012) for the Schauspiel Cologne.6 As well as its primary purpose to change perceptual proxemics, live cinema—a term that prioritizes the overt making of the adaptive screen image, rather than cinematic experience—clearly continues to be an especially successful means to adapt novels for Mitchell, where she has continued to refine and develop her approach by incorporating the latest technology.7 As Katya Krebs (2013) points out, discourses of adaptation have shifted from the notion of an established and definitive text versus ‘version’ arrived at through varying degrees of (un)faithfulness. For Krebs, the proliferation of adaption in contemporary theatre practice concerns the ‘(re)writing, (re)construction and reception of cultural positions and ideologies’ (2013, 9; see also Krebs and Hand, 2007); in Mitchell’s case, she seeks cultural (re)expression of the source content through its resolute focus on the finesse of the projected film. On the other hand, Mitchell’s live cinema is still ‘faithful’ to the novel in its use of original passages as voice-overs, spoken live in performance. For Mitchell, recorded cinema thus remains limited because ‘it is not really happening’ (Mitchell and Rebellato, 220); as Mitchell puts it, ‘the thrill of doing it live is a big thrill for everyone’ (2013). As I discuss here, devising live cinema thus concerns two interrelated processes: creating the form and content of the film, and producing what Mitchell and her team call the ‘choreography’ of how to perform it live. In its clearly constructed nature, live cinema is, as Linda Hutcheon proposes, a ‘double definition … as process and product’ (Hutcheon, 9), but where the process remains part of each performance in which the film is re-made and projected.

Cinema and Narrative In his recent Contemporary Mise en Scène: Staging Theatre Today, Patrice Pavis suggests the dominance of audiovisual technologies in theatre, which are seen across a number of contemporary directors’ work, notably Frank Castorf, among several others (Pavis, 139). While Mitchell is not the first to use video, her work concerns the cinematic portrayal of psychology, rather than the use of media as a videographic

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backdrop, as in Ivo van Hove’s Antigone (2015), or to reach an offstage location subsequently seen projected on stage (as in Declan Donnellan’s Ubu Roi (2013), van Hove’s Roman Tragedies (2007), and several of René Pollesch’s works). Instead, Mitchell emphasizes the actuality of sometimes frenetic on-stage film-making, which subsequently renders the highly crafted, often consciously aestheticized realism of the film. In early work, an ensemble of actors both performed and operated cameras; now there are separate operators and Foley artists, though actors are also involved in shooting the film.8 A further key shift in Mitchell’s later multimedia work is the focus on the psychology of a single character in order to ‘represent consciousness and modes of perception on stage’ (Mitchell and Rebellato, 216), a significant shift from a focus on the group of friends in the early Waves. Technical considerations support these contemporary concerns; Mitchell explains: It’s difficult to film highly complicated scenes with more than three characters … as well as changing between temporalities. This is why we prefer to concentrate on the thoughts of a single character … Secondly, I’m also intrigued by the way in which our thoughts drive us to isolation. (Siéfert)

Live cinema is, at its heart, concerned with single characters in crisis and the account of their self-reflexivity. And despite Mitchell’s concern with complexity, Night Train, The Forbidden Zone (Schaubühne Berlin, 2014) (which, like Night Train, also has a set incorporating a constructed train carriage) and the later Traveling on One Leg, are notable for their sheer scale and technical ambition. In an early discussion, Mitchell emphasizes how her burgeoning multimedia practice also questioned linear narrative (National Theatre Discover, 2015) and links the development of her experimental multimedia work in the German-speaking theatre with a rejection of ‘traditional components because they were connected to the way in which Nazism had unfolded itself’ (Mitchell and Rebellato, 217). Mitchell has enjoyed in those theatre contexts the proliferation of opportunities to explore instead individuals’ fragmented, looping psychologies. Discussing her dramaturgical motivation to continue the live cinema form in combination with an approach to adaptation, Mitchell explains

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it gives me greater freedom; I can choose the scenes I want to use. I love selecting and arranging, putting together texts and visual elements. Being close to texts that are as beautiful and complex as those written by Woolf, Mayröcker, and Handke is a privilege. Also, at times novels manage to get closer to what is going on in the characters’ heads, to, say, the metaphysical element in our existence, than dramas do. (Mayer)

Mitchell clearly suggests her authorship of the adaptation here, which re-makes and remediates the novel by allowing an audience to perceive the implications of a character’s inner life on film. Helen Freshwater similarly links adaptation with a montage or collage-like practice of cutting up and rearranging text in devised work in her discussion of Delirium by theatre O (2008). Theatre O’s treatment of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov ‘owes something to such approaches in terms both of the grand themes of the original and the liberties the company feels entitled to take with it’ (Freshwater, 9–10), recalling not only Mitchell’s treatment of Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot in … some trace of her, but also her team’s ongoing aesthetic of filmmaking as a process that creates something other than a straightforward rendition of the novel. If the live cinema aesthetic is stylistically one of realism, using passages from the novels that offer a dramaturgy of the individual, in practical terms close-ups abound as a cinematic vocabulary of psychological scrutiny. Accompanying voice-overs of principal characters’ thoughts are delivered by another actor and cued shot by shot. As Mitchell’s practice has developed, multi-roomed sets have enabled swift movement between multiple scenic locations. Although much of the appeal of Mitchell’s live cinema still lies in its relationship between the machinations of this stage-level work and the often eloquent screen images, for Pavis there remains a ‘competition’ between live and projected action, where, for Pavis at least, ‘the change of scale of an image, which is a familiar procedure in photography and cinema can lead— when that image is onstage—to a spatial and corporeal disorientation for the spectator’ (134). But live cinema exploits our contemporary ease with the filmic since the actors’ performances are only truly experienced on screen, even if, as I discuss, Dan Rebellato’s fine description of how the early work celebrated the ‘ocular movement between screen and stage. … [t]he beautifully realised images above but also the

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elaborately chaotic choreography of the actor-technicians work below’ (334–335) no longer always holds due to Mitchell’s later interventions.

Devising and Process As Alison Oddey foregrounds in her early (and, for many years, virtually the only) study of devising, choosing to devise quickly raises questions of ‘how and where to start’ (Oddey, Chap. 2). In the case of live cinema, where to start is often a novel: either Mitchell chooses this or she will take advice or recommendations from a dramaturg. For Traveling on One Leg, the dramaturg Rita Thiele had recommended Müller and a decision was made to use Reisende auf einem Bein, although the production also incorporates passages from her The Land of Green Plums [Herztier]. Typically, Mitchell rehearses for five weeks (her German-language productions are initially rehearsed in London) before a further three-week period moving the work into the theatre. Mitchell reports this final stage can involve 12-hour working days, 6 days a week (2013). Since neither Mitchell nor her regular Directors of Photography are German speakers, the working language swaps (though, given the ability of the German crew, English predominates) and the German-speaking actors initially perform in English. Although different emphases appear in different productions, it is possible to identify clear processual phases in devising live cinema. Mitchell first stages scenes in a ‘stepping through’ period. As I discuss, this is quite different from Mitchell’s rigorous process when rehearsing a play (Mitchell 2008), and concerns placing the action into the relevant locations. The Director of Photography will respond with a basic pattern of shots and a rough edit. Especially when rehearsing Traveling on One Leg, this process is called ‘making the film’ (a term redolent of the contemporary ‘theatre making’; Radosavljević 12–13), and is run once, before some finer tuning. Since all of the scene and shot sequences are independent, a complex process of ‘threading’ next takes place, whereby how cameras (as well as props or costume items) can be moved from scene to scene and location to location is established. Another logistical element to be tackled when threading Traveling on One Leg was a boom operator to pick up the live speech. Given Mitchell’s volume of live cinema work, it is surprising to note that this production was the

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first to incorporate dialogue (although dialogue appeared in The Yellow Wallpaper, this was muffled and often underneath action, sound or the relentlessness of voiceover). Another basic element to be considered in threading is the movement of camera cabling (to avoid tangled wiring, which camera must be moved first is determined by which camera cable lies on top of which); this was made a little easier when the boom operator in Traveling on One Leg was fitted with a wireless connection. The sound track is also added in rehearsal rather than in a production phase. Sequences are run, the German script is introduced and rehearsal refines the action. When activity stops, there are busy discussions on set, even without Mitchell, who may run over something with an actor elsewhere. There are thus several linear yet simultaneous devising processes involved. Attempts to define devising often invoke the absence of script before rehearsal, or at least trouble the relationship with text as a basis of performance (Heddon and Milling, 6–7; Govan et al. 6). In the early work on Waves, a text document of some 40 pages existed before rehearsal, from which the company selected sections and isolated voice-overs. Mitchell explains an initial devising process concerned asking ‘what is the image we can have for the person who’s thinking that?’ (Mitchell 2013) and that actors worked in groups to produce performance proposals. Mitchell confirms ‘I proposed very little—I set tasks’ (2013). This process has developed significantly: in Mitchell’s recent work, the writer Duncan Macmillan has become a particular collaborator, having created the preliminary script adaptation of both A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Night Train, the latter in collaboration with Lyndsey Turner, who worked alone on The Yellow Wallpaper. While the Director of Photography—Mitchell’s principal collaborator—would have read the draft, there is, crucially, no preliminary shooting script. As shots are slowly accumulated, they are captured by powerful servers and specialist computer software and a shot list made up of several hundred computer screen grabs is created and distributed. Simultaneously, the actors and operators create their own notation of their ‘choreography’ around the stage space. It is thus the realization of a progression of shots, not the script, that determines the journey of all involved through the action (Photo 4.1).

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Photo 4.1  Screenshot detailing ‘Secret’ from Traveling on One Leg, with permission from Ingi Bekk and Lily McLeish

The ability of devising to question, or at least complicate, the authority of the pre-existing, dramatically self-contained world of traditional playtexts, has fuelled a postmodern, contemporary performance mode, exemplified in the UK for example by the fragmented, selfconscious, challenging, and intertextual work of companies like Forced Entertainment, and in the US by companies like Goat Island or (especially in terms of textual deconstruction) The Wooster Group.

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Yet Heddon and Milling warn against a too-easy elision of the critical complexities of postmodernism with stylistics and suggest that ‘the identification of a shared “style” arising from the properties thought specific to devising also implies a shared process’ (222, my emphasis). In Mitchell’s work, the live cinema script and originary novel remain simply starting points for devising with a regular team of collaborators who understand both a process and the form and aesthetic of the film to be made. To take just The Yellow Wallpaper and A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, the Director of Photography (Grant Gee), Lighting Designer (Jack Knowles), Sound Designers (Melanie Wilson and Gareth Fry) and Camera Operators (Andreas Hartmann and Stefan Kessissoglou) worked across both productions. Beyond this, designers (especially Alex Eales), Foley artists, stage managers (often Pippa Meyer) and Mitchell’s long-standing associate director, Lily McLeish, have been involved in several productions. Mitchell has thus over recent years built an AngloGerman/Austrian ensemble of what tend now to be called ‘creatives’, as well as the actors she has long worked with (Julia Wieninger has appeared in Night Train and Traveling on One Leg) and which comprises some 20–30 people in the rehearsal room.9 The great advantage is one of shared skill: it would also be near-impossible for a new team to learn the complex process for each new project; moreover, as Heddon and Milling suggest, shared training and skills, interests or experiences are fundaments that will inevitably resonate in the aesthetics of the work itself. When attending rehearsal for Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, my overwhelming first impression was how slow procedures are. The basic script was some 39 pages long and by around two-thirds of this, the company had amassed significantly over 600 shots. At one rehearsal, to run over some five shots that were already more or less established took around an hour. The first day of threading Traveling on One Leg achieved less than six already short pages and assembled around nine minutes of the film. At 4 pm on another day I was present, 19 shots were run, which comprised less than four minutes of screen time. In some productions, threading is interchanged with making the film: a clear difference I observed between Traveling on One Leg and A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is that the former broke down the process into blocks of making and threading, whereas the latter seemed also to be finalizing shots during threading, a phase which also appeared especially difficult. I also saw Mitchell direct precise action during threading of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, a period apparently with a different emphasis, and Gee change shots during threading of Traveling on One Leg.

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Such slippage is common in devising processes and phases overlap and loop, and sometimes go awry; Mitchell recalls too that her early company were not able to get through a run through of Waves (Mitchell 2013) and initial attempts at short sequences in the later work still regularly break down. Sometimes the production is not finalized nor achieves a successful run through until the last few days of the process. And even though Mitchell notes that ‘once you’ve got the machinery of this work running, it’s a day’s work to change anything … it’s such hell’ (2013) changes do happen. After threading the opening sequence of Traveling on One Leg for example, it was decided that the opening section concerning the Romanian part of the story should be restructured. These changes meant that the cast and camera operators had to ‘unlearn’ their carefully notated choreography; those that can follow scripts or cues (the Deputy Stage Manager, the online editor, lighting, and sound) also had to reorder substantial paperwork. A key to the process is of course time, but also a shared understanding and acceptance of devising conditions. Discourse around devising has sometimes troubled notions of authority and the role of the director. That Simon McBurney, Complicite’s director, ‘rips and trashes’ (Alexander, 72) through devised material might seem far from the ‘leaderlessness’ (Proudfit and Syssoyeva, 4) so desired by the idealism of some collaborative groups of the 1960s. In other contemporary work, Harvie and Lavender usefully suggest how ‘negotiated leadership can facilitate group agency’ (4). As I perceive it, one of Mitchell’s key skills as a director is the ability to manage a rehearsal room and discern the needs not only of the work at hand, but also those involved. Mitchell is also a great delegator. Threading is typically led by McLeish or, for Traveling on One Leg, the floor manager.10 This is at once a delegation of a task that Mitchell undertook in the early days of the work, but also a sharing of work processes and significant responsibility across the ensemble. In contrast to her early, hands-on work when creating multimedia productions, a key process for Mitchell now is to watch the screen—not the stage action—and give notes as well as reworking where necessary. Overall, watching rehearsal does indeed appear as a complex and slow technical rehearsal, as in traditional theatre, punctuated by moments of director and actor collaboration, in a long and complex process that devolves and cascades responsibilities as effective devising.

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Adaptation Handke’s novella A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972) offers a first-person account of the writer’s attempt to understand his mother’s suicide. In Mitchell’s version, the sister appears too, offering a further familial presence in the parental home at the time of the mother’s funeral. Mitchell also re-enacts scenes from the mother’s past: in contrast to her earlier view, the medium and language of film is, in this case, made to suit temporal shifts, as scenes involving the mother’s life are shot in black and white. Lack of colour also suggests Irene’s muted experience of the world around her in Traveling on One Leg and, aesthetically, creates perhaps the vintage, cold greyness of the former Eastern bloc. Similarly, coded flashbacks also happen in Night Train, when the central figure’s memories of her father appear in monochrome. While offering a cinematic vocabulary of storytelling, these strategies also usefully place characters in relation to events in performance more actively than novelistic reportage. But Mitchell takes her central interest in self-reflexivity to extremes in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams as characters do not speak, and their thoughts are almost incessantly spoken by another male and female voice. Although, as with all of the live cinema scripts, Macmillan’s adaptation of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is written envisaging the filmed outcome, it is clearly provisional and a proposition at the inception of the devising process.11 Macmillan offered some of the script in a different font colour, either to indicate the difference between stage directions—which are a very full narrative of action—and voice-over, or to signify possibilities or potential cuts. Typically, all scripts have cinema-style markings such as ‘Int’ and ‘Ext’ to designate interior or exterior locations; in Traveling on One Leg, for example, one scene is precisely set up as ‘Interior. Irene’s apartment, Berlin. Evening. 6.30 pm’ (Mitchell 2015a), accurately placing the action. In contrast to this detail, Macmillan’s rehearsal script for A Sorrow Beyond Dreams offers potential alternatives to the opening sequences; later footnotes offer possibilities too: p. 26, for example, suggests ‘perhaps this paragraph is written on the notepad but not narrated?’ (Macmillan). Although an apparently simple question, this changes the form from the force of voice-over to placing the spectator in the character’s point of view. To return to Hutcheon, this is adaptation as ‘showing’ not ‘telling’ (38–46), enabled not only by Macmillan’s familiarity with the medium and its devising, but also temporal and formal shifts.12

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The live cinema scripts should clearly be considered work-in-progress screenplays. While live cinema is a medium of adaptation and a discrete practice, changes to original material have been criticized. The Yellow Wallpaper, arguably the most well-known of recent novels, particularly invited comparison with the re-rendered form. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 6000-word story of the same name was first published in 1892, but the Schaubühne called for an updated version (Mitchell and Rebellato, 224). Mitchell’s production thus takes place in contemporary Berlin, the husband has a car and—rather at odds with her imposed isolation in the original—the woman has a mobile phone and laptop. Later, the figure imagined behind the wallpaper is freed—achieved through video special effects to overlay images created in two locations at stage level—and, in a significant change to Perkins Gilman’s work, aids the central woman to commit suicide. One review criticizes, ‘for Mitchell, the woman behind the wallpaper, that alter ego, is nothing but a beautiful personification of fate, the Angel of death. After 120 years of being read, this is a curious conclusion for this classic text of feminist literature’ (Spreng, 2013). Such a criticism exposes an understanding of adaptation as necessarily preserving original content or worrying about fidelity, despite translation of form, rather than, as Margherita Laera has boldly defined, adaptation as ‘a synonym of appropriation, because it is too problematic to draw the line between a “faithful adaptation” and an “unfaithful appropriation” (faithful or unfaithful to what, anyway?)’ (Laera, 5). Returning to her role with Waves, Mitchell wrote the basic script for Traveling on One Leg herself.13 Herta Müller’s novel centres on Irene, who emigrates from the German speaking community in her native Romania to Germany, where the action shifts across three locations, West Berlin, Marburg and Frankfurt. The novel explores Irene’s fraught relationships with three men, Franz, Stefan and Thomas, and her sense of not belonging to either her home or adopted countries. The novel renders this sense of removal stylistically, as dialogue tends to be reported and is never in speech marks; for example: Did you ever have anything to do with the secret service there before you emigrated. I didn’t, but they did. That makes a difference, said Irene. (Müller, 18)

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Photo 4.2  Rehearsal for Traveling on One Leg, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. Note shot number on screen. Photo credit: Stephen Cummiskey

Müller’s slippage between reported and direct speech reinforces Irene’s daily experience, as in the live cinema version, where, like her previous choices, Mitchell is again drawn to individual isolation. The production used a multi-roomed set, though one projection screen was incorporated into the set as a section of the Berlin Wall, not, as so often, suspended above the stage. These design features were, though, also subject to the changes caused by ongoing devising: when I first attended rehearsal, a photo-booth had been removed and abandoned stage left, but was later re-included, and in contrast to the fixity of the main set, ‘pop up’ locations were added, often achieved through an actor moving in place temporary screens or flats (Photo 4.2). As with the changes Mitchell made to the ending of The Yellow Wallpaper, there is, here, an evolving adaptation process of moving from novel to script to film, nuanced through Mitchell’s response to the work as initial author. In the case of Traveling on One Leg, the scripted re-rendering is one of selection and emphasis rather than radical change; some sections of the script remain narrative of action, very close to the novel and look like long stage directions. But, like Macmillan’s work, the early script was not definitive—nor even complete for around the first third of rehearsal—and so offered somewhere reasonably definite to start; the ‘how’ of its progression would be to collaborate. The embryonic script was emailed back and forth between Mitchell and Thiele, who both

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translated and added elements based on her knowledge of the original German novels. Mitchell also involved Wieninger in decisions around the narrative of Irene, recalling at least something of the ensemble or actorcentric ethos of some devising (Heddon and Milling, Chap. 2). These strategies make collaborative some of what appears as Mitchell’s authorship and, like more permanent devising ensembles, benefit from the relative familiarity of an experienced company.

Acting Even with an eight-week rehearsal period, little, if any, of Mitchell’s approach to play rehearsal takes place in live cinema. Deriving in large part from Stanislavski and outlined in her own book (Mitchell 2008), Mitchell typically considers how characters are conditioned by their past when working on a play. A precisely detailed biography of characters is created, in which past events are sometimes invented in order to justify behaviour in the present of the play. Improvisation often explores this history. Defining ‘immediate circumstances’ reinforces the events of the 24 hours prior to a character’s first appearance. In terms of textual analysis, Mitchell is especially interested in intention and events (how changes in action shape characters’ shifting purposes and goals) and to establish the time, place and temperature of the specific situation and location. However, it is rare for these strategies to be employed in live cinema, although the screenplay for Night Train incorporated events in a production where ‘the Stanislavskian theatre work came together with the multimedia work; it was so precisely played’ (Mitchell 2013). But usually there is simply not time for Mitchell’s processual rigour amidst the devising of the means to produce a film. If the extremely detailed work I have seen undertaken in other rehearsal situations leads to psychologically dense, logical and, crucially, repeatable performances, this would appear to be missing in live cinema.14 Given the preponderance of live cinema in her work, some reconsideration of what constitutes Mitchell’s ‘normative’ practice seems warranted too. In Mitchell’s early multimedia work, when only actors operated cameras, sub-characters were created in order to motivate their work as camera crew who also acted: in Mitchell’s multimedia version of Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life for example (National Theatre, 2007), characters were created who might wish to create a

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televisual version of the text and could speak the various languages within it. Mitchell asserts that this has not been necessary when working with German casts, since she has found them particularly adept at taking on theatrical form without the need for its psychological justification (Mitchell, 2012). In A Sorrow Beyond Dreams especially, with little interaction between characters, it is instead an intensity of focus that characterizes live cinema acting; as Mitchell puts it, actors must ‘practice the text as a thought, not spoken, not like a monologue’ (2015), where a fixity of a key moment is often explained by the accompanying voice-over.15 If acting in live cinema is part of a total theatrical montage, an issue is that it is rarely logical since actors have to switch between filming tasks, near instantaneous acting in short scenes, and shifting location both within the set and jumping time and place in the chronology of events. In rehearsal for A Sorrow Beyond Dreams Liliane Amuat, as the daughter, operated a camera, then was in shot as the daughter trying to make a telephone call, and next moved a tripod, all in the space of a handful of shots. In rehearsal of one sequence of Traveling on One Leg, Achim Buch moved a camera ready for a shot yet to happen, and then just about reached the voice-over booth in time to deliver the disembodied voice of the photographer, which another actor played having moved there in preparation. In this overall sequence, Wieninger, as Irene, is in a hotel room, where she remembers the earlier event of having her passport photo being taken, yet also has to move from the interrogation room location back to the hotel. Nevertheless, Mitchell warned against ‘not doing it automatically, but really joining things up in your thinking— there are hard jumps’ (2015). In contrast to her play rehearsal technique, Mitchell suggests here the nature of the problem, not the precision of a solution towards the necessary ‘internal’ logic actors should find. Some central actor-characters are, then, able to develop something of a throughline to performance, especially in the case of the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper as her situation unfolds; and in Night Train, the holding framework of the train journey provides a (meta)chronological consistency. For Weininger too, logic can be found in the above example as the interrogation and passport photo events are memories borne out of her location in the hotel room, creating some degree of psychological weave to what, at stage level, is urgent activity. Even if it is the shots, both in aesthetic and practical terms, that establish the actors’ journey through the performance, great attention

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to detail in acting is still preserved. In rehearsal for A Sorrow Beyond Dreams Mitchell researched carefully in order to determine exactly how many pills and of what type should be swallowed in which order by the mother (Dorothee Hartinger) in order to commit suicide. In the suicide sequence, Handke’s description of how his mother had put on incontinence pads and several pairs of underwear is heard. As in Mitchell’s wider practice, such on-stage items are not referred to as ‘props’, but ‘objects’, endowing them with a reality or instrumentality, which can be related to credibly by the actor. Mitchell thus advised Hartinger, ‘if there’s any uncertainty with objects, I don’t believe you’ve planned it beforehand’, and ‘we mustn’t see any adjustment in order to sit on the bed, since she would know her room very well’ (2014). Here, acting is made more secure when linked to a set of environmental or situational touchstones. I have also heard Mitchell take time at least to speak through a situation and past events. In both cases, Mitchell must find precise acting points amidst the labour and slowness of shot making and the absence of long rehearsal focused on character. What the actors develop in rehearsal is more like a score, which has to be learnt and practiced as an oscillation between diegisis and technical rendition of the performance. Even if actors are missing (and, in the case of Traveling on One Leg, the need emerged to replace an actor who became unavailable), stand-in actors are hired so that the mechanics of the action needed to produce the shots might still be established and rehearsed. Mitchell’s long-standing collaborator, Kate Dûchene, stood in for Hartinger during rehearsal of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, and a drama school student was hired for a period of Traveling on One Leg to play roles in initial rehearsal. Given Mitchell’s prolific work, coupled with a desire to work with a set of principal collaborators who may be engaged elsewhere, the devising and rehearsal processes must of necessity sometimes focus on the development of the means to achieve the film, not the finer points of individuals’ performances.

‘Live Cinema’ As Heddon and Milling note, the growth in devising has usefully shifted the relative balance between process and product (175), where process concerns attention to a performance outcome, not an ideological position. Like much of Mitchell’s work, live cinema is fundamentally

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psychological realism; the choices of which stories or novels to adapt are predicated on central characters with strong inner monologues, around which to grow the technical complexities of the filmic form. Relying on actors to fill out their thought process in performance goes some way toward actor-centric devising approaches, as does, in the case of Traveling on One Leg, having the actors move their own props and costume around the set as part of their scores. In my wider discussion, a taxonomy of devising process in live cinema suggests threading is a key step, since it is at this stage that performative action is created. As I have often observed, the ensemble works in a patient and professional manner during the sometimes arduous task. An interim outcome of threading is that an assessment of how the material plays out on screen can be made; that there will be narrative changes is mutually understood since the ultimate arbiter of choice is how the film functions. Like all devising, there is in live cinema a process of testing, assembly and cutting, yet—with whatever degree of collaboration and devolution of skill—it is ultimately for Mitchell and the Director of the Photography to determine what appears on screen. If devising is a practice that simultaneously makes and rehearses a performance, live cinema is the devising of a film adaptation and the learning of the means to shoot and show it in real time. In its growth in personnel, scale, complexity and aesthetic aims, the live cinema technique has clearly developed, attesting to Mitchell’s reputation for formal innovation. Yet even with technological advances, Mitchell has suggested that the quality of the live film is sometimes limited and relies on its alignment with the stage action (Dramaten, 2012). In discussion, Mitchell described too that a sequence where the bed in The Yellow Wallpaper is physically shifted at speed from one room to the other is thrilling as ‘a big theatrical event supporting a big change in the film’ (2013), thus the effect of live cinema still sometimes relies on the simultaneous screen images and the evident production of the cinematic image through the moment of live action. Despite her interest in the effect of stage-level action, a significant development in Mitchell’s contemporary live cinema work is the use of design choices whereby action is periodically visible only on screen. Preventing a direct view of some of the actor and camera operators’ action is embedded in the scenography for A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Traveling on One Leg as some of the labyrinth of rooms cannot

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be seen by spectators without the roving cameras. And in some productions, a wooden flat, like a shutter, is dropped in, creating what is in effect a real ‘fourth wall’ to the rooms, a strategy that masks the setting up of a later shot. Devoid of any real opportunity to witness the live machinations of the means to produce shots (when shutters first fell in The Yellow Wallpaper my immediate response was to wonder if actors and operators were really continuing behind the walls; they are), the illusionistic aspect to the older work has depleted. Part of the pleasure as a spectator of Waves or …some trace of her was the complicity in the clear construction of shots by actors, often using rough and ready items, and the beautifully crafted images on screen. Even if Mitchell’s later scenographic developments paradoxically draw attention to the liveness of performance through its invisibility, in the competition (to return to Pavis) between stage and film, here film prevails. As an oeuvre, Mitchell’s work has shifted from multimedia theatre, as in the case of the early productions at the National Theatre, to a more accurate designation as live cinema in the contemporary productions; I have suggested too that the filmic vocabulary has increased, emphasizing a spectatorial engagement via the screen only. Since at least three cameras are used (rather than typically one as in traditional cinema), I would further suggest that both the acting and filming task is closer to multi-camera television, a technique that enables the playing of relatively long sequences without stopping; in television, this makes for quicker recording and, in live cinema, for what has been devised to be continually projected. While Mitchell’s multimedia practices do not neatly fit regular definitions of devising or création collective, one way of appreciating the work is as collective labour, in which matters of authorship and production are devolved through pockets of expertise as a simultaneous or temporally defined process (the creation of the script at the outset, for example, in contrast to the interweaving work of ‘threading’). In a recent collection on performance and labour, Klein and Kunst identify ‘new modes of working [and] the potentiality of performance practice … to challenge the established orders of the production and dissemination of artistic products … labour has become visible in performance work’ (Klein and Kunst, 1). As a set of clearly made cinematic adaptations, The Yellow Wallpaper exemplifies Laera’s definition of ‘intertemporal’ adaptation,

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whereas A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is ‘intratemporal’ in that its presentation maintains the time setting of the original (Laera, 7). But, given the broader processes and personnel in Mitchell’s oeuvre, matters are more complex, since both are intermedial adaptations; the adapted product in the case of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams also employs a complex stage technology clearly not around in the 1970s: it is an intratemporal content realized through an intertemporal treatment. As an aspect of devising and as the basis of performance, live cinema can be seen as a technology of movement. The labour of each performance aside, I have also seen camera operators ‘mark through’ their moves in rehearsal breaks in order to learn their particular choreography. This labour, required to render the work primarily as an ultimately cinematic encounter, remains an obvious part of the performative nature of the experience for spectators. The adaptation is laboured upon in real time before our eyes (and ears), yet ultimately must be appreciated as a film.

Notes

1. Mitchell’s work averages some six to eight new productions a year in both theatre and opera; she also oversees transfers. 2. I also find the Spencer review misogynistic. 3.  Mitchell has also incorporated live music; for Wunschkonzert (2008, Schauspiel Köln, Cologne) for example, a string quartet played in a visible glass booth. 4.  After Dido (Young Vic, London, 2009), is one example of Mitchell’s live cinema opera work. 5.  Mitchell’s Schaubühne Berlin production, Fräulein Julie, discussed by Birringer, Fowler (this volume) and in Mitchell and Rebellato, toured to the Barbican, London, in 2013. 6.  Throughout, I use the English translations of the titles, although, of course, the productions are known in the original German. Following discussion with Mitchell, I have not included her production of W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn [Die Ringe des Saturn] (Schauspiel Köln, Cologne, 2012) as this is a somewhat different piece of work, focusing on the creation of a sound world, as if a staged radio play, nor The Forbidden Zone (Schaubühne Berlin, 2014) since it is not an adaptation as such, but incorporates texts from several sources in a screenplay by Duncan Macmillan.

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7. Mitchell and her collaborators continue to explore the use of the latest high definition and 3D cameras (see 59 Productions, n.d.). 8. For example, in The Yellow Wallpaper, Tilman Strauß, playing the husband, films; in Night Train, the actors playing the father, the sleeping-car attendant and the husband operate cameras. 9. Wieninger has worked with Mitchell at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg, on Beckett’s Happy Days [Glückliche Tage] (2015) and Martin Crimp’s Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino [The Rest Will Be Familiar to You from Cinema] (2013). 10. McLeish is a bilingual German-English speaker. 11. Mitchell (2013) reports that for The Yellow Wallpaper, the order of scenes and voice-overs were ready before rehearsal; for Night Train, the order of scenes, most of the dialogue and most voice-overs were in place. 12. Macmillan confirms that the text was a constantly changing part of the devising and was never finished as such, and that the process for each live cinema production he has worked on has been different (Macmillan, 2017). 13. See Mitchell and Rebellato, where Mitchell also reports how she produced the basic rehearsal document for Rings of Saturn. A production of Waves [Die Wellen] was also staged at the Schauspiel Köln (2011). 14. As well as other productions, I observed some rehearsal of Mitchell’s production of The Cherry Orchard for the Young Vic, London (2014), where her approach was most in evidence. 15. Lily McLeish confirms that, while actors are not necessarily instructed to think the thoughts expressed in the accompanying voice-over, this is implicit, and recounts that, unusually, in The Yellow Wallpaper, the voiceovers performer learnt the voice-over text so as to align her delivery closely with her fellow actor’s thought process.

Works Cited 59 Productions. “The making of a Live Cinema Show - Forbidden Zone directed by Katie Mitchell.” https://vimeo.com/101517150. n.d. Web. 27 Jan 2017. Alexander, Catherine. “Complicite – The Elephant Vanishes.” Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes. Ed. Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. 59–80. Dramaten. “Bergmanfestivalen: Katie Mitchell - Om Teatern om tekniken.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoVpSvKcHq4. 28 May 2012. Web. 29 Oct. 2015. Billington, Michael. “Don’t let auteurs take over in theatre.” theguardian.com/ uk. 14 April 2009. Web. 22 Oct. 2015.

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Birringer, Johannes H. “The Theatre and Its Screen Double.” Theatre Journal 66: 2 (2014): 207–225. Clements, Rachel. “Deconstructive Techniques and Spectral Technologies in Katie Mitchell’s Attempts on Her Life.” Contemporary Theatre Review, 24: 3 (2014): 331–341. Freshwater, Helen. “Delirium: in rehearsal with theatre O.” Devising in Process. Ed. Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 128–146. Friedman, Sharon. “‘Sounds Indistinguishable from Sights’: Staging Subjectivity in Katie Mitchell’s Waves.” Text and Presentation, (2009): 154–166. Govan, Emma, Helen Nicholson and Katie Normington. Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practice. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Hadjioannou, Markos and George Rodosthenous. “In between Stage and Screen: the Intermedial in Katie Mitchell’s …Some Trace of Her.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 7: 1 (2011): 43–59. Harvie, Jen and Andy Lavender, eds. Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Heddon, Deirdre and Jane Milling. Devising Performance: A Critical History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Jefferies, Janis. “‘…some trace of her’: Katie Mitchell’s Waves in Multimedia Performance.” Women: A Cultural Review, 22: 4 (2011): 400–410. Klein Gabriele and Bojana Kunst. “Introduction: Labour and performance.” Performance Research 17.6 (2012): 1–3. Krebs, Katya. Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Krebs, Katya and Richard Hand. “Editorial.” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 1: 1 (2007): 3–4. Laera, Margherita, ed. Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. McLeish, Lily. Email correspondence with author. 26 Oct. 2015. Macmillan, Duncan. “Screenplay for A Sorrow Beyond Dreams.” Unpublished. 2014. ———. Email correspondence with author. 29 Jan. 2017. Mayer, Norbert. ““Wunschloses Unglück”, fast so schön wie Kino.” DiePresse. com. 31 Jul. 2014. Web. 29 Oct. 2015. Müller, Herta. Traveling on One Leg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998.

90  A.J. LEDGER Mitchell, Katie. The Director’s Craft: a Handbook for the Theatre. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. ———. Unpublished interview with author. Three Mills Studios, London. 30 Oct. 2012. ———. Unpublished interview with author. Three Mills Studios, London. 13 Nov. 2013. ———. Comments in rehearsal of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. Three Mills Studios, London. 10 Jan. 2014. ———. “Screenplay for Traveling on One Leg.” Unpublished. 2015a. ———. Comments in rehearsal of Traveling on One Leg. Three Mills Studios, London. 17 Jul. 2015b. Mitchell, Katie and Dan Rebellato. “Doing the Impossible: Katie Mitchell in Conversation with Dan Rebellato.” Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat. Ed. Margherita Laera. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 213–26. National Theatre Discover (2011) “Katie Mitchell on directing multimedia productions.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAij9r9RvF0. 6 May 2011. Web. 29 Oct. 2015. Oddey, Alison. Devising Theatre: a Practical and Theoretical Handbook. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1994. Pavis, Patrice. Contemporary Mise en Scène: Staging Theatre Today. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Proudfit, Scott and Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva. Eds. Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Radosavljević, Duška. The Contemporary Ensemble. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013. Rebellato, Dan. “Katie Mitchell: Learning from Europe.” Contemporary European Theatre Directors. Eds. Maria M. Delgado and Dan Rebellato. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. 317–38. Siéfert, Marion. Trans. Chris Campbell. “Entretien avec Katie Mitchell.” Theatre-Contemporain.net. n.d. Web. 22 Oct. 2015. Unpublished English translation by Tom Boddy. Sierz, Aleks. “Some Traces of Katie Mitchell.” Theatre Forum, 34 (2009): 51–59. Spencer, Charles. “Women of Troy: Euripides all roughed up.” Telegraph.co.uk. 30 Nov. 2007. Web. 29 Oct. 2015. Spreng, Eberhard. “Postnatale depression als bühnen film.” Deutschlandfunk.de. 17 Feb. 2013. Web. 6 Aug. 2013.

PART II

Re-mediating the Book to the Stage, Introduced by Frances Babbage

The theatre is inherently a site of repetition. Its work unfolds live, over and over, night after night, production upon production. Audiences attending the riotous A Midsummer Night’s Dream staged to launch Emma Rice’s tenure as director of the Globe (2016) may set that experience mentally alongside other Dreams, directly witnessed or only heard about: Robert Lepage’s production for the National Theatre, memorably set in a swamp (1992), for example; or Peter Brook’s legendarily acrobatic staging for the RSC (1971). Marvin Carlson’s influential study The Haunted Stage signals this quality of repetition vividly through its title: as Carlson shows, the theatre is unavoidably populated by the ‘ghosts’ of previous productions, past actors, past audiences, alternative soundings of famous lines. In the theatre, practices of recycling, retelling, and reenacting are expected and welcomed; indeed, they are fundamental to the pleasure that the art affords. Since remaking has always been central to the theatre’s raison d’être, adaptation in this context is differently characterized and weighted than in other arts. Of course, adapting a novel for performance is not at all the same as staging texts preconceived as drama. Plays, almost invariably, contain the embedded invitation to collaborate; they anticipate not one but multiple realizations; their authors effectively write their work into other hands. Novels, by contrast, appear already full and finished.

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The critics’ old hostility to, and denigration of, dramatizations of literature should not surprise us, therefore; the adaptor’s attempt on the life of such work can read as a type of arrogance, a boast that he or she can mould this into something more than was managed by its originator. Yet somehow, for the most part, the reception of literary adaptation in the theatre has been kinder and less immediately judgemental than, for example within film and television. In the theatre, the most ambitious, borderline hubristic undertakings are anticipated with more eagerness than scepticism. For example, the RSC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s monumentally successful historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies—together amounting to well over 1000 pages, seventy-odd characters, and spanning thirty-six years—was keenly awaited by public and press alike; the sheer weight of the challenge posed by the source stirred the anticipation and the will that the theatre should produce not a slavish illustration of Mantel’s books but something sufficiently extraordinary to match these. They were not disappointed. The much-praised production of Mike Poulton’s adroit adaptation, directed by Jeremy Herrin, ran to 6 hours; it required a significant investment of time, attention, and money from its audiences as well as from its multiple creators. The extreme example of the Mantel staging points to qualities uniquely attached to adaptation in the theatre, making this context quite distinct from that of film, despite the challenges—most obviously, visual dramatization—faced by both forms. A theatrical event is experienced on several levels simultaneously, whether or more or less consciously. First, spectators must ‘read’ the dramatic action, the fictional world that is being represented; second, they cannot fail to recognize the operation of theatrical action, that is, the mode of performance used to convey that fiction in the physical space; third, spectators are affected by, and themselves affect, the action of attendance, the sense of occasion and collectivity of this (which is at times profound, if at other times forced or superficial). These characteristics mean that when audiences attend an adaptation in the theatre, they are witnessing not just an adaptation, as it were a finished product, but adaptation itself, in process: the actors conjure their telling of the source into being for each performance and the very labour of that enterprise enriches the experience of the whole. Where film may be unsurpassed in its ability to capture the sweep and detail of scenic richness, the theatre by contrast has always sought to do much with little: a bare stage, few props, merely indicative costumes, all

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these readily signal a productive poverty that only makes more room for the imagination. These qualities in theatre as a medium help to explain what makes it a potentially fertile and welcoming space for adaptation. Because however daunting the adaptive challenges posed by a novel, however impossible might seem its effective translation to the stage, we know that the theatre can tell any and every kind of story. That ‘tell’ is crucial: there is no ‘suspension of disbelief’ so absolute that spectators are duped into seeing its fictions as real. Theatre always declares the gap between what it presents, and how it does this, albeit more explicitly at some times than at others. The proposal that theatre is an art surprisingly well equipped to adapt ‘impossible’ literatures is well supported by the chapters in this part. Benjamin Fowler, for example, explores precisely this ability in his critical revisiting of Katie Mitchell’s treatment of Virginia Woolf. Mitchell’s increasing incorporation of intermedial technologies alongside live action gave rise to a new term, ‘live cinema’, to describe her work. Fowler argues that Waves’ adoption of techniques drawn from radio and cinema—the creation of aural soundscapes by the actors, the feeding in of live-streamed film—were, for Mitchell, necessary tools to tackle the demands posed by Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness modernist novel. In Woolf, Mitchell had found ‘a text that would force [her] to make better theatre’: Fowler argues that the experience of adaptation obliged Mitchell to readdress the question of how far and by what means subjectivity could be stageable; consequently, he suggests, it may be more accurate to understand these experimental live cinema aesthetics not as a rejection of naturalism’s project, but a vital extension of this. Discussions of adaptation are never quite able to shake off the spectre of fidelity, even while it is widely understood, first, that a relationship of source to adaptation in which the latter did not depart from the former would not be an adaptation at all; second, that fidelity could hardly be established where disagreement proliferates about what in any text is ‘essential’ to retain; third, that an adaptation that attempted above all to mimic a literary source could not satisfy an audience in the theatrical context; and fourth, that it is actually possible and legitimate to examine adaptations—should we choose to do so—without any reference to the novels on which they are based. Nonetheless, the question of fidelity returns over and over—perhaps because in the end it is as good a term as any to describe not a duty of adaptation’s intertextual relationship, but

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more straightforwardly the expectations, frustrations, and rewards of this dynamic. Two chapters in this part revalue the notion of fidelity, demonstrating that this is not a term that must be erased from the discourse but rather one that bears scrutiny for the meanings it can carry in different contexts. Jane Barnette’s commentary on her own co-adaptation with Michael Haverty of Stephen Crane’s 1895 novel The Red Badge of Courage proposes that it may be possible, and valuable, to talk about the ‘spirit’ of a source text. As Barnette shows, ‘spirit’ can be understood not as some unarguable essence inherent in the original, able to be sustained or betrayed, but rather as the numinous energies that an adaptation can uncannily unleash. In this example, adaptation’s distinctive ability to speak in (at least) two voices at once, to be simultaneously strange and familiar, is deployed to rearticulate an authorial voice which for Barnette is marked by patriotism and an ironical cynicism. Questions of fidelity and authenticity are likewise considered by Edmund Chow in his chapter on the Birmingham Repertory Theatre’s The Kite Runner and its concerted attempt to build an Afghan ‘aura’. As Chow explains, the goals of authenticity and accuracy pursued by Matthew Spangler, the US author of the adaptation, in some ways reflect the dynamic already played out in Hosseini’s novel. The Kite Runner relates the struggle of the narrator Amir to come to terms with his treachery towards his homeland, evident in his betrayal of Hussan, his childhood friend, and his own abandonment of Afghanistan for the USA; the novel demonstrates the necessity that Amir now return to Afghanistan, not in a futile attempt to undo the past, but as an act of reparation in the present. Chow describes how the stage adaptation’s conscious courting of fidelity—through the incorporation of researched visual and aural detail, the use of Dari language, and references to specific historical and political events—are offered and received as a welcome corrective for the ‘Afghanistan’ constructed by the news media in the context of the ‘war on terror’. Here, adaptation in the theatre serves as a conscious remediation in which the efforts to get closer to a source are part of an acknowledged duty to be ‘good again’ to Afghanistan. By contrast, Kara Reilly’s chapter on stage versions of Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure explores the ways in which adaptors may exercise the right, even the necessity, radically to step away ‘unfaithfully’ from their source texts. Reilly sets out the problems for adaptation, and for readers, inherent in Cleland’s novel: in particular,

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the male author’s ventriloquism of female sexual experience, a fantasy of prostitution into which the reader is able to ‘project him or herself […] without consequence’. The two adaptations Reilly discusses, by April de Angelis and TheatreState, adopt contrasting means by which to deny spectators any such detachment. For the former, this means setting Cleland’s fictional account of prostitution into dialectical relation with historical and material realities; for the latter, the critique is effected by foregrounding the contemporary autobiography of the actor-devisor, presenting this not as an equivalent for Fanny’s experience but as starting point from which to develop a critical exchange. Samantha Mitschke tackles issues of remediation and fidelity with a quite different order of source text in her chapter on stage adaptations of Anne Frank’s diary. Mitschke explains how initial plans to adapt the diary, a deeply cherished document from perhaps the most famous victim of the Holocaust, sparked passionate controversy in the mid-1950s: a legal dispute ensued in which the ‘Jewish Anne’ of the author originally intended for the project was rejected in favour of the seemingly more ‘universal Anne’ of the eventual adaptators. Mitschke examines the rival adaptors’ joint claims to an understanding of Anne manifestly shaped by the writers’ self-identifications and frames of concern. For Mitschke, the ‘real Anne’ thus eludes both versions, the chapter noting how each differently manipulates and sentimentalizes the historical figure they purport to present authentically. The 2014 adaptation by Jessica Durlacher and Leon de Winter, Mitschke proposes, shapes an ‘Anne’ much closer to the author of the diary, even while the adaptors retain only fragments of the source text, incorporate new scenes and project attitudes on the material after the fact; in place of the empathetic projection of the 1950s versions, this twenty-first-century adaptation, Mitschke argues, substitutes an ‘advisory projection’ that establishes an overtly dialogic relationship with the source material, valuing the historical text while exposing the gaps in engagement that cannot be bridged by empathetic or other means.

CHAPTER 5

(Re)Mediating the Modernist Novel: Katie Mitchell’s Live Cinema Work Benjamin Fowler

In 2010, Katie Mitchell staged a production of Fräulein Julie for the Berlin Schaubühne that was advertised as ‘after August Strindberg’ (‘frei nach Strindberg’), making clear its debt to and distinction from his play of the same name. In her adaptation, Mitchell cut 80% of the text and filtered its events entirely through the prism of the maid Kristin, Strindberg’s peripheral third character whom the author himself in his preface to the play described as ‘without individuality’ (111).1 While Mitchell’s interest in a female consciousness lingering in the margins of a canonical text reveals a decisively feminist gaze, the production’s most visible and immediate innovation stemmed from its intermedial strategy. Mitchell gave form to Kristin’s consciousness through techniques borrowed from cinema and radio, created live and enacted in full view of the audience, and used to evoke the character’s subjective perceptual field. In order to understand this ‘Live Cinema’ treatment of a theatre classic we have to address the genesis of the technique in Mitchell’s adaptations of novels, a strand of work begun in 2001 that first reached audiences in her 2006 production of Waves.2 This chapter explores the B. Fowler (*)  University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_5

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formative influence of the modernist novel on the Live Cinema genre and examines how Mitchell’s exposure to the techniques of The Wooster Group in 2002 disclosed alternatives to what she perceived as the narrowing horizons of conventional naturalism, informing her work on adapting Virginia Woolf’s writing for the stage. By understanding their grounding in Mitchell’s search for pragmatic solutions to theatricalizing the novel form, Live Cinema’s innovative digital techniques become tools for realizing what Woolf described as the ‘luminous halo’ of consciousness. Indeed, with Waves, a theatre language emerged that put technology to surprising uses, offering spectators the means of exploring subjective experience on two fronts—that of the character, but also their own, inviting them to participate in a perceptual encounter akin to that Woolf’s novel affords its reader. The under-examined link between the novel form and Mitchell’s Live Cinema work is thus crucial to an understanding of this radical transformation in her aesthetic, which before 2006 had been associated with exquisitely detailed fourth-wall naturalism. Although in these works technology fragments the stage and lays bare the processes of cinematic representation, Mitchell’s methods oblige her audience to discover connections between the work’s separated elements, which cohere around ‘consciousness’ as their organizing principle. Indeed, Mitchell has compared this work to Cubism in its ability to show simultaneously ‘all the planes and the perspectives of the construction of character’ (“Om Teatern”). This chapter draws other links between Live Cinema and the dynamic and subversive strategies that energized modernist experimentation as early analogue recording technologies altered the perceptual fields of its key artists. Ultimately, in stressing its relation to subjectivity and consciousness I argue that this technique is most meaningfully viewed as an extension of Mitchell’s work on naturalism, rather than its radical deconstruction.

Novels Vs. Plays: Putting ‘Thought’ on Stage Of the 12 productions thus far created by Mitchell (in collaboration with 59 Productions)3 that bring radio and film techniques into collision with live theatre practice, three have been based on dramatic literature, two have applied the technique to opera, and seven have used novels or novellas as their primary source material. These numbers reveal how constitutive novels have been to the Live Cinema format, whose

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emergence—as Mitchell told an interviewer in 2013—wholly resulted from the challenge of staging Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: ‘We owe it to her exquisite writing. And, since then, novels have been a better source of inspiration for us’ (qtd. in Hogan).4 Novels sit at the heart of Mitchell’s interrogation of the relationship between subjectivity and stage practice for a number of reasons. Selecting novels that focus on a first-person perspective, or in which the author experiments with formal and stylistic means of disclosing perceptual experience, Mitchell has located literary material that circumvents drama’s traditionally logocentric procedures. When I asked her what novels offered her that plays didn’t, she responded, ‘Thought’: ‘Perception, experience, subjectivity. […] That’s what we’re in a lot of the time. We’re not in language, we’re in thought’. Novels thus facilitated Mitchell’s concentration on the internal dimensions and dynamics of character experience, prompting her to realize through tangible and technological mechanisms what she has described as ‘facets of consciousness’ (“Om Teatern”). Adapting novels for live performance re-routed Mitchell’s exploratory quest away from interpersonal relationships, the staple unit of conventional drama, allowing her to travel inwards. Mitchell seized upon Woolf’s 1931 novel in reaction to the boredom and frustration she had begun to experience with ‘mainstream theatre’ and its method of ‘organising narrative with consecutive scenes and a lot of words’ (qtd. in Grylls). For her, this conventionalized form failed to express subjective experience. Mitchell had reached the limits of her exploration of a theatre whose focus on corporeality relied on the communication of a character’s inner life through outwardly expressed behaviour within a concrete social domain. In order to transcend the body’s barrier, and the tyranny of the spoken word as an index of interiority, she turned to a highly literary source material. Although such a decision may appear counterintuitive, Mitchell had selected a modernist text exhibiting a similar refusal to submit to representational norms. Woolf’s poetic counterpoint of the interior thoughts of six characters, structured around significant episodes in their lives spanning six decades, proved generative for a director seeking to ‘find a text that would force me to make better theatre’ (qtd. in Jackson).5 Plays required that Mitchell approach character ‘as a documentary film maker would,’ and even in a character’s solitary onstage moments, soliloquy pressed for ‘everything [to be] mediated by language’ in such a way that actor, director, and spectator could ‘never really get inside [a character’s] head’

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(“Om Teatern”). Woolf’s novel demanded that Mitchell put ‘thought’ on stage, giving form to supple subjectivities reshaping themselves around shifting physical, temporal, and emotional realities. Significantly, the reasons behind Mitchell’s interest in The Waves rehearsed Woolf’s own frustrations with the novel form almost a century earlier. In “Modern Fiction”, a 1925 essay in which she sought to refresh prevailing literary trends, Woolf lamented the fact that ‘life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing’ now refuses to be contained in the ‘ill-fitting vestments’ of the British realist (or, as she termed it, ‘materialist’) novel (160). Attempting to represent that ‘essential thing’ (i.e. subjective experience) in language, she described the myriad impressions continuously received by an individual mind as an ‘incessant shower of atoms’ (160) coming from all sides. Her spatial metaphor establishes what Sarah Bay-Cheng discerns as the ‘modernist temporality,’ a temporality ‘rooted in individual subjectivity’ (“Temporality” 88) where linear-successive time is displaced, or even supplanted, by the simultaneity that characterizes our continuous perceptual bombardment. Mitchell’s interest in subjective temporality is everywhere in evidence, from her favourite poem—T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets6—to the temporal manipulations she has explored in her naturalistic work since Three Sisters (NT 2003), which include the subjective interventions into the flow of ‘real’ time through extreme slow-motion sequences. Many media theorists link modernist investigations of subjective experience with technological disruptions of time and space—what Klemens Gruber calls ‘an encounter with the new conditions of the production of signs’ (247) unleashed by the telephone, telegram, radio, and early cinema, and reflected in scientific theories such as Einstein’s investigation of quantum mechanics, which characterized time and space as dynamic, flexible structures. The relationship between perception, temporality, and technological representation that so fascinates Mitchell is one with a strong modernist lineage. In theatricalizing Woolf’s literary experiment the director raided disciplinary borders, absorbing the techniques of radio and cinema in order to achieve a live performance language able to move between interior thoughts, locations, and temporal zones at great speed—in Chap. 7 alone, Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness prose flows freely between characters in locations as far apart as a café in Rome, a farm in Lincolnshire, Piccadilly tube station, a London club, an attic room, and the side of a mountain in Spain. In 2001, Mitchell organized the first in a series of

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four workshops exploring a theatrical language capable of overcoming— via Woolf—the limitations of conventional naturalism, limitations which the reviewer Paul Taylor summed up, in an aptly cinematic metaphor, as ‘the theatre of permanent long-shot and crisply defined roles’. Radio and cinematic techniques offered pragmatic solutions to the challenge of realizing Woolf’s modernist text within the limited stage resources of the National Theatre’s 400-seat studio space, the Cottesloe. Mitchell, with sound designer Gareth Fry, began by investigating with actors how the live creation of complex aural soundscapes could ‘instantly, effectively—and economically—transport the audience from one location or historical period to the next’ (Kerbel 4). This line of creative enquiry led them to the techniques of radio drama—specifically the methods of the Foley artist who creates sound during the post-production phase in order to enhance a listener’s sense of location.7 Resonating with Woolf’s sea metaphor, the use of microphones to capture and isolate live aural effects made sound waves the dominant, fluid medium through which Mitchell transcended theatre’s fixity, materializing the flux of perceptions, anxieties, and desires caught in Woolf’s prose.8 Mitchell and her team combined literal and abstract approaches to sound, exploring methods designed to work on the intellectual and emotional responses of the audience. The actor Liz Kettle recalled experimenting with techniques following a rehearsal workshop led by Foley artist Jack Stew: ‘Peeling a potato is running a knife along the seam of a cricket ball. Tearing up a polystyrene plate is for when emotions become more jagged’ (qtd. in Jackson). Kettle’s account reveals the dual technical and creative application of the technique, used to score realistic activity as well as emotional states, but it also suggests a surprising consequence of performing Foley artistry in a live theatrical context. Spectators constantly saw the unusual objects used to create realist sound effects including the potato peeling, or a startled bird taking flight from a tree (achieved by flapping a leather glove away from a microphone). As Mitchell’s performers raided objects from stacks of freestanding shelves either side of the playing space, these curious combinations set up a dynamic poetic interplay between physical action and aural effect that, although subverting a naturalist fidelity between object and sound, induced a heightened sensory awareness. As actors took turns voicing extracts from Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narrative directly into microphones placed on a long black table centre stage, the rest of the company moved between various Foley

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stations. Throughout the performance they used roving props or stationary elements like gravel trays to underscore narration. Each of the seven sections of Woolf’s novel begins with an italicized description of a seaside scene witnessed by an omniscient narrator at various points over the course of a single day; as an actor read out these interpolated descriptions of waves and sea a performer drew a violin bow across the rim of a bell, creating an ambient metallic scrape that supplemented the pre-recorded audio of waves washing back and forth against the shore. Gareth Fry’s sound design enhanced the live effects throughout with pre-recorded drones and thuds as well as period music, compiled by music director Simon Allen and used, like the Foley effects, to evoke and shift location and period. Paul Clark’s original composition provided a final acoustic element, played live by an offstage string quartet and written in the style of Beethoven’s experiments with counterpoint. Having learned that Woolf listened to Beethoven’s late quartets as she wrote The Waves, Clark inferred the importance of counterpoint to the novel, offering Mitchell a composition whose lines of melody could separate and combine in response to Woolf’s orchestration of the six subjectivities the novel intertwines (Kerbel 8). Mitchell and her team discovered film later in the process. She and designer Vicki Mortimer quickly abandoned the idea of constructing a series of masking screens on stage, with open sections through which the audience could glimpse actors’ body parts (an arm or a head); nonetheless, the principle of visual fragmentation remained crucial. The novel’s fragmentary prose stimulates, for Mitchell, a particular mode of reader engagement that she intended to replicate in her stage adaptation. As assistant director Lucy Kerbel recalled: Katie discussed with the company how our imaginations do most of the work when we read novels, visualising the world of the story. The author has laid down a framework that our brains flesh out by filling in all the gaps and turning the words on the page into a living, breathing 360-degree world. (4)

For Mitchell, gaps invite readers (and spectators) to fill them in, raising their consciousness of entire ‘living, breathing’ worlds that aren’t limited by external naturalism’s tendency to over-signify its referents. By mapping the reader’s cognitive mode, the company discovered a basis for generating performance that invites a similar exchange. Over the course

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of these exploratory workshops, they settled on film as the most successful strategy for cropping and projecting visual fragments to accompany their work on the aural soundscape, leading Mitchell to invite Leo Warner to join the company as video designer. Before the eight-week rehearsal period that led up to the first performance in 2006, Mitchell streamlined Woolf’s 228-page novel into a 40-page document.9 Rehearsals consisted of working methodically through this document, exploring Foley techniques and devising visual imagery to create dynamic sections of performance that solved the challenges of Woolf’s prose paragraph-by-paragraph. Like the acoustics, this visual imagery combined realist and abstract approaches. Tiny environments were quickly assembled and disassembled across the stage, at times as simple as a handheld board that provided a realistic backdrop (covered, for example, in a William Morris wallpaper). One actor would stand in front of it as his face was projected in close-up on the suspended screen, while another voiced his thoughts. Technology isolated and separated the body of the character from the various voices, both male and female, interchangeably used to narrate his or her stream of consciousness. The cameras also generated poetic and abstract visual imagery. Small tanks and fishbowls brimming with water allowed a performer-operator to capture footage through their transparent sides, distorting the image. Repeated visual sequences of Rhoda’s (Anastasia Hille’s) submerged head, her floating hair tangling with petals or blanketweed, provided a recurring visual motif. Occasionally, an abstract effect would be applied to the digital video itself; when Jinny was filmed frantically dancing after having burned the telegraph announcing Percival’s death, the output was rendered with a halting black and white effect that caught the body of the actress (Liz Kettle) in a series of frozen jagged shapes. Mitchell’s experiments with technology were thus pragmatic attempts to generate dynamic staging solutions in response to Woolf’s text, rather than an avant-garde strategy aimed at deconstructing a source novel. While spectators were consistently able to assess the projected output against its means of construction—just as the aural effects could be related visually to their inventive origins in mundane objects—the aim was to stimulate creative perception, and to work directly on the audience’s emotions, rather than to unmask representational illusion. Although Mitchell’s use of technology clearly challenges orthodoxies of naturalistic theatre praxis, her intermedial methods sought to deepen

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spectators’ immersion in character and subjectivity rather than provoke their critical distance from events. Surprisingly, a means of clarifying this intent is available if we analyse Mitchell’s response as a spectator to the work of an experimental theatre troupe, famed for deconstruction and frequently labelled postmodern, who similarly used technology to bisect their stage.

Learning from The Wooster Group In 2002, Mitchell was invited to watch The Wooster Group’s production of To You, The Birdie! (Phédre) when it played at London’s LIFT festival,10 and to offer her response at a symposium discussing the Group’s work at London’s Cochrane Theatre. The symposium was titled ‘Working over the Classic Text—Adaptations and Interpretations’, and Mitchell’s reflections on The Wooster Group’s multi-sensory techno-corporeal adaptation of Racine’s play, which combined live with recorded elements shuttled across the stage on mobile screens, offers keen insights into the mind of a director already one year into her investigation into adapting The Waves. This touring production from a celebrated avantgarde New York company both inspired Mitchell and fuelled her frustration with British mainstream representational habits, as was evident in her closing remarks: The Wooster Group is transcendentally inspiring. But I do feel that it should be normal. I feel that really passionately. I feel trapped by not being able to play with the written word. (qtd. in Heathfield et al.)

Mitchell was responding positively to the formal innovation and invention of a production that eschewed naturalism, although Racine’s text appeared largely intact. The Woosters uncovered the possibility of escaping naturalism’s trappings while remaining committed to the written word in playful, and meaningful, ways. Unlike the detailed social realism of Mitchell’s own work on Chekhov up to this point, the mise en scène of this adaptation of Phédre was organized around striking visual metaphors—most noticeably the badminton court on which the play was staged, demanding enormous athleticism of the actors as their characters batted a shuttlecock back and forth during key scenes. This distilled the play’s emphasis on social and formal rules into a concrete situation that obliged actors—literally and metaphorically—to play. Most pertinently,

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however, The Wooster Group forced technology into collision with Racine’s neoclassical text, using microphones and projection screens to separate voices from bodies (as well as pre-recorded projections of bodies from their live counterparts). The actor Kate Valk was responsible for embodying Phédre, lending her a neurasthenic intensity pushed to an extreme in her consistent need to evacuate her bowels (with considerable assistance provided by numerous attendants who helped her mount a mobile commode). Valk’s body, however, was divorced from Phédre’s voice and thoughts, which were spoken through a microphone by a male reader (Scott Shepherd). As Mitchell expressed, ‘every piece of text was technically mediated, [which is] a cultural taboo in the [British] mainstream’, but ‘it was in the separation of word and action […] where the deeper radicalism lay’ (qtd. in Heathfield et al.). Not only was Racine’s protagonist divided between two performers, the audience was invited to attend to both simultaneously in the theatrical space. Mitchell’s reflections on these methods reveal the germination of ideas that visibly emerged in her own work four years later. After watching The Wooster Group, she reflected on the implications of this separation of elements from two points of view— the actor’s, and the character’s. In her talk, Mitchell asked Group actors directly if it was hard to be the body and be denied the voice, holding such precise psychological and physical intensity as someone else spoke their characters’ words. She also identified their technique’s propensity for helping actors avoid the dangers posed by words in conventional drama, suggesting that dialogue lures actors towards performances that assume characters are able to say precisely what they mean and think, thus reducing their complexity: In theatre, words [often] tend to lead us to think of character as a fixed unchanging entity, which is certainly not how we experience ourselves as people, however much we might like to. So for me, the device of dividing the voice and the body of one character between two performers started to chip away at this simplification and approached an idea of character which is probably closer to how we experience ourselves. (qtd. in Heathfield et al.)

The Wooster Group, then, liberated Mitchell to conceptualize character as portrayed by multiple labourers and multiple techniques within the frame of a unified production style. Mitchell seems to suggest here that

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a separation of elements held the potential to outdo the subtle synthesis achieved by an individual actor working in a naturalistic mode, appropriating technology as a way of surmounting the simplifications that essentialize character without abandoning character as a category. Although suggesting that such fragmentation made multiple spectatorial responses available—‘No-one owned the words and therefore we were free to play our own tunes on those words’—Mitchell was adamant that, for her, this strategy led her deeper into character, and deeper into the play. As she asserted in the Q&A afterwards, ‘this production revealed Racine’, even as others argued that it deconstructed, distanced, and objectified the play and the playwright.11 Rather than experiencing To You, The Birdie! as a postmodern riff on a neoclassical text, Mitchell was attracted to a fresh aesthetic style that she perceived to be revelatory of that text; she also saw in the Group’s methods the formal means of realizing on stage an experimental investigation into subjectivity akin to that crystallized in Virginia Woolf’s writing.

Living in Looking: The Continuous Present Indeed, Mitchell used Woolf’s autobiographical volume Moments of Being for additional textual material, including an extract at the beginning of Waves that worked as a kind of epigraph for the whole performance.12 Before the production launched into the novel’s first section (the inner thoughts of the six children as they played in the school grounds), a female narrator switched on her desk lamp, picked up a smouldering cigarette in a holder, and read the following extract from Woolf’s diary: If I were a painter I should paint these first impressions of childhood in pale yellow, silver, and green. I should make a picture of curved petals; of shells; of things that were semi-transparent. Everything would be large and dim; and what was seen would at the same time be heard; sounds would come through this petal or leaf—sounds indistinguishable from sights. Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of these first impressions. (Mitchell Waves 7)

These words established a connection between Woolf’s consciousness and her writing in a way that maps directly over Mitchell’s production and its representational methods. Woolf’s imaginative visualisation of childhood memory as an artistic process employs synaesthetic metaphors

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that crash through the borders separating perception from creation, harnessing the sonic reverberations of objects as tools with which to ‘paint’ pictures of her earliest impressions. As Evelyn Ender notes, ‘the text of Woolf’s early memories grants us access to a universe of sensory perceptions “in the making”’ (51), in which perception and artistic production are fundamentally intertwined. However, as Ender also notes, the painterly style evoked by Woolf isn’t that of a realist but rather a modern expressionist painter, creating ‘a universe endowed with phenomenal features that are initially devoid of clearly defined referential qualities’ (52). Like the polystyrene plates that Liz Kettle tore through in order to ‘score’ jagged emotion in Mitchell’s Waves, Woolf’s tuneful petals, pale colours, and semi-transparent objects, despite their abstraction, are full of affective resonance, intensified through their dynamic interplay. In contrast to the use of mainly pre-recorded footage in The Wooster Group’s production, the live construction of elements has proven fundamental to the Live Cinema form. For Sharon Friedman, the emergent quality this facilitates marked the significance of Mitchell’s Waves, which used technology to generate ‘visual and aural impressions simultaneously, and in the process, evoke a sense of immediacy in the viewer that is integral to subjective experience’ (156). The ability to combine camera and microphone outputs in real time is contingent on digital technologies that convert image and sound input into code, which is fed instantaneously through a computer media server where any additional processing occurs. In response to the cueing of an offstage programmer, that aggregated digital content is sampled from and routed through a projector and speakers according to a pre-determined cueing sequence—nothing is recorded; rather, it is streamed. Digital streaming offers a neat analogy for ‘stream-of-consciousness’ here, foregrounding a continuously renewing present tense that absorbs the audience in subjective experience. Indeed, in this theatricalization of cinematic representation, production, post-production, projection, and reception all become simultaneously available for spectatorial scrutiny. Friedman’s description of the implications for ‘the viewer’ signals the two levels at which this symbiosis of creation and perception impacts—engaging spectators in their own creative and subjective encounter with the production’s representational techniques leads them further into a character subjectivity that, rather than being embodied by a unified stage presence, emerges out of visual and aural traces dispersed across a vast network of performers and technological apparatus. Digital tools thus facilitate a ‘modernist temporality’

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(Bay-Cheng “Temporality” 88), allowing us to perceive Live Cinema as fulfilling Lev Manovich’s promise that, through the language of new media, ‘directions that were closed off at the turn of the century when [cinematic realism] came to dominate the modern moving-image culture are now again beginning to be explored’ (308). In exploring those closed off directions, Sarah Bay-Cheng’s work on Gertrude Stein offers material for a fascinating comparison between Mitchell and another key modernist literary experimenter for whom early cinema and literary strategies of representing subjectivity became deeply aligned. Bay-Cheng foregrounds the importance of a ‘continuous present’ (Mama 30) in Stein’s modernist experiments with linguistic repetition, particularly with reference to her ‘early textual portraits’ of friends, which ‘attempted to capture the essence of a person in language’, both ‘as an individual and as the product of artistic creation’ (29). Crucially, Bay-Cheng demonstrates the link between Stein’s ‘continuous present’ and the cinema: ‘Stein recognised that in film the eye has no memory of the individual frame, seeing only the images run together in movement’ (30). Repetition was, as Stein expressed in her consciously guileless style, a linguistic strategy that replicated the temporal quality of cinema where ‘by a continuously moving picture of any one there is no memory of any other thing and there is that thing existing’ (qtd. in Bay-Cheng Mama 29). The quick succession of stills running through a projector, each subtly different from the one it follows, gave Stein direct access to the represented subject in what Woolf might have described as its very moment of being. Stein’s fascination with the archetypal film she described perhaps sounds odd following the twentieth-century’s suspicion of mediation and spectacle in moving image culture. Additionally, she remains dislocated temporally and spatially from the persons or objects recorded in the light dancing on early cinema’s projection screen. However, Mitchell’s digital tools recover the possibilities that inhere in Stein’s analysis of cinema. They bring all elements—including the spectator—into a single moment of temporal simultaneity. The ‘thing existing’ finally merges with the thing looking, and the significance of this temporal symbiosis illustrates how integral seeing the making of is to the meaning of this work. Counter-intuitively, Mitchell’s use of mediating technologies actually rejuvenates Peggy Phelan’s promise that ‘performance’s only life is in the present’ (146).

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Cinema as a Metaphor for Subjectivity Alongside ‘liveness’, the cinematic has emerged as the second crucial context within which this genre operates. More recent productions have included extensive film sets at stage-level that facilitate complex camera set-ups, allowing continuous visual output to be captured. In each case, the screen has become a portal into the subjective experience of its central protagonist in subtly different ways, manifesting memory, desire, or psychosis. Inspired by Woolf, the use of mirrors in an early sequence embedded within Mitchell’s Waves foregrounds what since has become a preoccupation—the reflexive interplay of representational surface and subjectivity. The mirror, then, is Mitchell’s screen in metaphorical guise. Laura Mulvey noted, in her seminal 1975 essay on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, the ‘extraneous similarities between screen and mirror’ (836), fusing the site of cinematic representation with a trope of identity formation common to the theories of both Freud and Lacan. Lacan had famously theorized the mirror-stage of development as a child’s formative gaze into a reflective surface, allowing the fragments of a nascent consciousness to achieve integrity and wholeness (albeit predicated on an illusory sense of mastery). Mulvey identifies the screen of mainstream narrative cinema as a mirror in which the male ego ideal gains his coherence, primarily through watching objectified female subjects depicted as passive objects alternately used to arouse, and help constitute, the male viewer. At the end of her analysis, Mulvey feared that female subjectivity would never emerge as the subject of cinematic exploration given the unacknowledged patriarchal bias of mainstream narrative cinema. In Mitchell’s work, however, it is the mirror itself that reveals a means of challenging that bias. In staging three short sections of text from part two of Woolf’s novel, Mitchell’s company devised a sequence in which Jinny, Susan, and Rhoda stared into the ‘small looking glass on the stairs’ of their boarding school, revealing surprising possibilities in this primitive representational frame. A freestanding board with a mounted two-way mirror was positioned on a table at stage level. Jinny (Liz Kettle) knelt before it, lit by angled floor lamps, and a camera stood behind her, streaming output directly to the screen above where Jinny appeared to be standing before a mirror hanging on a wall. She examined her face as her thoughts were voiced by another: ‘I hate the small looking glass on the stairs […] It shows our heads only. And my lips are too wide, and my eyes are too

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close together’ (Mitchell Waves 31). Once Jinny had passed on to experience the comforts of the full-length mirror, Susan (Kate Duchêne) took up Jinny’s former position; but as her stream-of-consciousness voiced nostalgic memories of home and her father leaning upon a stile smoking, another actor moved the light source behind the mirror to reveal Susan’s father interposed between this freestanding board and a second covered in replica wallpaper. The mirror suddenly became transparent, but the effect on screen was of Susan’s reflection giving way to a memory that ‘I always see, as I pass the looking-glass on the landing, with Jinny in front and Rhoda lagging behind’ (31). Next came Rhoda (Anastasia Hille). As she focused intently on her reflection the same trick was repeated; this time, however, nobody knelt in the void between mirror and replica wall. As Rhoda’s thoughts ran on (‘I am not here. I have no face’ (32)), the projected visual showed a girl eerily unable to locate her image in the mirrored surface. Following Woolf’s cue, Mitchell’s mirror offered a window onto the psychology, memory, and fantasy structures shaping the subjectivity that stood before it. In its surface, protagonists temporarily perceive persons and objects triggered by the neurodynamics that constitute one’s experience of selfhood.13 A matrix of cognitive and psychological processes (imagination, recognition, misrecognition, identification) determine that which is articulated in the looking glass, but also on the Live Cinema screen. Even failed identification generates a strong sense of an identity, albeit experienced by the character as fragmentation. In the case of Rhoda, for instance, Mitchell staged the very invisibility that Mulvey’s essay on cinematic representation sought to render visible. For Rhoda, the mirror-stage literally and metaphorically won’t happen; her inability to achieve identification, wholeness, and selfhood actually makes her fractured subjectivity the very subject of the representation (and in this differs from the repressive tendencies of narrative cinema). Mitchell exposes the female subject’s compromised identity by making her into a protagonist.

Fräulein Julie I end this chapter with an account of Fräulein Julie that shows how the above techniques work to raise spectator and character consciousness, representing new areas of perception and experience than those fitting mainstream narrative patterns—patterns which Mulvey, writing about

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cinema, associates with a patriarchal order. Here, the idea of adaptation arrives full circle, with a dramatic text adapted to facilitate a cinematic exploration of a single consciousness in a live performance context, heavily informed by Mitchell’s work on the modernist novel. Using her screen to hold a mirror up to a subjectivity in flux, Mitchell extended her exploration of a theatre language able to realize the chaotic processual quality that constitutes subjectivity. The result was a poetic montage revelatory of inner thought that broke free from narrative conventions and expectations surrounding ‘dramatic’ action. The production opened with a close-up of Kristin’s hands (Cathlen Gawlich) picking flowers. Julie Böwe, who would provide Kristin’s onscreen face, sat gently humming in a sound-proof booth, her powerfully amplified melody resonating throughout the auditorium. Over at a Foley station, Lisa Guth and Maria Aschauer used props to create the noise of the flowers being picked, as depicted on screen, and the sound of Kristin’s footsteps over gravel and on grass. Through this leisurely paced introductory sequence, these various women, tracked by a series of camera operators, moved Kristin from outside into the kitchen of a large nineteenth-century manor house, where she hung the flowers from a hook to dry and turned to scrutinize her reflection in the kitchen mirror. For the first time, Kristin’s face (Julie Böwe) appeared on screen— mediated by both camera and mirror. Mitchell playfully suggested the futility of seeking the original form amid this series of reflections within reflections, not least because Julie Böwe herself was well clear of the kitchen set that occupied centre stage. Positioned instead in the foreground, with a replica mirror and a freestanding camera capturing her reflection in close-up, the ‘real’ Kristin was displaced by a stand-in (Cathlen Gawlich) in the ‘real’ kitchen. Although the consistent use of Böwe’s face on screen lent helpful continuity for spectators, it became clear that no one element (aural, visual, corporeal) was the privileged site of authenticity. Rather, Kristin’s consciousness would emerge from the interplay of all of these elements, generated by a multiplicity of stage labourers working in a continuous present. As a blank Kristin examined her features in the mirror, in the soundproof booth another actor read text that functioned as her streamof-consciousness—the first four stanzas of Inger Christensen’s poem Alfabet (1981). Using the Fibonacci sequence as a formal engine, the incremental growth of each stanza (moving through the letters of the alphabet from a-n) accommodates repetition, association, and surprising

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juxtapositions of commonplace objects to reveal the metaphysical in the mundane. Like Stein’s repetitive textual portraits, and the Live Cinema form itself, formal constrictions generate a highly individual consciousness of the world: cicadas exist; chicory, chromium, citrus trees; cicadas exist; cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum doves exist; dreamers, dolls killers exist; doves, doves; haze, dioxin and day; day exists; death day; and poems exist; poems, day, death (132–5)14

Importantly, this modernist Scandinavian poet also acted as a counterweight to Strindberg’s casual nineteenth-century misogyny, evoking a complex inner life for a character whose emotions and processes of decision making are given scant attention in the play.15 By incorporating poetry into her adaptation of Strindberg’s drama, Mitchell found the means of rendering dramatic character in a novelistic first-person mode of expression. This opening section also introduced audiences to dominant visual imagery that would recur throughout. Underscored by more of Christensen’s poetry, Kristin prepared the abortion potion that Fräulein Julie would later request for her pregnant bitch. The screen showed Kristin lighting a candle with a match; passing a vase of yellow flowers on the kitchen table; pouring water into a basin and staring at her reflection as the water settled; and making the potion itself in a saucepan (using dried flowers hanging on the wall, as well as chopped offal), then pouring the distillation into a small brown glass bottle that she uncorked with a ‘pop’. In addition to visual imagery, the Foley artistry foregrounded sounds that would be used to creative effect throughout. The sound of running water was particularly prominent—from the jug pouring its contents into the basin (replicated simultaneously in three zones of the stage) to the gushing tap under which Kristin washed a dirty cloth. These myriad visual and aural impressions would later swirl together to form the subjective matter from which Kristin’s three dreams were

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fashioned. When Strindberg’s play has her fall asleep on stage, Mitchell’s screen opened a portal into her subconscious in an extended visual departure from the play’s narrative. The kitchen—now suffused with a ghostly white light—is suddenly inhabited by Kristin alone. She sees herself reflected in a pane of glass as she looks out of a window. Water drips down its reflective surface and it seems to be lightly raining. This image gives way to a shot of hands on a wet mirror. Cutting back to the window, that screen now shows Kristin positioned outside, taking the place of her reflection and peering in. A vase has fallen, leaving a pool of spreading water across the kitchen table’s surface in which the yellow flowers are strewn. Kristin appears back in the kitchen and picks up one of the stems, but a POV shot establishes that it pricks her fingers and she bleeds. Gradually, muffled snatches of Jean and Julie’s dialogue (mediated by microphones) and blurred visual distortions create the impression of Kristin rising out of deep sleep as the kitchen set is returned to its pre-dream state. From the vantage point of Kristin’s sleeping head, a camera finally settles on Julie picking petals from one of the yellow flowers. Then, just as Julie moves to kiss Jean, Kristin stands up, alerting the pair that she’s now awake. As in Christensen’s poetry, a subjective logic supplanted linear temporality. Mitchell’s favourite filmmaker, Andrey Tarkovsky, shows us how responsive this organizational strategy is to Mitchell’s frustrations with mainstream naturalism. He writes in his memoirs of the value of poetic links over ‘traditional theatrical writing which links images through the linear, rigidly logical development of the plot’ (18–20) and thus ‘rest on a facile interpretation of life’s complexities’ (20).16 Dream logic, in this production, became a synecdoche for Tarkovsky’s poetic strategies. The production led audiences into a second dream once Kristin had found her way upstairs through a warren of corridors. The potion bottle, sounds of water running and dripping, reflections (in water, in windows, in mirrors, in the contents of a spilled vase), all these were again the associative landmarks that anchored Mitchell’s exploration of Kristin’s consciousness. But in this more surreal iteration reflections distorted; Kristen’s troubled face morphed into Jean’s and then Julie’s. In exploring the gaps and absences in Kristen’s journey through Strindberg’s play, Mitchell refused to bend character experience into a coherent narrative arc. Like Kristin herself, striving to make sense of events based on her limited visual and aural access to Jean and Julie, Mitchell’s audience were invited to gather, process, and connect images,

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sounds, and events whose relationship was not immediately apparent. In presenting its audience with fragments, Fräulein Julie enacted a theory of spectatorship articulated eloquently by Tarkovsky. For him, associative linking invites the spectator’s ‘affective as well as rational appraisal’ (20), showing great respect for spectators as it invites them to become participants ‘in the process of discovering life’ and sharing in the ‘misery and joy of bringing an image into being’ (20).17 As we saw earlier, Mitchell conceived of the creative relationship between Woolf’s novel and its reader in similar terms. As Ben Brantley found when Mitchell’s first Live Cinema show toured to New York, and in line with Tarkovsky’s levelling of producer and receiver, ‘Waves turns us all into everyday artists, accompanying Woolf as she puts the pieces together once again’. Mitchell’s Fräulein Julie ended with a third dream. As in Strindberg’s text, Kristin last saw Jean and Julie as she left for church on Sunday morning. Exiting the play, she overheard Julie asking Jean to show her a way out of her predicament. This overheard exchange didn’t, as it might in conventional naturalist theatre, cue blackout; rather it triggered a replay. Mitchell took her audience back into Kristin’s first dream, although with some significant differences. This time, light drizzle was transformed into heavy rainfall, and the auditorium filled with a harsh sound like nails falling onto a corrugated tin roof. Kristin stands outside, looking into the kitchen. The table is covered with water spilt from the vase—but now the water flows over the table’s edge, and more drips into its pool from an undisclosed source. A camera, in a slow-pan, shows the brown glass bottle lying uncorked in the pool of water. It continues panning, revealing Kristin, now in the kitchen, picking up from the soaked table a yellow flower which once again pricks her finger. This time, however, the dream runs on. Kristin drops the stem back into the pool of bloody water, and places her hands on the back of a kitchen chair. A camera captures her face in a tight close-up from below, and Kristin tilts her head down to look directly into the camera’s lens. For the first time, she is looking directly at us, the audience, through the screen. The screen itself, hanging above the stage, has suddenly transformed into a giant mirror. Böwe’s eyes confront us directly, and we as spectators find ourselves positioned as Kristin, staring straight back as if at our own reflection. If we are to look for a politics in this work it is here that it lies; the collective labour of 8 actor-technicians over the course of 90 minutes has all led up to this moment, culminating in an experience of identification rather than the fulfilment of a conventional narrative trajectory. We

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are in Kristin’s head, seeing through her eyes. Böwe’s eyes widen and the screen flares white. When I asked Mitchell what kind of impact theatre could have, one of her answers was to get people ‘imagining other people a bit more generously’. Regardless of whether this was her aim in Fräulein Julie, Live Cinema’s invitation to spectators to inhabit the very mind of its subject worked its powerful effect; it made us finally unable to dismiss a woman such as Kristin as ‘without individuality’.

Notes







1.  In this instance Mitchell adapted Strindberg’s play herself, preparing the textual edit in advance of rehearsals. She also prepared the heavily condensed edits of the novels that inspired Waves (NT 2006) and … some trace of her (NT 2008), issuing these to actors as rehearsals began. Mitchell has since delegated this work. For Reise durch die Nacht (Köln 2012), Lyndsey Turner acted as the dramaturg and Duncan Macmillan wrote the dialogue, which was based on Friederike Mayröcker’s novel. Turner also adapted Die Gelbe Tapete (Schaubühne, 2013) from the novella by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Macmillan adapted Peter Handke’s Wunschloses Unglück (Vienna 2013), and wrote and compiled text for The Forbidden Zone (Schaubühne/Salzburg 2014). 2. ‘Live Cinema’ is the term by which Mitchell and her frequent collaborator Leo Warner have come to describe these productions (See Oltermann; 59 Productions). Although instigated and conceptualized by Mitchell, Live Cinema works are the product of collaborative creation, with significant contributions from a dedicated team of sound and video designers. My frequent references to ‘Mitchell’s’ Live Cinema work seek in no way to diminish the crucial role of Leo Warner (or Grant Gee in those productions where he replaced Warner as Director of Photography). They merely reflect the focus of this chapter on Mitchell’s artistic trajectory. 3. This is the name of the video design company of which Leo Warner is Creative Director. Its website documents the Live Cinema shows that 59 Productions realized with Mitchell. See: http://59productions. co.uk/?s=katie+mitchell. 4. Mitchell has now discontinued her intermedial experiments in opera. This is, in part, because the flexibility of the musical tempo plays havoc with the precision required in cueing live film, but also because Mitchell has come to learn that the form is fundamentally ‘about the ear, not about the eyes’ (“Om Teatern”).

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5. The novel had long been on her radar; Mitchell had studied Woolf’s text at university in the late 1980s. See Kerbel (9). 6. As well as including extracts of the poem in her Three Sisters programme, Mitchell also included a large chunk of Four Quartets within the final section of her 1999 staging of Ted Hughes’ version of The Oresteia at the National Theatre. She worked on a staged reading of this poem with the actor Stephen Dillane in 2005, and paired it with Beethoven’s String Quartet Opus 132, which she had learned influenced Eliot as he wrote the poem. 7. The practice emerged in response to the challenge of joining moving pictures together with sound, and took its name from one of the original practitioners of the technique (Jack Foley) who worked in Hollywood in the early twentieth century. 8. See Halliburton: ‘Theatre’s not a naturally fluid medium, which is why it’s so clever that Mitchell sets up a framework based on soundwaves [sic].’ 9. See Jefferies (403). 10. Elizabeth LeCompte’s production visited the Riverside Studios as part of the London International Festival of Theatre from 9 to 23 May 2002. After 18 months of rehearsals and work-in-progress showings, the first public performance took place in Paris in November 2001. 11. Another panel member responded by saying: ‘No, I think it objectified him. I don’t think it tried to make connections, or say they’re just like us. It dropkicked this stuff into the long grass. It’s barbaric.’ (qtd. in Heathfield et al.) 12. The first-person narratives Mitchell selects exhibit complex ties between author and character (or narrator). Peter Handke’s 1972 novel Wunschloses Unglück (A Sorrow Beyond Words), staged by Mitchell in Vienna in 2013, blurs lines between fiction and reality in its account of the suicide of the novelist’s own mother. Mitchell carefully attends to the author’s biography in her preparation, often discovering details that influence her productions. After learning that Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper after a sudden onset of psychotic symptoms following childbirth, Mitchell included a young baby and a nanny in her 2013 adaptation (Die Gelbe Tapete, Schaubühne), forging an explicit link between the protagonist’s behaviour and postnatal depression. 13. Indeed, mirrors have featured in a vast number of Mitchell’s productions. In Wunschkonzert (Köln 2007), Fräulein Rasch spends considerable time scrutinizing her face in the bathroom mirror, often to the accompaniment of Anne Sexton’s poetry. The protagonist Regine strains to recover a childhood memory in Reise durch die Nacht (Köln 2012)—at a key moment she sees her abused mother in the mirror of the train’s toilet cubicle instead of her own reflection; in Die Gelbe Tapete (Schaubühne

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2013), the wallpaper itself functions as a distorted version of a mirror, in which the protagonist sees her own psychosis embodied as a phantom woman trapped in the wallpaper pattern. She eventually recognizes the woman in the wallpaper as herself, and scratches it off in an effort to release her. 14. This is Susanna Nied’s English translation of Christensen’s Norwegian original, which was spoken in German in Mitchell’s production. Christensen’s poem contains 14 stanzas each based on one letter of the alphabet (a–n). The words for ‘day’, ‘death’, and ‘poetry’, for instance, all begin with the letter ‘d’ in Norweigan. 15. In his preface to Miss Julie, Strindberg describes Kristin as ‘a female slave’ and a ‘subordinate figure’ who only receives abstract characterization because of her position in a servile class who are ‘without individuality, showing only one side of themselves while at work’ (111). 16. Although Tarkovsky rejects linearity, he does so in order to achieve a deeper realism. As Sitney argues, he ‘saw cinema as a means for the acute observation of a complex temporality that fluidly spanned duration, memory, and dreams; for him, to “sculpt in time” was to unveil the truth of lived time, not to invent imaginatively new temporal structures’ (211). 17. See Tarkovsky: ‘The method whereby the artist obliges the audience to build the separate parts into a whole, and to think on, further than has been stated, is the only one that puts the audience on a par with the artist in their perception of the film’ (21).

Works Cited 59 Productions. “The making of a Live Cinema Show – Forbidden Zone – directed by Katie Mitchell.” Online video clip. Vimeo, 23 Jul. 2014. Web. 23 Dec. 2014. Bay-Cheng, Sarah. Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. ———. “Temporality.” Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Eds. Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, & Robin Nelson. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010. 85–90. Print. Brantley, Ben. “Six Lives Ebb and Flow, Interconnected and Alone.” Rev. of Waves, dir. Katie Mitchell. The New York Times, 17 Nov. 2008. Web. 5 Feb. 2014. Christensen, Inger. “Alphabet.” Trans. Susanna Nied. I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Eds. Caroline Bergvall et al. Los Angeles: Les Figues Press, 2012 [1981]. 132–7. Print. Ender, Evelyn. Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science, and Autobiography. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Print.

118  B. Fowler Friedman, Sharon. “‘Sounds Indistinguishable from Sights’: Staging Subjectivity in Katie Mitchell’s Waves.” Text & Presentation. Ed. Kiki Gounaridou. The Comparative Drama Conference Series 6, 2009. 154–66. Print. Gruber, Klemens. “Early Intermediality: Archaeological Glimpses.” Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Eds. Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, & Robin Nelson. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010. 247–57. Print. Grylls, Pinny. “Katie Mitchell on Directing Multimedia Productions.” Online video clip. YouTube, 6 May 2011. Web. 3 Mar. 2013. Halliburton, Rachel. Rev. of Waves, dir. Katie Mitchell. Time Out, 22 Nov. 2006. Print. Heathfield, Adrian (Chair), Katie Mitchell, Hugh Denard & Deborah Levy. “Working over the classic text—adaptations and interpretations.” Recording of a symposium on The Wooster Group. Cochrane Theatre, Central St. Martins, London, 15 May 2002. British Library Sound Archive. Hogan, Emma. “Double Vision: Multimedia Theatre.” Economist.com (Prospero Blog). 1 May 2013. Web. 5 Feb. 2014. Jackson, Tina. “Take a Daring Plunge into the Waves.” Rev. of Waves, dir. Katie Mitchell. Metro, 29 Sep. 2008. Print. Jefferies, Janis. “‘…some trace of her’: Katie Mitchell’s Waves in Multimedia Performance.” Women: A Cultural Review 22.4 (2011): 400–10. Print. Kerbel, Lucy. “Waves Education Workpack.” Nationaltheatre.org.uk. 2006. Web. 1 Feb. 2013. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001. Print. Mitchell, Katie. Waves. London: Oberon Books, 2008. Print. ———. “Om Teatern om tekniken.” Katie Mitchell in discussion at the Bergmanfestivalen 2012, Online video clip. YouTube, 28 May 2012. Web. 9 Aug. 2013. ———. Personal interview with the author. 4 Sep. 2012. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy & Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999 [1975]. 833–44. Print. Oltermann, Philip. “Katie Mitchell, British theatre’s true auteur, on being embraced by Europe.” The Guardian, 9 Jul. 2014. Print. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked, The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Sitney, P. Adams. “Andrey Tarkovsky, Russian Experience, and the Poetry of Cinema.” New England Review 33.3–4 (2014): 208–41. Print. Strindberg, August. Eight Famous Plays. Trans. Edwin Björkman & N. Erichsen. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co, 1953. Print.

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Tarkovsky, Andrey. Sculpting in Time. Trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003 [1986]. Print. Taylor, Paul. “National’s gamble on this experimental Woolf adaptation pays off.” Rev. of Waves, dir. Katie Mitchell. Independent, 17 Nov. 2006. Print. Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 4: 1925 to 1928. Ed. Andrew McNeille. London: The Hogarth Press, 1994 [1925]. 157–64. Print.

CHAPTER 6

The Spirit of the Source: Adaptation Dramaturgy and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage Jane Barnette

In 2014, Michael Haverty and I developed a new adaptation of Stephen Crane’s 1895 novel The Red Badge of Courage for Kennesaw State University and 7 Stages theatre in Atlanta. The following year, I directed our adaptation for Auburn University’s new black box theatre. In this chapter, I reflect on these two productions to demonstrate some of the practical ways in which dramaturgical awareness is critical to the task of adapting literary works for the stage. There are several scholars who have written about theatrical adaptation, using case studies and interviews as evidence for their analysis. When these scholars address dramaturgy, though, they usually reference the kind of dramaturgy that signals textual analysis, or the structure (and sometimes process) of (arriving at) the adapted script.1 The sort of dramaturgy I indicate here is practicebased, with representation from the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA). Typically, this dramaturgical practice falls into one of two categories: new play or production dramaturgy—wherein

J. Barnette (*)  University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_6

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the dramaturg works primarily with playwrights (or adapters) to shape and improve a new script. Production dramaturgs work with directors and the creative team, with the ultimate goal of communicating with the audience via program notes, lobby displays, websites, and/or study guides. Adaptation dramaturgy (or adapturgy, as I call it) combines the practices of new play dramaturgs with those of production dramaturgs: theatrical adaptations require dramaturgs to have a dual focus on both the relationship between the source-text and the adapted script and the production choices that transform the adaptation into the languages of the stage. By outlining the specific processes we found helpful in bringing Crane’s novel to life, this chapter demonstrates how vital such a dramaturgical sensibility can be to the adaptation process—indeed, as I argue elsewhere, dramaturgy is the very lifeblood of stage adaptation.2 There were several factors influencing our decision to adapt this novel.3 For one, the fact that Crane’s novel was in the public domain was essential for us—our earlier attempts to secure rights to other literature had been unsuccessful, so we embraced the freedom such a source-text offered. Because our source-text was not managed by an estate or living author, we could take creative risks and liberties that might not have been possible otherwise. For this reason, as well as the financial reality of royalties, experimental theatre companies often gravitate towards adaptations of public domain material. 7 Stages is one such experimental theatre, located in the historically ‘hip’ Little 5 district of Atlanta. The Department of Theatre & Performance Studies (T&PS) at Kennesaw State University (a public university with a history as a commuter school serving a culturally diverse population) supplements its permanent curriculum and season offerings with courses and productions led by professional theatre-makers from the Atlanta area; however, this was the first partnership of its kind for T&PS. Michael and I had the opportunity of a ‘soft opening,’ as part of the T&PS season—then, after two weeks off (during which time we revised the script), we had one week to rehearse the production in the studio theatre of 7 Stages, before our professional run began. In addition to material concerns about public domain, producing Red Badge of Courage during a season that coincided with the 150th anniversary of the Kennesaw Mountain battle of the Civil War appealed to us for the possible publicity this might generate as well as the dramaturgical energy upon which we hoped to capitalize—if the city of Kennesaw was

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going to spend time and devote labour to commemorating this battle, our cast and crew could benefit from their research and outreach activities, we reasoned. These incentives alone would never motivate us to undertake such a challenge, however—there were also several aesthetic and personal reasons we wanted to adapt Red Badge. For Michael, who is a Civil War devotee, Crane’s novel had burned a psychic imprint on his soul: he loved the language and the spirit of the Youth’s story, and had long been fascinated with the prospect of making theatre about the Civil War. In my case, I was unfamiliar with Red Badge and Crane, but as I encountered Crane’s poetic language and recognized the dissociative patterns of trauma he was describing, I found myself drawn further into the literary and historical world the author had conjured. In US public schools, The Red Badge of Courage is often a required text in junior high or early high school, and the basic story is fairly simple: a young man—Henry Fleming, first identified as ‘a youthful private’—joins the Union army during the height of the American Civil War, leaving his mother behind.4 He doubts that he will have the courage to face the enemy in battle and indeed he does run away, eventually getting a head wound that others assume is his ‘red badge’ earned in combat. Paradoxically, Henry is both a coward and a hero: he allows his peers to believe he has honourably fought and survived a shot to the head, but also comes to see the refined, more subtle ways of demonstrating courage, and the final lines of Crane’s novel suggest the Youth has reached a peaceful resolution, that all is right with the world: ‘Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds’. Most of the scholarship surrounding The Red Badge of Courage focuses on interpretive strategies used to assess whether (and how) Henry is a hero, and if he is not, whether (and how) he matures over the course of the novel. Because Crane is deliberately ambiguous, the novel ultimately ‘tests us nearly as much as it does Henry Fleming, eliciting judgments that in turn judge us more than is true of most fictional texts’.5 Mixing detailed naturalistic descriptions with a knack for ‘the landscape of hysteria’, the author invites the reader to experience the confusion and trauma of war.6 His great innovation, and what drew us to the text, is the way Crane presents war ‘as a system of violent insatiability’, emphasizing the perspective that combat ‘does not produce heroes; it produces mangled bodies’.7 Thus, it is an ironic vision of war: on the surface it appears to uphold heroism and manly battles, but upon reflection Crane’s tone is unmistakably wry, even sarcastic.

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How, then, might we adapt this text? How could we honour the bloody ‘crimson blotches on the pages of the past’, while also embodying the irony in the author’s voice?8 At the heart of these adaptation decisions is a slippery concept that calls for greater attention, especially when considering the process and product of adaptation: ‘the spirit of the piece’. This notion—that a text has a spirit, and that we might arrive at agreement about what the nature of that ‘spirit’ is—is crucial to the approach I take as adaptation dramaturg. Above all else, it is this idea that becomes the decisive factor in my desire to collaborate on any project, but especially new adaptations like the one Michael and I created with Red Badge. What I call spirit others might call ‘essence’—insofar as they also seek to communicate the most vital part of the source-text. While essence and spirit are both useful concepts to help articulate what guides the creative work of adapting literature for the stage, my choice of spirit stems from the word’s meaning of ‘the animating or vital principle in man (and animals); that which gives life to the physical organism, in contrast to its purely material elements; the breath of life’.9 ‘The breath of life’ can be seen as the transformation of a story from the singular experience of reading it on the page to the communal one of experiencing it performed live—by adapting it for the stage, we give breath and embodiment to stories. Also, unlike essence, spirit conveys a kind of numinous energy—an encounter with something beyond the material world (or things that might be experienced with the five senses) that both fascinates and terrifies the reader. In The Idea of the Holy (1923), Rudolf Otto coined the word numinous to refer the quality of a sacred encounter. Otto defined numinous as that which evokes mysterium tremendum et fascinans, or an ineffable experience to which we are powerfully drawn and of which we are simultaneously terrified. The paradox of being both attracted and repulsed suggests that this is an uncanny encounter, that perhaps it registers as familiar and wholly unknown at once, adding to the push–pull sensation of discovering the numinous. In my experience as dramaturg of numerous adaptations, it is frequently this numinous/uncanny quality that adapters target for transformation into live performance. As others have argued, the stage is a place of disappearance, surrogation, and ghosts—so it makes sense that adapters would be drawn to these aspects when considering how to give breath to literature for theatrical purposes.10 The centrality of breath becomes even more visible in adaptations (like ours) that use puppets, as the actors bring an inanimate object to life, making the puppet appear to

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breathe. As Dassia Posner argues, ‘every puppet performance is, to some degree, a performance of the ür-narrative of life’.11 That is, by choosing to use puppetry (or to give life to an object), adapters emphasize the animating quality itself, an experience that is frequently uncanny for spectators. Add to this the ephemeral nature of the stage, combined with the collective memory of all who have walked the boards before—these factors might influence adapters’ inclusion of numinous scenes. Or perhaps the nature of adaptation itself invites a focus on the uncanny—either way, my research has suggested that by looking for the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, we can better see the dramaturgical research undergirding theatrical adaptations. In the case of Red Badge of Courage, both Michael and I were particularly intrigued by the manner in which Crane narrates the introspection of the Youth (Henry Fleming)—the way that his imagination and inner monologues transform through his experience with the ‘fog of war’, through encounters with death and the dying, and what we came to understand as a dissociative pattern not uncommon to survivors of (natural and man-made) trauma. Whereas other adapters have chosen to depict this inner life through monologues and character speech (including narration), we decided not to include word-based narration in our staging. Most extant theatrical adaptations of Red Badge are targeted for young audiences, a genre that often employs narration and storytelling techniques. In addition, these theatre for young audiences (TYA) adaptations are frequently penned with the expectation of touring, meaning that the scenic designs for these tours are minimal.12 Not only does Crane avoid using first person (with the exception of dialogue) throughout the book, but the descriptive passages about the landscape are so vivid that nature virtually becomes a character. Recognizing the primacy of image and sound for Crane, we sought to capture the spirit of this piece through three visual/aural narrative approaches: the portal, the projected animation and musical score, and the puppet. Our earliest conversations about the novel began with sharing the impressions that stuck with us the most—while we had slightly different examples, Michael and I both remembered the moments when the Youth encountered death as our pivotal images. This organizing principle—the perception that, when boiled down to its core, Red Badge is about the Youth’s terrifying yet mesmerizing experience of facing mortality—influenced our scenic design with our inclusion of a portal. We knew we wanted this portal to function metaphorically in addition to

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serving as an actual entrance or exit: we wanted to signal a threshold between the world of the living and the dead, between the world that we experience with our five senses and what lies beyond. Because we kept referring to the ‘hell of war’, as well as the ‘fog of war’, we decided to nudge those metaphors into the design—in early discussions, I brought into the mix images of the medieval hellmouth, as depicted in artwork as well as on vernacular religious drama stages, as inspiration. Hellmouths, usually crafted as gaping beast mouths with sharp teeth, featuring the scent of rotting animal flesh and filled with various (actors costumed as) demons, reminded audiences that hell is repulsive and terrifying, and coincided with the church-based message of this type of medieval theatre: to repent and be saved from everlasting damnation. While neither of us considered the source text particularly religious (much less Christian), we were intrigued by the possibility of salvation that we saw in the Youth’s encounters with death. In our script, the earliest description of this portal states that it ‘is a large hole [about four feet diameter, raised about three feet from the floor] in the center of sheet [of fabric that stretches from the back wall over the heads of the spectators] through which set pieces and performers may come and go’.13 In consultation with our student set designer (Alyssa Brosy), the portal became a giant barrel of a gun, big enough for actors to crawl through.14 The unnaturally large gun barrel, along with the use of miniature muslin tents in the opening scene, establish a warping of scale that unmoors the audience from what is ‘natural’ or ‘real’. By making the portal a larger-than-life rifle barrel, we absorbed the concept of the feudal hellmouth into an industrial capitalist vision of life and death. This coincided with other parts of our early conversations about ‘the spirit of the piece’, insofar as it represented a machine in the garden, mirroring Crane’s consistent juxtaposition of the man-made world of firearms and war with the challenges of the natural world, which often prove to be just as inhospitable to the Youth. Even so, the oversized barrel still functions as a sacred portal, and its selective use underscores how it can be seen as a threshold space of significance. For example, the first entrance through the barrel is made by the puppet, manned by three puppeteers standing behind the barrel (see Fig. 6.1). The sound effect is one of ‘distant rumbling’, meant to be ‘like birthing, the BIG BANG’.15 The next entrance through the barrel is of another uncanny object—‘paper trees with tops shaped somewhat like bullets, so that as they enter through the hole they seem like bullets

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Fig. 6.1  The first entrance through the barrel is made by the puppet, manned by three puppeteers standing behind the barrel. Photo credit Chris Burk of Stungun Photography

exiting a gun barrel’.16 From the audience perspective, this moment first seems familiar (a bullet coming out of a gun), before the entire prop is seen. Once the objects are outside of the portal, they are recognized as trees (or tree-like items), a transformation that is both surprising and disquieting, as something that once appeared to be man-made (a bullet) has been understood to be a (prop representing) a living natural thing (a tree).17 The next use of the barrel as portal is when the Youth has been wounded, when the puppet guides him through the barrel, as an exit rather than an entrance. Following this, the lights rise on him sleeping within the barrel after he has been discovered by his fellow soldiers. In the black rage section, the Youth turns his back to the audience, faces the barrel, and continues to reload and shoot at the screen animation. The way the Youth processes those challenges was of particular interest to us, insofar as it was both crucial to the source-text and (arguably) potentially the most difficult part of Crane’s novel to dramatize. How do you stage a journey of the mind, in the midst of a story about the

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Civil War? In the medium of literature that is typically read individually and silently, the mental diversions and struggles of the Youth are immersive, even against the backdrop of the battleground scenes and his close encounters with death. But on stage, it is different. We could choose to have the Youth tell the audience what he was thinking, in a series of monologues, but since we had chosen to omit all other narration, this felt out of place. We wanted the experience of watching the play to be intense and visceral, a theatre of cruelty immersion into the terrible truth of war that took inspiration from Antonin Artaud. Thus, we decided to privilege image and sound over language, and depicted the Youth’s inner thoughts through projected animations, supported by original music composed by Damon Young. While there are also instances where animation supported the mise en scene more generally (e.g. establishing the time of day, weather, or location), its primary purpose with regard to the adaptation dramaturgy was to represent the Youth’s dreamlike and nightmarish thoughts. The first time this occurs in our script is when the Youth daydreams about the circus, while the army waits for their marching orders. ‘What did they march us out here for?’ he asks. ‘The battle’s somewhere else. We’re just a demonstration. I want to see some action!’18 As if queued by his demand for action, on the screen we begin to see circus imagery and we hear the barker say, ‘If it’s action you want, well then my boy, join the circus parade!’ (see Fig. 6.2) The barker is played by the same actor who plays the Lieutenant as well as Tall (or Jim Conklin), the soldier who becomes a father-like mentor to the Youth. The fact that one actor plays these three roles helps relay our intention that the advertisement of the circus acts sound much like the pitching of the military—that buying tickets is like signing up to join the army, that playing a shooting game is like being in glorious battle, and so on. The frenetic energy of the circus is matched by the chaotic rush to battle that follows on the tail of this divertissement, as the images on the screen transform from circus activities like a magician and animals playing instruments to a large red reptile—‘the swollen red animal’, in Crane’s words. At this point, the music also changes from a circus parade to a war march, and the Lieutenant rushes onstage, saying ‘You’ve got to hold’em back!’19 In the following sequence, as the Youth encounters his first actual battle, the animation continues to display his terror by morphing the red animal (a snake in the Atlanta shows and a dragon in the Alabama production), so that it eventually ‘vomits red bullets’ (see Fig. 6.3).

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Fig. 6.2  The youth daydreams about the circus. Photo credit Robert Pack, Widescreen Video Productions

The next symbolic use of the animation occurs near the end of the play, but before I turn to that moment, I want to zero in on how the music helps establish the pivotal death of the Tall soldier, who dies before the Youth’s eyes in what Crane describes as a ‘hideous hornpipe’ of a macabre dance that almost resembles a grand mal seizure. This encounter deeply affects the Youth, not only because he witnesses the gruesome death of his closest friend but also because Tall dies the way a soldier should die: from the wounds he has received during war,

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Fig. 6.3  Youth encounters his first actual battle, the animation continues to display his terror by morphing into the red animal. Photo credit Robert Pack, Widescreen Video Productions

because he stayed on the battleground and fought, rather than running away from the danger (as the Youth has done). This extended death scene stood out to us in the source-text as an event that lent itself quite well to theatre: it is already dramatic and spectacular in the novel when described by language alone—when embodied in live performance, it is mesmerizing yet terrifying. Consider the theatricality of Crane’s description of Tall’s downward spiral (which we used as stage directions):

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There is a resemblance in Jim to a devotee of a mad religion, blood-sucking, muscle-wrenching, bone-crushing. […] Suddenly his form stiffens and straightens. Then it is shaken by a prolonged ague. For a moment the tremor of his legs causes him to dance a sort of hideous hornpipe. His arms beat wildly about his head. His tall figure stretches itself to its full height. Then it swings forward, slow and straight, in the manner of a falling tree. The body bounces on the earth.20

Dramaturgical research revealed that the hornpipe is a folk dance of Celtic descent, with active legwork and folded or otherwise non-active arms, sort of like a jig. The hideous (or grotesque) version of this might exaggerate the disconnect between the legs and the rest of the body, as if they were convulsing of their own accord, quite apart from the rest of his wounded body. The music for this section supports the frantic pace of the hornpipe, with a forward-driving beat punctuated by a chord-playing fiddle. The chords increase in intensity throughout the song, played during the stage directions quoted above. Young’s ‘Hornpipe’ is surprisingly upbeat for a swan song, but fits the bizarre explosive dance that accompanies Tall’s strange death. For those who have read Crane, this passage was probably memorable and yet seeing it in a live performance, with an actor mimicking those spasms accompanied by such agitating music, is likely more extreme of an experience. The result is a dance that is both spellbinding and horrific (see Fig. 6.4). The Youth also gets wounded later in the story, but his injury comes from an exasperated soldier who bashes him in the head with his rifle butt, not from fighting the enemy in an honourable way. Nevertheless, when he is discovered and nursed back to health by the Loud soldier, the Youth never corrects his assumption that the wound was sustained in battle, instead basking in the misplaced respect that his peers pay him. This pride boils over into the next symbolic animation sequence, of the Youth’s ‘black rage’, that rises when he and Loud charge the enemy and seize the flag. Because our adaptation pulled in parts of the lost manuscript from Crane’s earlier draft of Red Badge, featuring what we perceived to be a complete loss of moral compass, this moment of rage was important to symbolize as part of the Youth’s descent into madness. By definition, rage is an uncontrolled and violent variant of anger—to symbolize this loss of control, the animation imagery gets chaotic, as does the music. For the Auburn production, the animation designer Matt

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Fig. 6.4  Bryan Mercer as ‘Tall’ in his death dance, the ‘hideous hornpipe’. Photo credit Robert Pack, Widescreen Video Productions

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Kizer created a swirling hypnotic effect for the black rage section that suggested a blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy, as if the Youth were undergoing (or spectators were invited to take part in) a surreal expansion of consciousness.21 In so doing, the images projected on the screen encouraged a psychedelic experience—not in the modern sense of mind-altering drug usage, but from the Ancient Greek, meaning to make the soul visible.22 Crucial to our understanding of the Youth’s journey was an analysis that his quest for courage is about more than physical or mental bravery. The Youth wants enlightenment, or to become his highest/best self, and the war provides a convenient topos for an extraordinary experience that might lead to this higher self. The puppet, therefore, became a physical manifestation of the Youth’s heightened consciousness. The puppet, built with long rods and meant to be operated by two to three puppeteers, is costumed identically to the Youth and resembles him with the striking exception that it has no facial expression or fully recognizable face. Our request to puppet designer Tanner Slick was to build a ‘faceless’ puppet; the resulting design achieved our goal by including eyes (with what appears to be a concerned expression on the puppet’s forehead) but no mouth. The absence of a mouth allowed the puppet to mirror the facial expression of the Youth, to morph more easily with a spectator’s imagination. This detail became so important that when Slick was commissioned to build another puppet for the Auburn remount of Red Badge, we ultimately chose to use the original puppet, because the newly designed one was too expressive—not only did he have a mouth, but his eyes were chiselled out and there were deep nasolabial folds that indicated age/wisdom, ultimately making the new puppet not functional for the spirit of our production (see Fig. 6.5). In complement to this design, the costume design in both productions featured a Kepi hat that could be pulled low on the actors’ brow bones to hide their eyes, so that only their mouths were visible. Thus, when functioning as puppeteer, the half of the actor’s face that remained visible completed the part of the puppet’s face that was absent. The simultaneous presence of the puppeteer and the puppet brings attention to the theatricality of the action in Red Badge, heightening the visual meta-narrative onstage. By virtue of having a puppet onstage, before even considering the role the puppet plays in the adaptation, the audience is encouraged to consider the ‘spirit of the piece’, insofar as ‘a puppet is by its very nature dead, whereas an actor is by her very nature

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Fig. 6.5  Two puppet designs by Tanner Slick; Photo Credit Parker Stripling

alive. The puppet’s work then … is to strive towards life’.23 Our adaptation, both in script and staging, further emphasizes this ür-narrative, adding to it the quality of striving towards heightened consciousness. The puppet appears four times in our stage adaptation: first, during a dreamlike memory/premonition sequence at the top of the play,

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then when he encounters the corpse in the ‘chapel of trees’, again when the Youth is injured accidentally, and at the end of the play, when the puppet carries a folded flag (see Fig. 6.6). While the initial and final appearance of the puppet function primarily as framing devices to establish the disconnect between the Youth’s imagination or visions and his reality, the middle two appearances are tied directly to the puppet as a visible object that stands in for the concept of the Youth’s enlightened self, as well as his very survival.

Fig. 6.6  At the end of the play, the puppet carries a folded flag, marching through the portal. Photo credit Robert Pack, Widescreen Video Productions

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By directing the puppeteers to make the Red Badge puppet float in mid-air, we further emphasized the numinous quality of the puppet. This aspect, in addition to the fact that only the Youth interacts with the puppet, helps spectators recognize that the puppet is a figment of the Youth’s imagination, or that the puppet can be seen only by the sixth sense, as a ghost or spirit of sorts. In the first of these midpoint instances, the Youth has just run away from battle for the first time—in fear for his life, he does what he has been contemplating doing for some time: he escapes the carnage to protect himself, and in so doing abandons his fellow soldiers. He justifies this cowardly act by telling himself (and the audience) that ‘I done good saving myself, just a little piece of the army … if none of the little pieces were smart enough to save themselves, why, where would the army be then?’24 Although his words appear to justify the actions, inside he remains torn (‘his brain in a tumult of agony and despair’) and he retreats further into a forest, which Crane describes as featuring a ‘religious half-light’, and containing a ‘chapel of trees’. This experience is meant to be numinous, and offers the Youth an opportunity for redemption through an encounter with his own mortality when he finds the corpse in short order. To guide him along this extraordinary path, the puppet appears and hovers over the Youth’s shoulder. Within the forest, represented on stage by two actors embodying trees, the Youth happens upon the corpse of a fallen soldier.25 This dead man, in Crane’s words (used as stage directions in our script), ‘is dressed in a uniform that had once been blue, but is now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the Youth, are the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth is open. Its red has changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray skin of the face run little ants’.26 The puppet reaches out to the Youth and turns his head to face the corpse, at which sight he nearly faints, falling to the ground in shock. Once more the puppet approaches the Youth, with the intention of having him look death courageously in the face. The Youth cannot stomach the sight, and pushes the puppet away, keeping his gaze shielded from the corpse. In defeat, the puppet exits, and the encounter is incomplete—the opportunity for numinous wisdom is thwarted. In this scene, there are two puppets—the corpse and the primary puppet, but only the latter moves.27 Still, the design of the corpse puppet matters here, as it stems from our adaptation vision, or what we interpreted as ‘the spirit of the text’. Without question, we intended for the

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corpse puppet to evoke shock, to make spectators feel some of the same push–pull energy that the Youth feels upon seeing this dead man. To achieve this, in both productions the designers created puppets that were uncanny in their likeness to a skeletal human figure, with ample decomposition of the ‘flesh’ made apparent by the black light that we used to illuminate the portal in which the corpse sat. By using ultraviolet paint on the corpse-puppet, the designers could draw attention to the figure immediately, as it was dark elsewhere on stage and this was the only instance of black light used, emphasizing how unique this encounter was. The next time the puppet appears is when the Youth sustains his concussion, and falls dizzily to the ground. Helping him to his feet, the puppet checks on the Youth with concern, but when the Youth reaches out to grab the puppet, hoping to cradle him in his arms, the puppet dodges him, maintaining a close distance. As the Youth stumbles across the stage, the puppet gently guides him upstage toward the portal/gun barrel, and nudges him to enter it. He crawls through the hole and the lights fade out; when they come back up we see the Youth’s silhouette on the projection screen, staggering about. Throughout both of these middle puppet sequences, because the puppet appears when the Youth is alone and in need, the audience associates the puppet with the Youth, even if spectators remain uncertain as to the exact nature of the puppet’s being (is he real or imagined?) or the purpose of his visits. While they may have different ways of describing it, most spectators also recognize that the puppet represents a numinous creature, in part because of the uncanny nature of puppets as animated dolls, though here this is further emphasized by the times the puppet appears onstage as well as its specific design—to resemble the Youth in small scale, but without a mouth or fully designed face. By animating the more enlightened part of the Youth’s consciousness as a puppet, this adaptation uses primarily the visual language of the stage to articulate what we saw as the ‘spirit of the piece’. The spectacle of puppetry, combined with the projected animations, original music, and live silhouette work, give breath to both the Youth’s inner mental state and the disquieting irony of war that we understood as Crane’s vision in Red Badge. The frame of the adaptation—a brief opening and closing chorus of sorts—shows where we took the most liberty in departing from the familiar novel’s dialogue, in service to our overall vision. In particular, the ending to our Red Badge demonstrates the merge between new play and production dramaturgy that is adapturgy in two

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distinct but related ways. First, our closing choral scene refracted our opening one, by including key lines from the script, but assigning them to different characters. For example, while the Youth originally says ‘Yeh ain’t at all like yeh was’ to Loud, in the last choral section (which takes place directly after the ‘black rage’ scene where the Youth erupts in a shooting mania, continuing to shoot well after the threat is gone), it is the Sarcastic Soldier who says this line to him, as he leaves the stage. Perhaps the most noticeable bookend is the repetition of the haunting Victory song that occurs at the top of the show, in this final choral moment, and in the middle, just before Tattered’s scene with Youth: Sing a song of Victory Pocket full of bullets Five and Twenty dead men Baked in a pie. When the pie was opened The dead began to sing Wasn’t that a dainty dish To set before the King.

The repetition of these lines along with their placement highlight how adapturgy shaped our directing concept for staging Red Badge—the recognition that war warps the way soldiers perceive reality. Thus, rather than ending on a hopeful note (as the published novel does), Michael and I chose to honour the ambiguity and irony that we most admired in Crane’s voice. As part of the process of creating the script (that is, within the framework of new play dramaturgy), I researched the publication history of The Red Badge of Courage. Serendipitously, the version of the novel I first encountered included chapters and sections that were not in the book as it is commonly known.28 Several pages from his original manuscript, including the entirety of Chap. XII, never made it into the Appleton publication of 1895, probably because they could be read as blasphemous.29 According to Henry Binder, who made the reestablishment of the missing text his personal academic mission, the omission of these pages makes the final chapter of the published Red Badge ‘erratic and confusing [as it] terminates on an inappropriate note’.30 In the deleted sections, especially in the original Chap. XII, the Youth positions himself above nature, as a ‘prophet’ who philosophizes a ‘new world modeled by the pain of life’.31

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Michael and I decided to reclaim several passages from this lost chapter, adding them to the finale, so that the Youth’s last words are: ‘I am entirely different from other men. I am the prophet of a new world. The laws of life are useless. I abandon the world!’32 As he spoke these lines to the audience, the actor playing the Youth climbed up on top of the gun barrel with the flag he captured, waving it aloft as he opened his eyes abnormally wide.33 The image was one of a man who has lost his grip on reality, a man who is hallucinating and who, in his passionate commitment to these visions, is terrifying in his egomaniacal power. Directly following this proclamation, the puppet begins to march slowly through the portal, holding a folded flag. The final image is of the faceless puppet looking up into the audience, as the lights dim. The result of these adapturgy interventions was an adaptation that fully utilized the possibilities of live performance, by focusing on spectacle and unmooring the tidy resolution that poetic justice offers in the published novel. Our use of the portal, projections, and the puppet to articulate visually the daydreams, terror, and dissociation that Crane describes with the written word honoured the spirit of the piece without spoken narration. In so doing we highlighted the numinous possibilities of stage adaptation, creating a Red Badge that was uncanny for spectators with either experience of war or with Crane’s novel. For those audience members especially, watching our adaptation was simultaneously familiar and strange, nostalgic, and horrible.

Notes



1. Recent books on theatrical adaptation include Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat, edited by Margherita Laera (Bloomsbury, 2014), Page to Stage: the Craft of Adaptation, by Vincent Murphy (U of Michigan P, 2013), and Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film, edited by Katja Krebs (Routledge, 2014). The December 2014 issue of Theatre Journal was also dedicated to Theatre and Adaptation. For more on adaptation dramaturgy, see my book Adapturgy: The Dramaturg’s Art and Theatrical Adaptation (Southern Illinois UP, 2017). 2. My reference to the “dramaturgical sensibility” is a nod to the groundbreaking book, Towards a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and Journey, by Geoffrey S. Proehl, with Kugler, Lamos, and Lupu (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2011). For more about adapturgy, see my essay, “Literary Adaptation for the Stage: A Primer for Dramaturgs”. in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, edited by Magda Romanska (2014).

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3. A common critique of adaptations is that they serve material needs, rather than aesthetic ones. Both Linda Hutcheon and Julie Sanders address this concern in their books on adaptation (A Theory of Adaptation and Adaptation and Appropriation, respectively). For a sociological analysis of the machinery behind book-to-film adaptations, see Simone Murray’s The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (Routledge, 2012). 4.  Most Crane scholars agree that the likely setting for the events that occur (from the Union’s perspective) in The Red Badge of Courage is the Battle of Chancellorsville, a surprising victory for the Confederacy that included the second bloodiest day of the Civil War (2 May 1863). While the Union outnumbered the Confederates by 2 to 1, their leader (Joseph Hooker, a Union Army Major General) was not as decisive as General Robert E. Lee. Among the wounded was Lt. Gen. Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, who was accidentally hit by friendly fire and ultimately died of his wounds in this battle. 5.  Lee Clark Mitchell, “Introduction.” New Essays on The Red Badge of Courage, ed. Mitchell (Cambridge UP, 1986), 20. 6. David Weimer, The City as Metaphor (Random, 1966), 52. Qtd. in Robert Butler, “Richard Wright’s ‘Between the World and Me’ and the Chapel Scene in Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage”; A Literary Relationship. CLA Journal 53.4 (2010): 375. 7. Adam H. Wood, “‘Crimson Blotches on the Pages of the Past’: Histories of Violence in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.” War, Literature & the Arts 21 (2009), 50. 8. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (Signet Classics, 2011 reprint), 5. 9. Oxford English Dictionary, 1a. 10. I refer to Joseph Roach’s theory of “surrogation,” Peggy Phelan’s emphasis on ephemerality, and Marvin Carlson’s notion of ghosting. See: Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (Columbia UP, 1996), Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge, 2004), and Carlson’s The Haunted Stage: the Theatre as Memory Machine (U Michigan P, 2001). 11. Dassia N. Posner, “The Dramaturg(ies) of Puppetry and Visual Theatre,” in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, 337. Posner references Basil Jones, “Puppetry an Authorship,” in Jane Taylor’s Handspring Puppet Company (Krut, 2009), 255. 12. See, for example, the TYA adaptations by Kathryn Schultz Miller (1990) and Joe Sutton (2005). Both of these adaptations use narration (in Sutton’s version it is an old man remembering his experience with war; Miller’s take has an outright narrator character). A more recent TYA adaptation by Eric Schmiedl uses hip–hop lyrics rapped by ‘The Voice’

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to give life to Henry’s conscience (2013), to mixed reviews. One exception to the young audience storytelling approach is Catherine Bush’s take, which does not include a narrator; instead, her play uses flashbacks and dream sequences to move fluidly between the battlefield and Henry’s memories of home (2011). 13. Michael Haverty and Jane Barnette, adapters, Red Badge of Courage (version 2), 2. 14. Haverty and Barnette, adapters, Red Badge of Courage (version 6), 1. For the Auburn production, Fereshteh Rostampour (a professor in the department of Theatre) was the lighting and set designer. 15. Ibid., emphasis in original. 16. Ibid., 11. 17. In the Auburn production, this sequence was different: instead of trees that appeared to be bullets, we used real tree branches, carried by actors who entered from either side of the projection screen. 18.  Haverty and Barnette (version 6), 5. Catherine Bush’s adaptation also uses memories of the circus as a flashback sequence in her stage adaptation. 19. Haverty and Barnette (version 6), 6. 20.  These sections are taken virtually verbatim from Chap. IX in Crane’s novel. 60. 21.  For the Atlanta-area productions, Kristin Haverty was the animation designer. 22.  The etymology of psychedelic, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘a borrowing from Greek, combined with an English element,’ wherein ‘psyche’ means mind, soul, or spirit, and ‘del’ comes from a Greek word that means ‘to make manifest, reveal’. 23. Basil Jones 254, qtd. in Posner 337. 24. Haverty and Barnette (version 6), 10. 25. Here I refer to the Auburn production, wherein the actors used real tree branches to signify their transformation into trees. As aforementioned, in the Atlanta productions, the trees were large props, designed to look like bullets as they entered through the portal. 26. Haverty and Barnette (version 6), 11. See Chap. VIV in Crane. 27. In the Atlanta version of this production, there were actually three puppets—the third was a worm puppet, designed to crawl out of the corpse’s mouth when the Youth first encounters him. 28. Because this was my first encounter with Stephen Crane altogether, I did not initially realize that the novel I read was so different from the one Michael knew and loved. 29. The blasphemy stems from the fact that in these excised passages, Henry proclaims his dominance over all things, as if he himself were a god.

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30. Henry Binder, “The ‘Red Badge of Courage’ Nobody Knows.” Studies in the Novel. 10.1 (1978), 25. 31. Crane, qtd. in Binder 12. 32. Haverty and Barnette (version 6), 29. 33. In the Atlanta-based productions (at KSU and 7 Stages), Josh Brook played the Youth. Other cast members included: Bryan Mercer (Tall/ Lieutenant/Tompkins), Devon Hales (Mama/Tattered), Laura Driskill (Loud), and Megan Jance (Sarcastic/General). In the Auburn production, David Tourtellotte played the role of the Youth, and in this scene he stood (waving a flag) atop a fallen tree trunk that was our primary scenic design object for the Auburn production. Other cast members included: Steven Hatcher (Tall/Lieutenant/Tompkins), Tara Folio (Mama/ Tattered), Michael Sanders (Loud), and Alexander Horn (Sarcastic/ General).

CHAPTER 7

Have We Found Anne Frank? A Critical Analysis of Theater Amsterdam’s Anne Samantha Mitschke

In Adaptation and Appropriation, Julie Sanders states that an adaptation ‘signals a relationship with an informing sourcetext [sic] or original’; a version of the said text that, despite various and/or fundamental changes (such as a cinematic version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet), remains ‘an ostensible and recognisable rendition’ of it (2006: 26). Such a definition echoes that of Patrice Pavis, who in his Dictionary of the Theatre (1998) offers a total of three definitions for ‘adaptation’. In very basic terms they are as follows: ‘The re-casting of a work from one genre into another’; ‘dramaturgical work based on the text to be staged’; and ‘translation or a more or less faithful transposition’ (1998: 14). Of primary interest in the context of this chapter is the assertion of both Pavis and Sanders regarding the ‘infidelity’ of an adaptation towards its source text. Pavis declares that ‘To adapt is to entirely rewrite the text, using it as raw material’ (ibid, 14), while Sanders concurs that ‘it is usually at the very point of infidelity that the most creative acts of adaptation […] take place’ (2006: 20).

S. Mitschke (*)  Independent Scholar, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_7

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If to adapt is to ‘rewrite the text’ in such a manner as to be deemed ‘unfaithful’ to it, then, what are the ramifications of adapting a historical document for the stage—specifically, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl? Frank is the most famous victim of the Holocaust and her diary continues to be read by millions throughout the world, having been translated into over 60 languages. The Diary exists in multiple forms, including plays, films, artwork, cartoons, and musicals; as Ian Baruma (1998) sardonically remarked, ‘About the only thing we haven’t seen so far is Anne Frank on Ice’. In this chapter I am going to address three stage adaptations of the Diary: The Diary of Anne Frank (1956) by American husband-and-wife Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett, arguably the most famous piece of Holocaust theatre in the world; Anne Frank: A Play (1952/1967) by American writer Meyer Levin1; and Anne (2014), by Dutch husband-and-wife Jessica Durlacher and Leon de Winter. I will begin with a brief examination of the Levin and Goodrich and Hackett adaptations, with a particular focus on their respective emphases on ‘Jewish’ and ‘universal’ perspectives brought about by highly-specific readings of the Diary. I posit that the ‘real’ Anne Frank has been obfuscated through these readings, most notably in view of the fact that the Goodrich & Hackett adaptation has had a huge influence in shaping how Anne Frank is perceived in popular consciousness—particularly in the sentimentalising of her story. I suggest that the inherent problems with each adaptation—the loss of Anne Frank behind the playwrights’ projections of her—have arisen from the playwrights’ attempts to stay ‘faithful’ to the original text. In a critical analysis of Anne, the Durlacher and de Winter adaptation, I will explore how it differs from the other two adaptations through Durlacher and de Winter’s use of imagination and, at times, outright infidelity to the text. Key aspects of the adaptation which I will interrogate are: the setting of the opening scene in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen; the change of location throughout the play between post-war Paris and wartime Amsterdam; the development of Peter Schiff 2 into a full character and active participant in driving the story forwards. Finally, I will examine the play’s conclusion, which does not have a definitive ending— or more specifically, an ending which does not finish with a conclusive statement from the character of Anne regarding her beliefs, hopes, or ideals. Ultimately, I posit that the Durlacher and de Winter adaptation successfully enables the spectator to ‘find’ an Anne Frank who is relevant to the contemporary moment, specifically through its infidelity and the

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‘empathic projection of the adapters’: that is, their ability to place themselves in Anne’s situation and to view it through Anne’s eyes.

The History of the Diary and Controversy Surrounding Its Adaptation In 1933, following Hitler’s rise to power and increasing anti-Semitism, the then-four-year-old Anne Frank, her parents Edith and Otto and older sister Margot emigrated from Frankfurt to Amsterdam. After the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the Franks were eventually forced into hiding in the so-called ‘Secret Annexe’ above Otto’s business premises in July 1942, along with Hermann van Pels (van Daan)—a friend of Otto’s—his wife Auguste, and their son Peter. (Anne gave pseudonyms to everyone in her diary. When editing it Otto chose to use the real names of his family and Anne’s pseudonyms for the others.) Anne began keeping a diary, recording her hopes and fears as well as accounts of life in hiding. The two families were aided by Otto’s Dutch employees, and in November 1942 Fritz Pfeffer (Albert Dussel)3 joined them. On 4 August 1944, the occupants of the Secret Annexe were discovered and arrested by the Nazis. Anne’s diaries—comprising various notebooks and loose sheets—were gathered up for safekeeping by one of the family’s helpers. Anne died at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945; out of the eight people who had gone into hiding, only Otto Frank survived. Liberated from Auschwitz in January 1945, Otto returned to Amsterdam where Anne’s diary was given to him by Miep Gies, Otto’s employee and one of the family’s Christian helpers. Through Otto’s efforts the diary was finally published in Dutch in June 1947; British and American editions were published in 1952 by Vallentine, Mitchell and Doubleday (Lee 1999: 217–225). The Diary became an instant bestseller upon its American release, attributed in part to an ecstatic review by Meyer Levin in the New York Times Book Review (Levin 1973: 58–59). Levin, then a forty-four-year-old writer, first read the Diary in August 1950. As a battle correspondent during the war he was one of the first Americans to see the newly liberated concentration camps and, transformed by what he had witnessed, felt an urgency to tell the story of the Holocaust (Lee 2002: 187). Simultaneously, he felt that only those who had suffered from the Holocaust directly had the right to do so: ‘Some day [sic] a teller would arise from amongst themselves’ (Levin 1950:

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174). After reading the Diary Levin ‘fell in love with it’4 and wrote to Otto Frank, suggesting the possibility of adapting it into a play and/or film, and Otto eventually agreed.5 In 1951 Otto accepted a publishing deal with Doubleday (Lee 2002: 196), and in March 1952 Levin was assigned to write the aforementioned review of the Diary. He ‘was confident the diary would find someone to transfer it to the stage […] and […] felt he could write the adaptation.’ (Ibid, 198) When the Diary was published days after Levin’s review, every copy of the five thousand printed had been sold by the afternoon, with a further fifteen thousand being rushed through (Ibid, 201); Broadway producers had already begun calling Doubleday about dramatic rights (Levin 1973: 59). Levin told Otto that his sole wish was to write the adaptation and Otto concurred, wanting Levin to work on it in order to ‘guarantee [the] idea of [the] book’ (Lee 2002: 202). However, while Levin wished to use Anne as a ‘Jewish’ example of the results of hatred and persecution, Otto wanted a ‘universal’ Anne and made his views clear: ‘It is not a Jewish book […] though Jewish sphere, sentiment and surrounding is in the background. […] It is (at least here) read and understood more by gentiles than in Jewish circles.6 […] So do not make a Jewish play out of it!’7 Levin replied that his emphasis was ‘on the lack of opportunities open to Jewish writers’ rather than the ‘Jewish quality of the material’8; yet his determination to write a ‘Jewish’ Anne persisted. After conversations with Otto, Cheryl Crawford was chosen as a producer for the adaptation in June 1952, which Levin was to write on condition that, if his adaptation was not ‘right’, another writer would be hired for ‘extra work’.9 Levin began work but, after talks with Doubleday, Otto—in a bid to prevent Levin from becoming fixated upon a ‘Jewish’ Anne—told him that he should work with another writer (Lee 2002: 203). Crawford read Levin’s first draft and pronounced in its favour, but days later changed her mind and announced that she did not like it and that it did not have enough potential for Levin to continue working on it. At Crawford’s suggestion Levin approached Kermit Bloomgarden, who had successfully produced major Broadway plays such as the premiere of Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) (Graver 1995: 43). Bloomgarden also rejected Levin’s script and Levin wrote to Crawford, asserting that as she had not opposed the script on the grounds of ‘dramatic technique’ the agreement between them therefore did not apply, and he asked her to step aside as producer, without involving Otto, to allow his work to be staged.10 However, Otto

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had already concluded that Levin was not the right adapter—‘From this moment on, my confidence in Levin’s script was vanishing’ (Otto Frank in Lee 2002: 211)—and Otto’s lawyer wrote to Levin in October 1952, urging him to observe the original agreement with Crawford.11 After protracted negotiations, on 21 November Levin signed an agreement ‘under protest’ which allowed him one month to find a producer from a list approved by Crawford and Otto’s lawyer (Graver 1995: 47). After that time Levin would have to relinquish his adaptation rights and Otto could engage any writer and producer that he wished (Lee 2002: 213). However, for various reasons—from rejection to doubts over the play’s suitability—Levin’s adaptation was not accepted; Levin was forced to renounce his rights and Crawford, foreseeing trouble to come, withdrew from the project (Graver 1995, 46–49; 69). Kermit Bloomgarden made an offer to Otto to produce the as yet unwritten adaptation and was accepted. After having read that a non-Jewish writer might adapt the diary, Levin wrote to Otto: ‘I will not stand for this. I will write about it wherever I can’ (Graver 1995: 52). Levin’s obsession with the idea of a non-Jewish writer adapting Anne’s diary grew. While Otto sympathized with Levin and was even unsure as to how fairly he had been treated, he remained unconvinced that a Jewish writer was necessary or even desirable (Lee 2002: 214–215). In November 1953 husband and wife Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett were hired to write the new adaptation. They had started their respective careers in theatre before writing comedies and musicals for the big screen and generated commercial success in films such as The Thin Man (1934) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). They had no definitive religious or political views and were renowned for their social pluralism and liberal standpoint; concurring with Otto’s beliefs, the pair created a ‘universal’ Anne for the stage. Subsequently Levin perceived that both his own and Anne’s Jewish identities were being stifled and denounced the new adaptation at every opportunity; Otto ultimately ceased all personal communications with him (Graver 1995: 80–83). In December 1954 Levin attempted to sue Crawford, alleging that she had fraudulently induced Otto to break the contract of March 1952; he also attempted to sue Otto, asserting that he was fighting for the right to have Anne’s voice (and so that of the Jewish people) heard. Goodrich and Hackett’s adaptation previewed in 1955, and Levin instigated a new lawsuit against Otto and Bloomgarden for plagiarism (Graver 1995: 94–104). In an out-of-court settlement Levin received ‘$15,000 for agreeing to give up all claims’ (Goodrich

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2001: 237). Yet Levin continued with his campaign, including sending out various petitions; continually attempting to present his case in the American and British press; and even querying if Otto had survived Auschwitz at the cost of his family’s lives.12 His fight continued for the ensuing twenty-nine years following Crawford’s rejection of his script until his death in July 1981, with his reputation as a writer tarnished by the decades-long controversy. While Anne Frank was finally produced at Boston’s Lyric Stage in 1983 by Mordecai S. Kaplan, and again in 1991, it has not been staged since; Goodrich and Hackett’s The Diary of Anne Frank is regularly performed by amateur and professional theatre companies throughout the world.

Empathic Processes and ‘Fidelity’ to the Text But what does any of this controversy have to do with ‘fidelity’ to the original text of the Diary? Primarily, it shows just how much interpretation is involved in adapting a text. A key example can be found within Levin’s continued assertions that Anne’s Jewish identity was being suppressed. While Levin’s own Jewish identity and wartime experiences led him to read the Diary in terms of its Jewish context, the secular and apolitical Goodrich and Hackett saw the Diary through a ‘universal’ lens. The playwrights thus identified more with those aspects of the original text that corresponded with their own beliefs and identity politics. Moreover, I suggest that such aspects were additionally influenced by empathic processes. Broadly speaking there are two main forms of empathy: ‘affective empathy’, in this instance constituting an ‘appropriate’ emotional response to the situation of another (Baron-Cohen 2011: 11), and ‘cognitive empathy’ or ‘perspective-taking’, which involves placing oneself imaginatively in the position of another person (Zillmann 1994: 90). Affective and cognitive empathy are not usually mutually exclusive and take place concurrently, resulting in a ‘complex imaginative process’ (Coplan 2004: 143). Levin’s response in terms of affective empathy towards Anne—through the medium of her diary—was distress at the realization of her fate, coupled with a desire to tell her story (coinciding with Anne’s own wishes in relation to the publication of her work). Goodrich and Hackett underwent similar responses in the context of the aspiration to tell her story and sorrow over Anne’s death: for example, in January 1954 Frances Goodrich recorded: ‘Terrible emotional impact. I cry all the time’ (Goodrich 2001: 207).

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In the context of cognitive empathy, Goodrich, Hackett, and Levin deployed perspective-taking in a number of ways. For example, Levin had visited Bergen-Belsen during his time in liberated Europe and subsequently was able to envisage what Anne’s experiences would have been like before her death. While adapting the Diary Goodrich and Hackett travelled to Amsterdam and visited places such as the Secret Annexe (Goodrich 2001: 214). As well as viewing pertinent geographical spaces from Anne’s perspective, the adapters likewise sought to imaginatively place themselves in Anne’s position. I suggest that this imaginative standpoint, especially in terms of aspects such as Anne’s feelings towards those whom she was in hiding with, was made significantly easier by the fact that Anne herself recorded those feelings in detail. However, as stated by Peter Goldie (2011), individuals are not able to entirely separate themselves and their experiences from the person whose perspective they seek to take. Goldie defines two types of perspective-taking. The first is ‘empathetic perspective-shifting’, which is ‘consciously and intentionally shifting your perspective […] to imagine being the other person, and thereby sharing in […their] thoughts, feelings, decisions’ etc (Ibid, 302). The second is ‘in-his-shoes perspective-shifting’, which is similar to the definition above but involves ‘shifting your perspective […] to imagine what thoughts, feelings, decisions and so on you would arrive at if you were in the other’s circumstances’ (Ibid, 302) These definitions are similar to two concepts developed by Lakoff and Johnson: ‘empathic projection’ and ‘advisory projection’ (Ibid, 281). ‘Empathic projection’ occurs when an observer places themselves in the situation of another person and views it with that person’s values (Ibid, 281). ‘Advisory projection’ takes place when the observer perceives the situation of someone else but imposes their own values upon it (Ibid, 281). As I have stated, the perspective-taking of Levin and Goodrich and Hackett was shaped by their experiences and beliefs, and these are demonstrated by the message that the respective adapters declared that they wanted their work to convey. For Levin, Anne’s story was about the struggle of Jewish identity and the consequences of racism and prejudice in the context of the fate of Europe’s Jews. For Goodrich and Hackett, Anne’s story was a ‘universal’ warning against hatred and prejudice, told through the medium of an archetypal teenaged girl. On one hand the adapters were ‘faithful’ to the original text in that they reflected these views and events surrounding them—at various points expressed by Anne throughout her diary, and ranging from her questioning of God and the fate of the

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Jews (2002: 261–262) to her quarrels with her mother (41) and growing feelings for Peter van Daan (205). At the same time, the playwrights were not entirely ‘faithful’ to the source text: for example, both adaptations include entirely fictional scenes in which Anne removes the Star of David from her clothing, and Goodrich and Hackett invented a scene in which Mr van Daan steals bread from the communal cupboard (2.3). While such scenes demonstrate the innate creativity of the adapters, I suggest that such ‘creativity’ is, in this case, inherently problematic. The ‘unfaithful’ scenes are created in such a way as to lay further emphasis on to the ‘Anne’ that the playwrights envisioned and identified with—not as she really was in her diary. For instance, in the bread-stealing scene Goodrich and Hackett endow Anne with adult sensibilities in a situation that Mrs. Frank reacts to with near-hysterical anger; Anne tearfully urges her mother to reconsider her demand that Mr van Daan and his family be expelled from the Annexe (2.3). However, Anne probably would have reacted differently; commenting upon the greed of Dussel at mealtimes, she wrote: ‘I […] feel like […] knocking him off his chair and throwing him out of the door’ (2002: 169). The playwrights therefore conceived a notion of who Anne was and moulded their readings of the Diary to fit this conception, not the other way around, building a framework from elements of the original text and fleshing this out with their own creations. While they are perhaps ‘faithful’ to the text in terms of their specific readings of it, and ‘unfaithful’ in terms of their creation of new scenes, overall they are ‘unfaithful’ to the historical figure presented in the Diary in that they present a skewed and at times false image of her. At the beginning of the Diary Anne is spoilt, self-centred, and domineering, jealously craving of her father’s love and attention, dismissive and critical of her mother, and petulant towards her sister. These attitudes did change as Anne’s diary and life in hiding continued. Yet Anne’s egocentric traits are lessened in Goodrich and Hackett’s adaptation, and any negative behaviour that she does display is excused through being attributed to the whims of a child. The child-like nature of Goodrich and Hackett’s Anne is accentuated through moments such as her removing her underwear in front of strangers (1.2), trying on Margot’s bra, walking in high heels for the first time, and experiencing her first kiss (2.2). Goodrich and Hackett’s adaptation is therefore largely responsible for the sentimentalizing and romanticizing of Anne’s story and Anne herself. This is deeply ironic given that Goodrich and Hackett’s impression of Anne is the most central one in popular consciousness today and is often

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believed to be a ‘translation’ in Pavis’ sense of the word: a ‘more or less faithful transposition’ (1998: 14). If the figure of Anne Frank and the ‘message’ of her diary are so securely fixed in public perception via Goodrich and Hackett’s adaptation, then, to what purpose was the creation of a new adaptation— particularly one which, as I shall discuss shortly, aroused criticism in the press for its apparent presentation as part of a ‘nice evening out’ (Liphshiz 2014)?

Durlacher and de Winter: Updating Anne Frank for a New Generation In a 2013 article, Jessica Durlacher describes being ‘touched and scared’ when she and her husband, Leon de Winter, were approached by the Anne Frank Fonds (Foundation) in Basel to write a new stage adaptation of the Diary (Durlacher 2013). Buddy Elias, Anne’s cousin and president of the Anne Frank Fonds, felt that the Goodrich and Hackett play was ‘good’ but that a more up-to-date adaptation would engage younger generations (Aaronovitch 2014). Plans for a new script were initiated as early as 2009 by the Fonds board (Jewish Herald Voice, 2014). Durlacher explained that both she and de Winter secretly questioned the necessity of telling such a well-known story again, referring to Anne as an ‘icon’ and her diary as a ‘bible’. This changed after a conversation with some younger acquaintances—who thought that Anne had hidden on a farm, and when corrected were unable to remember ‘how she got out’—highlighting an evident and pressing need for another adaptation (Durlacher 2013). Durlacher and de Winter are prominent authors in Holland and both are children of Holocaust survivors: de Winter’s parents survived in hiding, while Durlacher’s father survived Auschwitz (Jewish Herald Voice 2014). As such Durlacher and de Winter explain that they have been ‘preoccupied with the Holocaust’ in their ‘work and lives for as long as we can remember’ (Durlacher 2013). In terms of adapting the Diary, the pair carried out extensive research. They were granted full access to archival documents held solely by the Anne Frank Fonds (Jewish Herald Voice 2014), and alongside these they read written testimonies and literature that had not been available to Levin or Goodrich and Hackett; their adaptation is the only one in existence to draw upon all extant versions

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of the Diary (Durlacher 2013). In their re-telling of Anne’s story, the pair sought to ‘show the girl behind the symbol’. As Theu Boermans, the artistic director of Theater Amsterdam has observed, ‘Everyone has their own image of Anne, everyone projects feelings onto [sic] Anne, and the girl herself disappears’ (AFP 2014). In many ways Durlacher and de Winter combine the best attributes of Levin, Goodrich and Hackett in relation to their status as adapters: both are world citizens, having lived in America as well as Holland (Levin travelled extensively during his time as a journalist, while Goodrich and Hackett took long vacations in Europe); both are Jewish; and they are parents to a teenaged daughter (Levin had children, while Goodrich and Hackett did not), allowing them to see the perspective of both Anne and the adults in the Annexe. During the adaptation process Durlacher reported that she and de Winter felt a ‘huge responsibility to keep Anne’s story […] as touching and big as it should always be’ (Durlacher 2013). The resulting adaptation, simply entitled Anne, is in Dutch with a scattering of German, reflecting the languages spoken in Anne’s own household. It premiered at Theater Amsterdam, a 1100-seat purpose-built theatre, in May 2014 and, due to overwhelming demand, the run was extended several times until the end of January 2016.13 Foreign visitors able to use a multilingual translation system in languages ranging from English and German to Spanish and Russian. The total production budget was fourteen million Euros and the space combined state-of-the-art technology and digital media with three life-sized sets that move around the audience on tracks (Mitschke 2014: 70). The production used projection as a key aspect: images were projected on to huge screens at either side of the stage, ranging from contemporary footage of Hitler and triumphant Nazi parades to pages of the original diary, specially-created moving images of a rooftop view of Amsterdam being bombed and even, later in the play’s run, close-ups of the actors within the confines of the apartment and the Annexe, courtesy of a live feed from tiny video cameras installed around the set. Interestingly, Anne attracted some criticism in the media—not for its content, but because it was perceived as offering ‘tragedy and fancy dinners’ (Liphshiz 2014). The new theatre’s amenities include a restaurant where patrons can have lunch or dinner before the show, and the Theater Amsterdam website offers package deals of a meal and a ticket. There are also options to purchase a snack box in advance. Criticism included comments from the director of the Anne Frank House museum

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in Amsterdam, Ronald Leopold, in reference to ‘the commercial setting in which this production is steeped’: ‘Anne Frank should not be a nice evening out […] I can’t help but frown when I see arrangements with a glass of wine, a box of snacks, dinner with a nice view and then a night out’ (Ibid). Such remarks were used in the press to highlight the ongoing conflict between the Anne Frank Fonds, the sole owner of the diary copyrights and thousands of other documents, and the Anne Frank House. De Winter, however, was forthright in his response about the clash between the House and the Fonds: ‘I didn’t and still don’t care about this conflict […]. I only cared about […] what has been done to a family of Jews.’ (Ibid) Subsequently, even the Anne Frank House admitted that Anne “gave ‘more justice to the history of Anne Frank’ because it ends with her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, unlike the original 1955 play, in which she declares that ‘people are really good at heart’” (Carnvajal 2014)

Coming Closer Through Infidelity: Durlacher and de Winter’s Anne There are three particular areas in which Durlacher and de Winter have been ‘unfaithful’ to the text: alongside wartime Amsterdam, the adaptation’s additional settings in post-war Paris and the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen; the development of Peter Schiff into a fully-blown character; and the adaptation’s ending, which, in direct contrast to the Levin and Goodrich and Hackett versions, does not conclude with a definitive statement from Anne herself. What makes these particular aspects so interesting, and why I have chosen to discuss them here, is that they are magnified creations from comparative snippets of the original text. While Levin and Goodrich and Hackett adapted longer extracts, Durlacher and de Winter have done likewise but also focused on small details, allowing them to ‘adapt’ in the truest sense of Sanders’ definition (creating a version of the source text that, despite changes, remains an ostensible and recognizable rendition of it): they achieve a masterful act of creativity through a heightened and well-executed use of imagination, sourced from relative minutiae within the Diary. As I shall now discuss, the primary example of this is the setting in post-war Paris. On 8 May 1944 Anne, dismissive of what she termed the ‘bourgeois life’ that her mother and sister desired, expressed a wish to ‘spend a

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year in Paris and London learning the languages and studying art history’ and to be surrounded by ‘gorgeous dresses and fascinating people’ (Frank 2002: 286) If one sets aside the fact that Durlacher and de Winter worked from all extant versions of the Diary, this reference to Paris is the only one to be found in the commonly available (Englishlanguage) editions of the text. While the play begins in Bergen-Belsen, the second scene is a flash-forward to Anne’s fantasy life in post-war Paris and these continue throughout the play.14 Anne’s ability to ‘leave’ the Annexe for short periods additionally functions as an effective metaphor for her being able to ‘escape’ through her writing/imagination. When the audience enter the auditorium, a vast cyclorama depicts the motionless greys of a bleak and apparently featureless landscape. Upon closer scrutiny the hazy but sinister outline of a guard tower can be seen, with others stretching away into the distance. The opening lines are a voiceover spoken by Anne and Margot, incarcerated in the camp and recounting what they dreamt while sleeping. Anne talks of Paris and the cyclorama splits to reveal the popular image of a typical Parisian caférestaurant: red velvet, chandeliers, lush green plants, white tablecloths, and uniformed waiters abound. Anne’s university friends are waiting for her, discussing professors and lectures, until Anne arrives late—sporting a new jacket—and chooses to eat alone rather than go to the cinema with them to see a film about the war. It is at this point that she meets a man at another table who tells her that he is a publisher, and he gradually persuades her to tell him about the book that she is writing—a version of her diary. In this manner Durlacher and de Winter’s adaptation is inherently unfaithful to the text, illustrating a combination of imagination, empathic projection, and advisory projection. Their conceptualization of a sumptuous eatery populated with ‘fascinating people’, and Anne’s appearance in new clothing, are evidence of their placing themselves in Anne’s position in the hypothetical situation and viewing it with Anne’s standpoint in mind (empathic projection): in the Annexe she was continually hungry due to chronic food shortages and, as she stated herself, wished to experience fashions and people. Yet I posit that Durlacher and de Winter also frame the scene in terms of advisory projection, or viewing the situation from their own perspective, in the context of Anne’s refusal to see the film; it is reasonable to assume that Anne, or indeed anyone, would rather eat than see a war film if they had suffered the privations and terrors that she had.

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The anonymous Publisher, a well-dressed and good-looking man who is a few years older than Anne, buys Anne a meal and they talk, setting up the narrative device that drives the rest of the story forward. While Anne will not actually show him what she has written, maintaining that it is only for her ‘beloved’ due to its personal nature,15 she agrees to tell him about it and the scene is set for a flashback to the Franks’ apartment in Amsterdam. From here the character of the Publisher begins to be developed; he is an onstage witness to the action and stays on the periphery while Anne interacts with others, stepping forwards at relevant points to talk to Anne and ask her questions in order to learn more about what she is feeling and/or move the story along. At these points Anne ‘leaves’ the Annexe to go to him, frequently seated at a small table with a lamp— representing the café-restaurant where they met—before returning back into the main action. Their growing feelings for each other become evident as they talk; occasionally they dance together; and towards the end of the play they share a romantic kiss before his true identity is revealed: Peter Schiff, Anne’s first love (132). Schiff is often overlooked due to Anne’s extensive writing about Peter van Pels, with whom she was in hiding, and their romantic relationship— including Anne’s first kiss (which is featured in all three adaptations). Perhaps many people merge the two, similarly to how Anne described it herself: ‘Peter Schiff and Peter van Daan [Pels] have melted into one Peter, who’s good and kind and whom I long for desperately’ (Frank 2002: 199) Yet Anne talks about Schiff throughout her diary, often referring to him as ‘Petel’, and her feelings for him are made clear from the beginning: [W]e passed […] Peter Schiff with two other boys; it was the first time he’d said hello to me in ages, and it really made me feel good. […] Mother is always asking me who I’m going to marry when I grow up, but I bet she’ll never guess it’s Peter […]. I love Peter as I’ve never loved anyone, and I tell myself he’s only going around with all those other girls to hide his feelings for me. (Ibid, 16–17)

By including Schiff and van Pels within their adaptation, both of whom are contemporaneously developing relationships with Anne, Durlacher

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and de Winter paint a more accurate picture of who Anne really was: she cared for van Pels, but likewise expressed strong feelings for Schiff. Her relationship with van Pels is placed in its proper context and the one in which Anne described it in terms of her feeling trapped within the Annexe and desperately needing someone to love her and be loved (Frank 2002: 60). I posit that Durlacher and de Winter exhibit both empathic and advisory projection in doing so, in that they take Anne’s own words and ‘magnify’ them to create the character of Schiff. His presence and impact within Anne’s life are emphasized in the adaptation to reflect her feelings for him, yet Durlacher and de Winter’s creation of him as a publisher in Paris illustrate their advisory projection—they are imagining what Anne might have wanted through their own perspective while still loosely adhering to the original text. Levin and Goodrich and Hackett perhaps did not include Schiff due to dramatic constraints— namely the issues of involving a character who, in real life, was not in the Annexe—as well as possible concerns surrounding spectatorial views of Anne as a flirt or being ‘mad about boys’; Anne herself referred to not wanting to be perceived like this in her efforts to win Schiff’s affections (Ibid, 164). Furthermore, Durlacher and de Winter’s utilization of Schiff as a character, specifically in the post-war context and as accompanying the Annexe action throughout, underscores the notion of ‘What if s/he had lived?’ without forcing the point. The epitome of Durlacher and de Winter play’s ‘infidelity’ to the original text is the ending. The Goodrich and Hackett adaptation ends with Anne’s disembodied voice declaring the hopelessly misquoted line from her diary: ‘I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart’ (Frank 2002: 332), to which her father replies that ‘She puts me to shame’ and closes the diary (2.5). As Graver (1995) observes, Anne’s words here are taken so much out of context that many people believe that they are actually the final words of her original diary (95). In Levin’s adaptation it is Anne who ends the play; her assertion about the goodness of people is repeated in the context in which it appears in the Diary: ANNE:  W  hen I look at moonlight and have a feeling of beauty, when I feel love, […] and even horror and pain—[…] then, in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.   […] I see the world gradually turning into a wilderness. I hear the ever approaching thunder which will destroy us too. I can

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feel the suffering of millions, and yet […] I think […] this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will come over the earth. (3.1) The structural positioning of Anne’s words at the end of each adaptation indicates the final ‘message’ that the adapters wish the spectator to take from the performance—the final ‘belief’ that the adapters want to portray Anne as having had. The closing words in the respective plays show the authors’ highly-specific readings of the Diary. In Durlacher and de Winter’s adaptation, Anne’s voice also ends the play—but rather than trying to speak ‘for’ the real Anne, the masterful final scene moves away from the original text and places the historical figure within the proper context of the Holocaust. Following a monologue by Otto, in which he tells of the fates of the Annexe occupants (similar monologues are in the Levin and Goodrich and Hackett plays), Anne steps forward. She stands alone before a bleak landscape of grassland, ragged trees, and railway tracks stretching away from the audience, lit by what could equally be sunset or dawn in the distance. Anne directly addresses the spectators in a halting manner, and none of her sentences are complete— ‘I believed that… I dreamed that…’—she does not state definitively what she believed or dreamed. These unfinished lines underscore the fact of her death and her voice tails off before she turns away and walks the railway tracks, half-turning back to face the audience in a shaft of light while the other characters stand in shadow, dotted around nearby, facing the spectator while a snowfall of tiny pieces of paper drift from the ceiling. The stylized tableau is simultaneously moving and illustrates the popular exaltation of the historical figure while also being hugely evocative. The lighting of Anne while the other characters remain in shadow highlights the widely held concept of Anne Frank as representing all Holocaust victims; the falling paper represents the widespread ‘drift’ of Anne’s words around the world, as well as the snows of Eastern Europe and the ashes of the dead; and the spectator is potentially able to glean a hint of hope through the lighting of Anne in contrast to her surroundings, but the shadowy figures of the other characters disable any ‘uplifting’ sentiment (such as that evoked by the Goodrich and Hackett play). Instead the spectator is left feeling as if they have been confronted by very real ghosts, emphasized by the characters’ still attitude of ‘watching’ the audience; it is implied that the ghosts of the Holocaust are not at rest, no matter how many times the populace choose to believe in the ‘goodness of people at heart’.

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Conclusion The Durlacher and de Winter adaptation is not perfect. For instance, the Nazis who come to take the Annexe occupants away towards the play’s end are stereotypical and a little exaggerated as they storm through the building, shouting, pointing guns, and issuing threats (130–134); Anne herself comes across as rather overstated when she flamboyantly presents her father with a letter addressing his concerns about her relationship with van Pels (125). However, I posit that the play is masterful and brilliantly executed in terms of its presentation of the ‘real’ Anne by, paradoxically, moving away from the original text. Instead of taking a notion of Anne and building a play around it, or even attempting to speak ‘for’ her, Durlacher and de Winter take moments from the source text and alternate between Anne’s voice and their own. In doing so they create an adaptation that reaches the heart of Sanders’ definition in signalling a relationship with the informing text, implementing various imaginative changes, and yet allowing that adaptation to remain an ‘ostensible and recognisable rendition’ (Sanders 2006: 26). By utilizing advisory and empathic projections and imagination, yet remaining firmly grounded within the Diary, Durlacher and de Winter have created an adaptation that allows the spectator to effectively find their own way through to Anne Frank.

Notes



1. Due to access and copyright restrictions, the text of the 1967 version is referred to in this chapter. 2. Anne’s real-life first love, who is mentioned throughout the Diary but usually overlooked by adapters and readers in favour of the romantic relationship between Anne and Peter van Pels, with whom she was in hiding. 3. This was Anne’s somewhat cruel pseudonym for Pfeffer: ‘dussel’ means ‘idiot’ in Dutch. 4. Letter from Meyer Levin to the New York Times, 9 December 1952. Boston University archives (BU). 5. Of particular interest in the context of this chapter is Levin’s later assertion that ‘At first Otto Frank […] “could not see” the Diary [sic] in dramatic form, but […] [p]resently, he began to “see” and even to make suggestions for assuring absolute fidelity’ (Levin 1973, p. 36). 6. Francine Prose points out: ‘Of course the diary was read by more European gentiles than by Jews; there were so few Jews left’ (2009, p. 190). 7. Letter from Otto Frank to Meyer Levin, June/July 1952 (BU).

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8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Letter from Meyer Levin to Cheryl Crawford, 28 October 1952 (BU). 11. Letter from Myer Mermin to Meyer Levin, 29 October 1952 (BU). 12. Letter from Meyer Levin to Herbert Luft, 28 February 1956 (BU). 13. At the time of writing it is unclear if there will be another extension. 14. Levin’s adaptation begins with a prologue, after which the action takes place outside the Franks’ Amsterdam apartment and then moves to the Secret Annexe, which is the location for the rest of the play (open time, closed space). In Goodrich and Hackett’s adaptation the play begins in the Annexe after the war; the action takes place as a flashback before ending back in the post-war Annexe (open time, closed space). 15. I am indebted to Rene Voogt and John Macdonald for their assistance with translating the Dutch script.

Bibliography Aaronovitch, David. (2014). ‘Anne Frank’s story lives again in Amsterdam.’ The Times, 15 May. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/anne-franks-story-livesagain-in-amsterdam-dz8hdb6rskx [Accessed 13 January 2016]. AFP. (2014). ‘New Anne Frank play reveals ‘girl behind the symbol’.’ 9 May. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4517648,00.html [Accessed 28 October 2015]. Associated Press. (2014). ‘New Anne Frank play, using her own words, opens in Amsterdam.’ 8 May. http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/new-anne-frank-playusing-her-own-words-opens-in-amsterdam-1.2636290?cmp=rss [Accessed 24 October 2015]. Baron-Cohen, Simon. (2011). Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new theory of human cruelty. London: Penguin Books. Baruma, Ian. (1998). ‘The Afterlife of Anne Frank.’ The New York Review of Books, 19 February. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/ feb/19/the-afterlife-of-anne-frank/ [Accessed 24 October 2015]. Carvajal, Doreen. (2014). ‘Amid Tensions, a New Portrayal of Anne Frank.’ 12 May, New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/ theater/a-holocaust-play-in-amsterdam-opens-in-controversy.html?_r=0 [Accessed 24 October 2015]. Coplan, Amy. (2004). ‘Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions.’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62 (2): 141–152. Coplan, Amy and Goldie, Peter eds. (2011). Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Durlacher, Jessica. (2013). ‘Anne—The Battle Between Reason and Desire.’ Huffington Post, 14 July. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/

160  S. Mitschke jessica-durlacher-/anne-the-battle-between-reason-desire_b_3277286.html [Accessed 24 October 2015]. Frank, Anne, Frank, Otto H., and Pressler, Mirjam (ed.). Massotty, Susan (trans.). (2002). Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, 60th Anniversary ed. Puffin Books. Garfield, Simon. (2008). ‘In her diary, Anne Frank admits she was smitten by a boy named Peter, but in the six decades since, no picture or news of him has come to light—until now.’ Guardian, 24 February. http://www.theguardian. com/books/2008/feb/24/news.features [Accessed 13 January 2016]. Goodrich, David L. (2001). The Real Nick and Nora: Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Writers of Stage and Screen Classics. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Goodrich, Frances and Hackett, Albert. (1956). The Diary of Anne Frank. London: Samuel French. Graver, Laurence. (1995). An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Holligan, Anna. (2014). ‘Anne Frank keeps memory alive for new generation.’ BBC News, 8 May. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainmentarts-27308964 [Accessed 24 October 2015]. ‘Imagine if Anne Frank had lived to tell her story.’ (2014). Jewish Herald Voice, 22 May. http://jhvonline.com/imagine-if-anne-frank-had-lived-to-tell-herstory-p17263-152.htm [Accessed 24 October 2015]. Lee, Carol Ann. (1999). Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank. London, New York, Sydney and Toronto: BCA. Lee, Carol Ann. (2002). The Hidden Life of Otto Frank. Penguin Books. Levin, Meyer. (1950). In Search. Paris: Authors’ Press. Levin, Meyer. (1967). Anne Frank: A Play. Private publication. Levin, Meyer. (1973). The Obsession. New York: Simon and Schuster. Liphshiz, Cnaan. (2014). ‘At new Anne Frank theater in Amsterdam, tragedy and fancy dinners.’ 18 March, Jewish Telegraphic Agency. http://www.jta. org/2014/03/18/news-opinion/world/at-new-anne-frank-theater-inamsterdam-tragedy-and-fancy-dinners [Accessed 24 October 2015]. Mitschke, Samantha. (2014). “Empathy effects: Towards an understanding of empathy in British and American Holocaust theatre.” Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham. Pavis, Patrice; Shantz, Christine (trans.). (1998). Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. Prose, Francine. (2009). Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc. Sanders, Julie. (2006). Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge. Zillmann, Dolf. (1994). ‘Mechanisms of emotional involvement with drama.’ Poetics, 23: 33–51.

CHAPTER 8

Adapting The Kite Runner: A Fidelity Project to Re-Imagine Afghan Aura Edmund Chow

Introduction One of the tiresome debates within Adaptation Studies is fidelity, the faithfulness of the new work to the original literary source. This concept of fidelity—stemming from Translation Studies—is linked to typologies of equivalence which take an instrumental approach to language as communication of objective information. In this approach, equivalence is understood as ‘fidelity’, ‘accuracy’, ‘correctness’, ‘adequacy’, and ‘correspondence’ (Venuti 5), which results in target texts resembling the source texts in lexicon, grammar, and style in formal ways. On the other hand, a hermeneutic approach to language privileges function, which is the potential of a target text ‘to release diverse effects’ (Venuti 5), including meeting social, political, economic, and cultural agendas. That form and function are on polarizing ends is not new within Adaptation Studies, with ‘fidelity’ often dismissed entirely as retrograde. This chapter attempts to revisit the debate around fidelity to a stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner. Based on the performance at

E. Chow (*)  University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_8

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the Birmingham Repertory Theatre on 1 October 2014 in the UK and an interview with the adaptor Matthew Spangler, this chapter uses Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura or ‘getting closer to things’ (9) to argue that Spangler’s intention of adapting the original text intimately allows audiences to come closer to Afghan histories, cultures, and traditions—a politicized trope which, I would argue, is for the West ‘to be good again’ to Afghanistan, in the novel’s own words.

Fidelity In the early debates within Adaptation Studies, Robert Stam criticizes the fidelity discourse that often makes comparisons of films with novels. He vehemently argues: ‘The standard rhetoric has often deployed an elegiac discourse of loss, lamenting what has been “lost” in the translation from novel to film’ (Stam 3). Even though Stam is referring to film adaptations, these attitudes are also prevalent in stage adaptations. Instead of privileging the source text, Linda Hutcheon proposes an alternative theoretical perspective that sees adaptations as autonomous texts, what she calls a plural ‘stereophony of echoes, citations, references’ (6). Alongside other theorists (Bluestone 1957; McFarlane 1996; Cardwell 2007; Stam 2005), Hutcheon critiques the focus on comparative analyses that plagues Adaptation Studies, as if an adaptation’s legitimacy is only defined by the authority of the ‘original’ text. Similarly, Julie Sanders adds that there are adaptations that have decisively moved away ‘from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product’, which she calls ‘appropriation’ (26). One attraction of adaptation, according to Joanne Tompkins, is its elasticity, its versatility in incorporating ‘cultural translation and exchange, […] as well as the structural modifications that multimedia are increasingly making to the [theatre] form’ (Tompkins x). The above arguments illustrate the resistance of adaptation theorists to fidelity discourse, a strategic divorce from these debates to legitimize itself. But as J. D. Connor (2007) highlights, these decades of campaign against fidelity have failed; the more Adaptation Studies distances itself from fidelity, the more entangled it is in practice. Connor states that this phenomenon called ‘fidelity reflex’ is ‘not the persistence of the discourse, but the persistent call for it to end’ (ibid.). This is because laymen have persisted in raising fidelity questions, yet critics have ‘persisted in attempts to silence that conversation of judgment’ (ibid.). Connor suggests that ‘once criticism is freed from fidelity discourses’

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judgmental “bad conscience,” it can only offer more of itself, endlessly’ (ibid.). Prompted by this call for reconciliation, this chapter proposes that, instead of seeing these discourses as divisive, and consequently unproductive for adaptations, it is possible to revisit this and examine how ‘fidelity’ (equivalence) has contributed to ‘effects’ (function) in the case of The Kite Runner. The adaptor’s attention to textual fidelity here causes the meanings around Afghanistan—and therefore cultural understandings—to increase without committing many artistic compromises. How this is done will be explored in the following sections.

‘The Kite Runner’ Performance Published in 2003, Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel became the New York Times bestseller within two years, with a current record of 21 million copies sold (Iqbal), which became the most visible cultural product and representation of Afghanistan since 9/11, arguably humanizing a land and her peoples that had so far been represented in images of terrorism and religious fundamentalism. The Kite Runner’s popularity is also evident as it has been adapted for screen (Forster),1 stage (Spangler), and graphic novel (Celoni and Andolfo), bringing to life a poignant story of friendship and separation of two best friends from Kabul. While the 2007 film was nominated for an Oscar, grossing almost $75 million worldwide (Iqbal), this theatre production is Matthew Spangler’s eleventh run on a world tour since 2009, an equally successful adaptation in a different medium. This section critically investigates the use of music, infusion of Dari language, and interjecting dialogues to create cultural ‘effects’ on stage, a function to not only inculcate a sense of wonder towards an unknown culture, but to also foster a strong connection towards the Afghan characters.

Music, Language, Dialogues When the theatre doors of the newly refurbished Birmingham Repertory Theatre open, a musician on downstage left is already playing his tabla in soft rhythmic beats of South Asian music to welcome audiences as they file into take their seats. On the proscenium stage is a pair of gently inclined floors extending from the wings to the centre of the stage, where a large rectangular area is covered by a carpet (see Fig. 8.1). Here, the tabla rhythms allow audiences to soak in an ambience possibly

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Fig. 8.1  The flying of kites in The Kite Runner (Source: Robert Day)

identical to Afghan musical sounds. Closer to the opening time, the drumming becomes louder and it suddenly appears as if the musician, Hanif Khan, has taken over the stage in his own virtuosic performance of rhythmic sounds. When the beats end to mark a transition to the beginning of the play, the audiences clapped vigorously—congratulating Khan’s showmanship. Music, as explained in Spangler’s script, performs three functions: to underscore moments, to convey transitions in time and tone, and to identify changes in location. I would, however, add a fourth, that is to project an imagined authenticity of a foreign (Afghan) culture. Authenticity is not an unproblematic concept,2 but to explain imagined authenticity as used in this chapter, I borrow Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘aura’, which has been defined as the ‘appearance of magical or supernatural force arising from their uniqueness’ (Robinson). Benjamin speaks about a ‘supremely sensitive core in the art object’ (Benjamin 7) that possesses a degree of vulnerability, which gives it its ‘genuineness’. For example, a photograph is able to bring out aspects of the original that ‘can only be accessed only by the lens […] and not by the human eye’ (6). As such, a technological

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reproduction ‘makes it possible for the original to come closer to the person taking it in’ (6). Arguably, the tabla drumbeats before the opening scene of The Kite Runner functioned to reproduce an Asian-style ambience in the theatre—beyond what the novel could produce—so that audiences would be ‘getting closer to’ (9) the unique cultural contexts of Afghanistan. This is the ‘aura’ of an imagined Afghan authenticity. To enhance the Afghan ‘aura’, the extensive use of Dari language (the common language as spoken in Kabul) is heard very early in the play. In Act I, the first scene shows the adult Amir, the protagonist, receiving a phone call from a family friend (Rahim Khan) telling him that there is a way to be good again. Briefly, the San Francisco setting changes to Afghanistan with increased tempos from the tabla, now with a younger Amir and his best friend, Hassan, running and playing cowboys. They then deliver lines in Dari for a seemingly long period of time. One reviewer writes that the ‘Farsi used by the two boys in the opening scene as they played and joked was perfectly understandable without the need for translation’ (Harris). Like Harris, I was admittedly charmed by the foreign language. There is a feeling of ‘Afghanness’ in the atmosphere, an exceptional attempt by the theatre-makers in reproducing a historical time and place in Kabul through music, costume, and language—all of which, I argue, contribute to the believability and ‘authenticity’ of the fiction, reproducing, to a large extent, the aura of Afghanistan. The most fascinating scene where instruments are used to create ‘natural’ sounds is the kite flying competition by Amir and Hassan. During the competition, the rhythmic tabla beats become more intense, signalling heightened tension and excitement. This is then layered with ‘natural’ sounds of wind. It is created by the ensemble holding wooden spools and rotating them on a swivel, which produced sounds identical to the howling and whistling of wind. Harris adds that the ‘soundtrack of Afghan percussion and the whirling wind things […] operated by the cast members provided atmosphere and cultural authenticity’. This is shown in stark contrast to pieces of music played through the speakers when the scenes were set in San Francisco. Kool and the Gang’s Celebration and Steve Miller Band’s Abracadabra were two such examples. The artificiality of recorded American popular music provides a foil to the natural, ‘authentic’ Afghan soundscapes. It is the live music in the form of drumbeats, singing bowls, Schwirrbogen—and hidden singers underpinning the action—that gives this performance an ethnic feel. Walter Benjamin reminds us that the ‘genuineness of a thing is the

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quintessence of everything about it since its creation that can be handed down, from its material duration to the historical witness that it bears’ (7). When audiences have been co-opted to partake in the scene, we bear witness of Afghanistan’s history unfold. This is possibly reinforced by Hosseini’s semi-autobiographical experiences growing up in Kabul, so audiences become witnesses of an Afghan story, as one reviewer writes: Overall, this production brought to light a beautiful and harrowing relationship between Amir and Hassan and, combined with the stage’s versatility, succeeded in bringing Hosseini’s epic tale to the stage with vivacity and poignancy. (Britton)

The success of this production is largely due to the versatility of the soundscapes and live music, the diverse effects that adaptations can bring on a hermeneutic level to source texts like Hosseini’s novel. Audiences become more acquainted with an Afghanistan they have not yet felt viscerally and understood aurally.

Text How the dialogues and scenes are structured in the adaptation produce a similar effect, that is to provide immediacy to the action and therefore to the likeability of the Afghan characters on stage. Structurally, Spangler’s script follows the same linear progression as Hosseini’s novel. Act I, set primarily in Kabul, documents Amir’s significant moments and ends when Hassan and his father leave Baba’s household due to an accusation of theft, while Act II primarily deals with Baba and Amir’s life in San Francisco, as well as Amir’s rescue of Hassan’s orphaned son, Sohrab. The stage adaptation offers possibilities that the novel could not, such as the interjection of dialogue to interrupt the narrative voice. For example, in an early scene during Act I, Amir is describing to the audience the mud shack where Hassan was born. He goes on to explain how Hassan’s mother had abandoned Hassan and so, both Amir and Hassan were nursed by the same woman. The narrator’s lines are interrupted by lines from a dialogue when Hassan is playing tag with Amir, as shown below: Amir: So my Baba hired the same woman who had nursed me to nurse Hassan. We fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn. And under the same roof, we spoke our first words. Mine was: Baba. His was:

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Hassan: Amir! Amir: My name. Hassan: You’re it. (playing a game of tag) According to Harris, Amir ‘slip[s] in and out of the action’ while narrating his dilemma in a ‘series of soliloquies’. Harris also notes that Spangler uses this method frequently as he ‘“love(s) the dexterity of that approach” which brings a “film aesthetic” to the stage’. I suggest that this ‘film aesthetic’ is the layering of two sets of time—real time and narrative time3—which allows for a permeability of actions. Added on to this complexity is Act II’s introduction of historical time: the Soviet war in the 1970s and the Taliban rule in late 1990s, which Spangler interweaves delicately. The play ends exactly how the novel ends, with Amir running after a kite for Sohrab, just as Hassan had previously done for Amir. To this effect and extent, this foregrounds a methodological approach that begins to question the uses of ‘fidelity’ in adaptations—as evidenced by the following interview with Matthew Spangler.

The Process of Adaptation In a Birmingham Post review of the performance, Fionnuala Bourke states that ‘the play is so good as it is based on Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 international best seller. But replicating such a complex story which spans a long period and crosses the globe cannot have been an easy feat’ (Bourke, emphasis mine). The word ‘replicating’ implies a form of imitation, duplication, or reproduction of the original text by Hosseini, the source against which all other copies (or adaptations) are evaluated by theatre reviewers such as Bourke. But to Linda Hutcheon, there is a semantic distinction. She argues that an adaptation is ‘repetition, but repetition without replication’ (7). More precisely, Hutcheon states that an ‘adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing’ (9). Hutcheon’s distinction here is an important one in scholarship around adaptation, but in practice, theatre goers often succumb to comparing adaptations with the original. For instance, one other reviewer writes: ‘Not having read the book, I can’t comment on whether Spangler’s adaptation is faithful to the original. But the play is a phenomenally powerful piece of theatre which for many people will portray Afghanistan in a totally new light’ (Orme, emphasis mine). For

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many reviewers, there is an automatic cognitive mapping of the adaptation to the source text, to assess its textual fidelity, to match the old with the new. In Orme’s case above, there is no original text to compare with, so it allows for Spangler’s adaptation to remain as a derivation, an independent piece of theatre that sheds ‘a totally new light’ on Afghanistan. I argue that the light shone on Afghanistan is framed by semi-autobiographical materials from Hosseini’s childhood, including his own penchant for writing (like Amir in the book), the Soviet invasion, and his ‘returning to Afghanistan after the rise of the Taliban’ just like the protagonist, all of which point to a form of truth—and accuracy— of historical retelling. Even though Hutcheon argues that it makes little ontological sense ‘to talk about adaptations as “historically accurate” or “historically inaccurate”’ (Hutcheon 18), I contend that readers and audiences welcome historical accuracies in this case to counteract the version of ‘Afghanistan’ that had been perpetuated by news channels on the ‘war on terror’. In other words, while the medium of stage adaptation can, potentially, be a point of departure for the adaptor, the choice to be historically ‘truthful’—both in honour of Hosseini’s semi-autobiography and to the other realities in Afghanistan—is an ethical one, even if there is some recognition that ‘truth’ is often multi-layered and contested. Spangler is an experienced adaptor — he has adapted other awardwinning plays including Tortilla Curtain (based on the novel by T.C. Boyle); Paradise Hills (based on the short stories by John Cheever); and Albatross (based on Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner); however, he found that in working on The Kite Runner, he had to engage in a different process as an adaptor. He spent about nine months reading, researching, and understanding Afghanistan. Spangler says in our interview: In the case of Kite Runner, I wanted to learn as much as I could about Afghan history and culture before I started adapting. Because it occurred to me that if I didn’t know things about Afghan history and culture, I could make a mistake in adaptation, [like] take something out or leave something in, juxtapose two scenes that shouldn’t really be juxtaposed, and create something that would be culturally offensive. And I may not even know that I’m doing it. (Spangler, emphasis mine)

To avoid being ‘culturally offensive’ is an important consideration here. In fact, Spangler had lengthy conversations with Hosseini’s father-in-law

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who was a university professor to clarify the accuracies about Afghan history. Weighing against an Afghan’s perspective, Spangler was able to, in his words, ‘triangulate’ what he was reading and arrive at his own conclusions, for a period from November 2005 to July 2006 before he created the adaptation for the stage. He states that he wanted to know Afghan history and culture ‘well enough that [he] felt he could sort of take a scalpel to Khaled’s novel […] and reduce the likelihood that he would make something culturally offensive’. To a large extent, this echoes the ‘historical fidelity’ that Beekman and Callow advocate for, where they state: ‘For historical references, it is inappropriate to make use of cultural substitutes, as this would violate the fundamental principle of historical fidelity’ (Beekman and Callow, 203). Beekman and Callow’s work on Biblical translations, in contrast, stems from the conviction that ‘the Christian faith is rooted in history’ (Shuttleworth and Cowie 71). Because of that, they argue that objects, places, persons, animals, customs, beliefs, or activities that are part of a historical statement must be translated—or adapted, in our case—in a way that the ‘same information is communicated […] as by the original statements’ (35). In other words, historical fidelity is a strategy of ‘not transplanting historical narratives into a target setting’, of not violating the faith. Likewise, Walter Benjamin states that ‘[t]he uniqueness of the work of art is identical with its embeddedness in the context of tradition’ (10). It is, therefore, necessary for a piece of art to reference its ‘context of tradition’, especially since tradition is ‘alive’ and ‘extraordinarily changeable’ (ibid.). For example, the Greeks viewed the statue of Venus as an object of worship, while medieval clerics saw it as an idol, but both groups of people were ‘struck by […] its singularity or, to use another word, its aura’ (10). Benjamin also states that the ‘genuineness of a thing’ includes ‘everything about it since its creation that can be handed down, from its material duration to the historical witness that it bears’ (7). Following these assertions, I argue that when Hosseini wrote The Kite Runner, it was his way of reproducing the Afghanistan that he knew of; this was the first adaptation of his own life experience. By doing this, the novel allowed his readers to get closer to things and experience the rich traditions and ‘aura’ of Afghanistan. Hosseini wanted ‘to make Afghanistan a more real place rather than just a remote, war-afflicted nation’ (Iqbal, emphasis mine), and to overturn the normative rhetoric of the media, as already argued. Consequently, for Matthew Spangler to research on Afghanistan for nine months before he started writing is a

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deviation from his usual adaptation process. This suggests that his choice to subscribe to historical fidelity was a way of getting closer to the ‘truth’ of Afghan histories and cultures, so that when audiences watch his play, we could appreciate the Afghan ‘aura’ without violating Afghans’ faith or culture, similar to Beekman et al’s philosophy on Biblical translations. This also explains why Spangler wants his script to be true to the original text. I would further posit that Spangler’s stage adaptation (as well as David Benioff’s screen adaptation) is a reproduction of Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, which is another reproduction of Afghanistan’s ‘aura’, real or imagined. That means Spangler’s text is considered the second level of adaptation of ‘Afghanistan’. So instead of seeing the ‘aura’ fade in Benjamin’s argument, all these reproductions of Afghanistan—all of which kept the title unchanged—are reimagining this ‘aura’ through the complex retelling of dynamic relationships, kite-flying, bacha bazi (young Hazara boys exploited as dancers), and other customs that Western audiences and readers hardly know about. Despite the ethical necessity to exercise fidelity to Hosseini’s novel, this does not negate the fact that Spangler’s emphasis is on creating good theatre. ‘It doesn’t do any good if you create a play that is very accurate to the text but doesn’t work as theatre’, Spangler asserts. ‘You don’t do the text any favours’ (Spangler). In other words, the play has to be theatrically engaging in order to tell a good story. Spangler points out that The Kite Runner has a ‘built-in advantage’ because of Amir’s first-person narrative voice. Since the narrator can be on stage telling the story, it allows Spangler to be both ‘true to the text and create a workable piece of theatre’ (ibid.), whereas other texts require more changes or are resistant to changes. Second, Spangler claims that ‘the shape of the book follows the shape of a stage play’ (ibid.): there is an inciting incident in the first act, the second act introduces new themes that resolve the themes from the first act, followed by a climatic scene at the end. Spangler admits, ‘The Kite Runner follows the form of what we in western theatre expect’. He adds: ‘In a strange way, the closer I was to that book, I felt like the more it was working as a piece of theatre’ (ibid.). Adaptation, in that sense, operated on two levels. For the adaptor to get close to Benjamin’s ‘aura’ of Afghanistan, he had to abide by Beekman and Callow’s ‘historical fidelity’, and, on the second level, he had to abide by Hosseini’s novel because it worked structurally, and therefore theatrically, for the stage.

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The third level of adaptation is more unique to Spangler’s context. Because of his geographical proximity to Khaled Hosseini in the USA, Spangler’s adaptation process involves liaising and collaborating directly with the author from the beginning, a privilege not many adaptors have when adapting texts (Zatlin), and a collaboration that could also be construed as artistically stifling (Logan). For Spangler, his collaboration with Hosseini was an integral part of his process. Spangler met up with the author in 2006 in Say Francisco Bay Area where they both live, and shared ideas with him. Spangler originally thought the adaptation would focus on a refugee story in the latter half of the novel. But the more Spangler involved himself in the story of the refugee character, the more he felt he had to include other sections, which eventually became the entire novel. Furthermore, many of the earlier drafts were vetted by Hosseini, whose comments ‘were things in the book that he (Hosseini) would have wanted changed if he were to rewrite the book today’ (Spangler). Seen in this light, Spangler’s adaptation could be construed as a newer interpretation of The Kite Runner which he co-wrote with Hosseini. But the collaboration did not end there. Hosseini was involved in the first production at San Jose State University, where Spangler directed it. When it was produced by the San Jose Repertory Theatre, Hosseini was present for many rehearsals. In all, Hosseini had an active part as ‘artistic collaborator’ in the stage adaptations from 2005 to 2009, a term Spangler coined for him, and a partnership that Spangler is most appreciative of. Spangler speaks about Hosseini’s generosity and kindness—and how easy it was to work with him. Spangler also professes that ‘[i]t’s important to me that Khaled [Hosseini] likes the play, and that he feels that it’s a fair reflection of the book’. The implicit need for the novelist’s approval here is, as I have argued earlier, an attempt to get closer to the ‘aura’ of Afghanistan in the bid to represent the narratives of Afghanistan to counter the mediafabricated versions of Afghanistan, and to avoid being ‘culturally offensive’. To put it in back into the context of the play, I would argue that it is Spangler’s attempt to find a ‘way to be good again’—the line spoken by Rahim Khan at the beginning of the play to Amir—as one American practitioner’s theatrical intervention to redeem the ‘war on terror’ waged on Afghan soil. This could explain why, of all his adaptation practices, Spangler felt the need to be historically and culturally faithful, to have nine months of research, to collaborate with Hosseini’s father-in-law, and

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finally, to gain Hosseini’s approval. In an interview with the Nottingham Post, Hosseini praises Spangler’s adaptation: I think it translates incredibly well. What I really love about the play is that so much of the book is preserved in it. You have freedoms with stage adaptations that you don’t have with film. One large chunk of the book is the main character’s Amir’s internal monologue, […] In the play the lead actor can break from the action, turn to the audience and share his thoughts. (Hosseini in Wilson)

Furthermore, Spangler’s view of The Kite Runner as an adaptation is an unfinished one. Even though the production at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre is its eleventh run globally, the script is undergoing constant revisions. Spangler says, ‘I’m not publishing the script, because I like making changes to it for every production’ (Spangler). In other words, his rewriting is possibly another attempt to get closer and closer to the ‘aura’ of Afghanistan—to be faithful to source text, culture, and history—while releasing the diverse effects of cultural understanding and appreciation for a gripping Afghan narrative. In fact, a New York Times reviewer of the novel states that Hosseini has ‘give[n] us a vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence—forces that continue to threaten them even today’ (Hower, 2003). For an adaptation to possess fidelity, then, is to prevent further disrepair and stereotyping of an Afghan nation, of an existing war narrative that demands a constant re-writing.

Notes 1. David Forster is the director of the film, but the screenplay is written by David Benioff. 2.  See Helen Freshwater’s 2012 discussion of authenticity where she acknowledges the avoidance of this term within theatre discourses. 3. See Ryan Claycomb’s 2008 discussion on the intersections between real and narrative worlds in theatre.

References Beekman, John, and John Callow. Translating The Word Of God, With Scripture And Topical Indexes. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Pub. House, 1974. Print.

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Benjamin, Walter. The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Print. Bluestone, George. Novels Into Film. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957. Print. Bourke, Fionnuala. ‘Birmingham Rep Hosts The Kite Runner: Review’. Birmingham Post. N.p., 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2015. . Britton, Louisa. ‘Review: The Kite Runner’. Nouse. N.p., 2014. Web. 6 Apr. 2015. . Celoni, Fabio, and Mirka Andolfo. The Kite Runner Graphic Novel. New York: Riverhead Books, 2011. Print. Cardwell, Sarah. ‘Adaptation Studies Revisited: Purposes, Perspectives, And Inspiration’. The Literature/Film Reader: Issues Of Adaptation. Ed. James M. Welsh and Peter Lev. 1st ed. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2007. 51–63. Print. Claycomb, Ryan. ‘Curtain Up? Disrupted, Disguised, And Delayed Beginnings In Theater And Drama’. Narrative Beginnings: Theories And Practices. Ed. Brian Richardson. 1st ed. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. 166–178. Print. Connor, J. D. ‘The Persistence Of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today’. A Journal of Media and Culture. N.p., 2007. Web. 6 Apr. 2015. . Freshwater, Helen. ‘Consuming Authenticities: Billy Elliot the Musical and the Performing Child’. The Lion and the Unicorn 36 (2012): 154–173. Web. Harris, Val. ‘The Kite Runner – Birmingham Rep’. The Good Review. N.p., 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2015. . Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Print. Hower, Edward. ‘The Servant’. New York Times 2003. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. . Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory Of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Iqbal, Nosheen. ‘How Do You Put The Kite Runner On Stage?’. Guardian 2013. Web. 25 Mar. 2015. Logan, Brian. ‘Whose Play Is It Anyway?’. The Guardian 2003. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. . McFarlane, Brian. Novel To Film. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Print. Orme, Steve. ‘Theatre Review: The Kite Runner At Nottingham Playhouse’. British Theatre Guide. N.p., 2013. Web. 7 Apr. 2015. . Robinson, Andrew. ‘Walter Benjamin: Art, Aura And Authenticity’. Ceasefire Magazine. N.p., 2013. Web. 7 Apr. 2015. .

174  E. Chow Sanders, Julie. Adaptation And Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006. Print. Shuttleworth, Mark, and Moira Cowie. Dictionary Of Translation Studies. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Pub., 1997. Print. Spangler, Matthew. Interview. 28 Oct. 2014. Skype. Stam, Robert. ‘Introduction: The Theory And Practice Of Adaptation’. Literature And Film: A Guide To The Theory And Practice Of Adaptation. Ed. Robert Stam and Alessandro Raengo. 1st ed. New York: Blackwell, 2005. 1–52. Print. The Kite Runner. USA: Marc Forster, 2007. Film. The Kite Runner. New York: Matthew Spangler, 2007. Theatre. Tompkins, Joanne. ‘Editorial Comment: Theatre And Adaptation’. Theatre Journal 66.4 (2014): ix−xi. Web. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translation Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. Wilson, Simon. ‘Kite Runner Author Khaled Hosseini On The Stage Adaptation That Comes To Nottingham Playhouse’. Nottingham Post 2014. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. . Zatlin, Phyllis. Theatrical Translation And Film Adaptation. Clevedon [England]: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Print.

CHAPTER 9

Fanny Hill Onstage: TheatreState and April De Angelis’s Feminist Adaptations Kara Reilly

As the performer with a bomb strapped to his chest in Forced Entertainment’s Showtime explains: ‘the audience are people who like to watch other people do it in the dark’. A theatre production with the title Fanny Hill—with its implicit promise of voyeurism—gets bums on seats. The British stage has seen two contemporary feminist adaptations of John Cleland’s 1747–1748 pornographic novel in recent years: TheatreState’s 2014 production of Fanny Hill Project Volume 2.0 and April De Angelis’s 2015 version of Life and Times of Fanny Hill at the Bristol Old Vic (an updating of her 1991 script). Both productions are feminist adaptations of a famous pornographic novel in which the male author, John Cleland, ventriloquizes female prostitute, Fanny. The male vision of the female sexual experience expressed in Cleland’s novel is radically shifted in these productions as Fanny finds a female voice. TheatreState’s Fanny Hill Project Volume 2.0 juxtaposed performer Tess Seddon’s experience of working in a foot fetish club in Manhattan with performer Cheryl Gallacher’s re-staging of Fanny Hill’s story in the novel.1 April De Angelis re-imagines Fanny Hill as a woman in her early sixties who K. Reilly (*)  University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_9

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is threatened by her creditor, Spark. He demands she write an erotic memoir as a way to pay her debt. The only problem is that Fanny has forgotten her past and so she hires two younger prostitutes to act out her story and help her ‘remember it’. Her uncertainty about her past conjures that dictum that memory is an interruption of forgetting. Both productions use the eroticism and bawdy comedy that is ubiquitous in Fanny Hill to lure audiences into the theatre and make them pay attention. However, as José Esteban Muñoz has written, ‘comedy does not exist independently of rage’ (xi). So while these productions seduced audiences with pleasure and laughter, they then pulled the rug out from underneath them by raising the stakes, reversing the situation, and making thinking audience members ask questions about the cultural construction of the female body through pornography. Cleland’s Fanny Hill offers the reader a chance to project him or herself into the narrative voice of Fanny Hill without consequences—indeed the novel is famous for the fact that Fanny marries her true love, Charles, and lives happily ever after. In contradistinction to the novel, both of these productions critique the nature of sex work in the eighteenth century, but also how women are still perceived through the male gaze in the contemporary moment. De Angelis’s Fanny Hill shows the longterm devastation that a life of prostitution can have on women and the traumatic origin stories of prostitutes that are erased from Cleland’s novel. Starring Caroline Quentin in the title role, De Angelis writes back to pornography by making her appropriation contemporary, political and relevant. Director Michael Oakley offered a stellar production that illuminated a contemporary take on one of the most banned books of all time. The setting in the Bristol Old Vic Theatre was grand and luxurious in scale, as it is one of the oldest extant theatres in the country and built in the eighteenth century. In contrast, TheatreState’s production was at the small fringe black box theatre in Exeter. TheatreState makes the story contemporary by creating a dialectic between Fanny Hill’s experiences of selling her body in 1747 with performer Tess’s experience selling her feet in 2010. Using pillow fights, drinking games, a DJ, rap music, and a send up of pop music videos and choreographed dance routines, TheatreState employs laughter to engage audiences in the narrative journey which is dramaturgically structured around the chapters in Fanny Hill. What initially seems like an innocent enough picara-style story about a young woman on an adventure in New York who needs some cash, and so chooses to sell her feet to foot fetishists in a club, reveals a much darker message about what it takes to be an ‘independent woman’.

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TheatreState’s adaptation writes back to eighteenth-century pornography in a diachronic way, questioning the degree to which women can ever really own the gaze and their own sexuality as performers or prostitutes either in the eighteenth century or in the contemporary moment. The production is ultimately post-Brechtian in that it uses a dialectical type of performance to juxtapose Seddon’s experience in the twenty-first century with Fanny Hill’s experience at the end of the eighteenth century (Barnette 333). April De Angelis’s Life and Times of Fanny Hill is also diachronic and dialectic to the contemporary moment. She seduces the audience with ribald sex scenes only to show the original traumas of the women who are forced into prostitution. Essentially, both productions ‘write back’ to the pornographic novel, using it to make their own, feminist version that speaks volumes about the gaze in the contemporary moment.

Time to Confess TheatreState’s Fanny Hill 2.0 begins with Cheryl greeting the audience as they enter Exeter’s Bike Shed (an intimate 50 seat basement theatre) in May 2014. The stage is basically empty except for a blonde boy-ish DJ Jordan, who stands centre stage in a DJ booth playing Madonna’s ‘Celebrate’ with automated coloured lights projected around the space. Cheryl offers audience members vodka or juice, as Tess lies stage left wearing stiletto heels and a half paper mask that is eighteenth century in style (complete with periwig curls) while kicking her leg up and down with mechanical repetition and a permi-grin on her face. Once the audience is settled Tess and Cheryl conspiratorially come centre stage to the microphone: ‘We’ve got something big to confess to you, it’s really embarrassing, but first a game…’ The audience is asked to play the drinking game ‘I have never’. The rules of the game—for those who haven’t played—are simple: one person places their glass on their head and says: ‘I have never…’ For example, and this is one from the show, ‘I have never taken a selfie’. If the other players have taken a selfie, then they must drink their drinks. Meanwhile DJ Jordan samples Kendrick Lamar’s rap song “Swimming Pool (Drank)”, which is about a man struggling to survive in drinking culture, as the audience settles into their drinking game. The phrase ‘Drank’ also produces a sample of gestic music, which is music that accrues meaning through repetition. Tess and Cheryl tell us that ‘I have never’ is a game:

178  K. Reilly where there’s no clear winner…. It’s a game where there’s no clear ending. Sometimes I wonder is the game really playing us? It’s a game where you don’t have to do anything or say anything but you’re still playing the game. You’re always playing the game.

The game is a warm up act that loosens up the audience, but also becomes a metaphor for the confusing impulses behind sexuality. The implication being that we all play the game whether we want to or not. At first the challenges are simple, including ‘I have never read Fanny Hill.’ But Tess and Cheryl compete with each other getting meaner and meaner: ‘I have never had a sex dream about an oranguatan’; ‘I have never been in a power trip in rehearsals’; ‘I’ve never been a shit performer’; until Cheryl says to Tess, ‘I have never been a prostitute’. And Tess drinks her drink. This moment is a catalyst as Tess Seddon moves centre stage and begins telling us her story, while Cheryl begins her physical transformation into Fanny through eighteenth century dress. Tess directly addresses the audience at the microphone: Hi, the story I’m going to tell you tonight is a little bit embarrassing and a bit awkward. But it’s something that I did. I sold my feet, but before I tell you about that I want to give you a bit of background. When I was 13 I asked my parents for a playboy bunny t-shirt for my birthday and in return I got Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman. I was a little bit confused, but I read it and I was shocked. I had been oppressed for 13 long years of my life.

Some members of the audience tittered with recognition at the desire to wear a playboy bunny t-shirt or at the sudden total awareness reading Greer can deliver. At the same time, Tess’s monologue is dead-pan and somewhat tongue in cheek. She goes onto to describe her 13-year-old awkwardly heroic self: And I went into school the next day and demanded that all my classmates rip off their pictures of Katie Price and Jodie Marsh from their exercise books. And a couple of years later when we were fifteen and everyone started fantasizing about being strippers I told them that they were going to let down not only themselves but also womanity. That the sisterhood would be broken if they started selling themselves because it would affect how men saw women everywhere. A few years later having found no friends at school: I found myself doing exactly the same thing, letting down the sisterhood.

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Here Tess indicates a key theme in the piece, which is the way images from popular culture permeate women’s ideas about how their identities should be constructed. The inciting incident becomes clear—Tess will tell her story—that juicy confession we were promised earlier. It is the story of a descent into vice: And that’s the story I’m going to tell you tonight. It’s the story I told Cheryl a while ago and she was desperate to make a show about it. At first I was like, there was no way I am going to get up on stage and tell people what I have been up to, but she was super desperate and she said she would do whatever it took for me to do this tonight. So I dug deep into the history of erotic literature and found this, Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure … and it tells the story of a young woman’s descent into vice, and just how much she totally loves it. I think it’s probably the most embarrassing book for someone to read. Hopefully, it’s worse than my story, I’ll let you decide … Let’s cast our minds back to the eighteenth century as we meet Fanny Hill…

DJ Jordan rings a boxing match bell and announces ‘Introducing Fanny Hill’. The bell will take on a character of its own as it is repeatedly rung throughout the performance, signifying scene changes but also heightening the sense of competition between performers. This was a reference to Brecht’s famous essay “Emphasis on Sport”, which suggests good theatre should be like a boxing match. Cheryl prances forward wearing her pink quasi-eighteenth century frock and holding a copy of the novel. She begins her story with the epistolary, ‘Dear Madam’. The physical book often appears in stage adaptations and here the book becomes a key performative object reminding the audience that they are watching an adaptation. The book functions as a tool to help Cheryl transform into Fanny Hill. She coyly promises to tell the story of her shameful and horrifyingly perverse descent into prostitution. The sequence ends with DJ Jordan playing David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ as Tess and Cheryl engage in a choreographed routine that is playful and knowingly bad. In contrast April De Angelis’s Life and Times of Fanny Hill opens with Voltaire who is ‘having a lovely holiday in England’, declaiming his love of the English over the French, a clear citation of Voltaire’s Letters on the English. A 60-something Fanny propositions Voltaire, and he runs off, after shouting an insulting, ‘Mon Dieu!’ This opening illustrates De Angelis’s awareness of Fanny Hill’s participation in the materialist philosophical tradition. Fanny is down on her luck. She explains:

180  K. Reilly Fanny’s fallen on hard times. Hard times. Corners aren’t as dark as they used to be And customers are fussy. What I say is, you don’t need teeth to give good suck! I wish it was always dark. Black like inside a hat. Then I’d do business. Then I’d have a carriage and a parrot. I haven’t eaten for three days. I could be dead on Sunday! (De Angelis, 3)2

Spark enters and Fanny hopes he is a paying customer who will hire her, but in fact he has purchased her gambling debts and is now her demanding creditor. He wants her to write her erotic memoir as a way to pay her debt. Spark argues that by writing a book, she will service ‘the multitude in one singular act’ (7). Here the origins of pornography enter into the story, and Spark argues that the experience of the prostitute can titillate multiple readers through print, as opposed to only one client in person. Fanny agrees to write the book, but she has one significant problem—her past is a blank slate. Like Cheryl and Tess, she also has a confession to make: I have a confession. My horrid career. It has been horrid I’m sure of that. when I turn round fast to catch at it all I see is a blur of bedpans or a bloke buttoning up. (7)

The promise of juicy confessions in Fanny Hill—who is famous for titillating generations—is deflated here by Fanny’s reduced circumstances and her memory loss. The real world intrudes on fantasy. To solve her memory dilemma Fanny hires two younger prostitutes, Swallow and Louisa, to act out her story. She claims she is ‘remembering it’ but really she is creating it from scratch. The implication is that Fanny has few

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happy memories from her life of prostitution, which rather than a life of pleasure, has instead been a life of trauma. Fanny instructs Swallow and Louisa to imagine themselves newly arrived to a London coach station from the country. She tells them: Fanny: Louisa: Fanny: Louisa: Fanny:

 ou’re all alone. Penniless. Y An innocent and friendless orphan new to London. What will happen? Imagine. Pause. Well? I’ll get screwed. That is a trifle bald, Louisa. It’s the truth. But it lacks narrative. The reader, as we all do, requires a little fondling before being brought to the point.

And that is the dramaturgical motivation for the bawdiness that follows—Fanny, Swallow, and Louisa will improvise and create a story, thereby seducing the reader into the world of Fanny Hill and all of its erotic pleasures through fantasy. Young Swallow becomes Fanny as the elder Fanny takes on the role of Mrs Brown who introduces her to the world of pleasures in the brothel. Fanny is seduced by Phoebe, who kisses her and remarks, ‘Perhaps it is the London way to do things’. This laugh line from the novel is also used in TheatreState’s production during a so called ‘girl-on-girl’ scene that spoofs slumber parties in pornography. Tess spends most of the scene awkwardly trying to dress Cheryl in her pink pyjamas, which deflates anything erotic and makes the sequence embarrassing. When Katie Perry’s pop song ‘I kissed a girl and I liked it’ comes on DJ Jordan puts feathers in front of a fan as the two have a pillow fight that shows the representation of lesbian sexuality for sale in the media. In April De Angelis’s play Phoebe initiates Swallow/Fanny into the world of voyeurism as they peep on Mrs Brown while she has explicit sex with a young horse grenadier. The sex is acted out onstage where it looks increasingly automatic and the grenadier’s penis is referred to as ‘a machine’. But before the elder Fanny as Mrs Brown can auction off her virginity to the highest bidder, Swallow/Fanny explains that she has met Charles, fallen in love at first sight, and that he has decided to ‘keep’ her. This scene is staged with Swallow/Fanny putting her arm carefully through

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a blue velvet jacket and embracing herself. The tenderness of the performer towards this performing object was evocative. However, the older Fanny refuses to approve this as a viable ending: ‘You can’t end a book on chapter three. It’s too thin, it won’t sell’ (28). So the older Fanny has Charles kidnapped by his family and sent to the South Indies, while the younger Fanny has to contend with a new ‘keeper’, Mr. H. The plotting of Act I closely follows Cleland’s novel.

Origin Stories While the back stories of Fanny, Louisa, and Swallow are less important initially than their enactment of a present that Fanny can record and sell, TheatreState makes a point of explaining the material circumstances that led to Tess selling her feet. The lack of back story in April De Angelis’s adaptation will become the return of the repressed as the figures are all haunted by the traumas that led to their careers as prostitutes in Act II. Tess tells us about her experience finishing university with a drama degree during the 2008 crash. She was less than employable and was forced to move home to Bradford and take a job as a receptionist. Her father had gone bankrupt, had a midlife crisis, and abandoned her mother for a woman half her age. At her miserable day job a malicious boss forces Tess to wear a vomit-coloured brown pin striped suit and a 90 degree ponytail. The boxing ring bell dings, as Cheryl becomes Fanny again and tells of her upbringing in a village outside Liverpool and her parents’ sudden death from smallpox when she was 15. She quickly moves onto how ‘I set my sights and the last of my moneys, on getting to London!’ The boxing bell rings again. We learn that while working in the office, Tess is determined to do something with her theatre degree. She realises most theatre companies wanted her to do an unpaid internship. ‘If I’m going to work for free, I’m not going to do it in Bradford’. Tess decides to get a New York-based internship and is invited for an interview. ‘After a particularly bad day in that brown suit I decided it was time to book that flight and I headed off to New York’. Suddenly Miley Cyrus’s song ‘Party in the USA’ is blasting from the speakers and Tess and Cheryl engage in a campy live ‘music video’ style dance complete with lip-synching. They dance like enthusiastic teenagers acting out a fantasy: they put on sunglasses, twirl umbrellas, dance in unison, and unfold maps to find their way around the city. The lack of polish in these music videos is deliberate and charming. The failure here is part of

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their charisma (see Bailes). This use of the music video fantasy speaks to the formation of the ego identity through the projection of the self onto media figures. Cheryl and Tess’s eyes gleam with the naïve possibility of a new life and ‘the magic of New York’. Suddenly the music is interrupted by DJ Jordan announcing “Chapter Two: Being Taken in”. Both women looked harried as they rush to tell the next part of the story. Cheryl describes being taken in by Mrs Brown’s brothel; whereas, Tess has been taken in by her boyfriend’s Aunt in New York. However, the aunt has gone to Canada for her mother’s funeral and Tess is confronted with Tommy Cooper or ‘Coops’ who answers the door wearing nothing but science goggles and his speedo. The boxing bell rings again and Cheryl describes meeting Mrs Brown’s cousin, who is cadaverous in hue with ‘tusks rather than teeth … he was so blind to his own startling deformities as to think himself born for pleasing’. Mrs Brown’s disgusting cousin forces his pestilential kisses on Cheryl. As the bell rings again, Tess explains that every morning over breakfast Tommy would tell her how many women had been abducted and raped in the city that day and that she should not go out. She is terrified and decides to remain indoors. In addition to dealing with unwanted attention from Tommy, she looks after his husky, cooks, and cleans for him. The boxing ring bell rings faster and faster as Tess and Cheryl jump in front of the microphone. Their stories are more and more juxtaposed in a theatrical montage (see Bryant-Bertail). The unwanted affections of Mrs Brown’s older cousin are juxtaposed with Tess combating the annoying attention from Tommy. Tommy kisses Tess after she has vomited from too much alcohol; Cheryl is outraged that Mrs Brown has auctioned off her virginity to the highest bidder. The boxing ring bell goes off again and DJ Jordan announces, ‘Here we go!’, as David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ plays again. Here the music becomes gestic through repetition. This time it is distorted, as the bell continues to ring with increasing ferocity. Tess and Cheryl have a competitive dance off. This time the dancing is not a knowing, playful choreography; instead, it is a disturbing frenzy of automatic and desperate competition.

Tess’s Story Tess explains that she moves out of the house with Tommy and into a freegan commune with 90 other people. She needed a job that was cashin-hand in New York and she explains that the best available job was for a foot fetish club, so she auditioned after having a pedicure and was quickly

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accepted. This is juxtaposed with Cheryl as Fanny describes seeing Charles and falling in love at first sight with him. DJ Jordan becomes Charles, dressed in a pimp-style outfit complete with sheepskin coat and leather hat. He offers to keep Cheryl and she agrees. The bell dings and Tess explains that she was casted after ‘de-socking’. There she was told ‘he’d never seen such beautiful arches’ and he took a photo for the website. Tess explains the situation in the foot fetish club. You got $20 for every 10 min of a client touching your feet, or you could earn the big bucks in the booth where a sign hung that said ‘self-masturbation is not illegal’; something she decided against. The first night the clients were not as weird as Tess anticipates, so she helps herself to a vodka and settles in. The bell rings again and Cheryl wears a bridal veil. The scene is called ‘Attack of the Truncheon’ and is the climax of the play. Cheryl explains that having successfully escaped from Mrs Brown’s and gone to their new abode, Charles then flings her onto the bed. Striking a bridal pose, she explains that she doted on him and could have died for him. She takes the sheet covering the front of the DJ booth off, and Jordan slowly emerges from behind the booth lip synching the Ying Yang Twins pornographic ‘Whisper Song’. The lyrics are ‘Wait till you see my dick. I’m gonna beat that pussy. Beat the puss up. Bam. Bam.’ As the chorus starts Jordan dances evocatively and pulls two flesh coloured dildos out of his pockets pointing them at the audience like guns. He then dances with Cheryl pointing the dildo guns at her while she playfully puts her hands up in the air, and then pulls her skirt over her head. Suddenly, Jordan begins shooting Cheryl and a sperm-like milky white substance comes out of the dildo guns. Cheryl tries to hide behind Tess, she even steals one of Jordan’s squirt guns and shoots Tess’s feet, but ultimately she ends up on the floor as Jordan continues to shoot her with the sperm from the dildo guns. Cheryl is stunned; she refuses to move. Jordan looks confused and puts down the dildo gun. Suddenly a computerized voice announces from the DJ box that they must move onto ‘Chapter 8: An Education’ and the boxing bell rings twice with insistence. Tess and Jordan stare at one another and at Cheryl seated on the ground. Nothing happens for some time, until Jordan gets the novel and hands it to Cheryl. Cheryl throws it across the room, Jordan picks it up again, and gives it back to Cheryl who indicates that now Jordan must play Fanny. With the microphone in hand, Jordan begins to read from the novel with a lucky lisp, indicating a campy queerness, as Cheryl throws her skirt at his head and he offers her his coat. She refuses the coat, and Jordan begins to put

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on her fluffy tulle skirt, explaining that after sex ‘he couldn’t walk for ten days’. Jordan, who was just performing hyper-masculinity through the Ying Yang twins’ song, is now objectified. Through this sudden shift, the performers reveal the compulsive heteronormativity inherent in pornography like Fanny Hill and the potential for self-loathing that comes when one identifies with the wrong gender. If for the contemporary male the identification with the phallus signifies his own identity with himself and his absolute distinction and difference from the female, by taking on the role of Fanny Hill Jordan queers himself and becomes an object (see Moten). However, there is also a subtler reading that allows his queerness to reflect an anxiety about female sexuality on the part of some queer men and the misogyny that is a part of that anxiety. When bell rings again Tess finishes the story of working in the foot fetish club. She made $600 in the first night, and she made extra money for letting clients tickle her. Some girls who worked there left early with the men, but for Tess the strangest part about her job was competing with the other women to get clients. Tess explains that over sixty women worked in the club, so that in order to get clients you had to chat people up. ‘I’ve never been very good at chatting people up, especially people you don’t want to touch you.’ The booth automatically begins playing Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Swimming Pool (Drank)’ rap again, reminding the audience of the drinking game that initiated the play. Jordan takes on the persona of a fellow prostitute ‘playing the game’ via the drinking game and uses his ‘I have never’ announcements as a chance to humiliate Tess. Eighteenth century harpsichord music comes on. Jordan and Tess dance in competition with each another for the audience’s attention and by extension the attention of the clients at the foot fetish club. An upset and silent Cheryl goes up stage to the back wall of the theatre and watches the two compete. The bell rings again and the computerized voice announces ‘Chapter 9: Queen of Fucking Everything’. Tess changes into her foot fetish club outfit which consists of gold stilletos and a sheer white negligee. Jordan lisps into the microphone as Fanny Hill: I joined a house of convenience … I was at the top of my game, and as such, only dealt with persons of distinction. I began to take pleasure in the vanities of our sex that were in ready supply … all the trinkets and dresses were lavishly heaped upon me … None are treated better during their reign than the mistresses of those fine gentlemen.

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He gets down on the ground in front of the booth and begins to mechanically kick his leg up and down like an automaton while moving a red umbrella in the air. He freezes as the robot DJ voice announces Chapter 10: Independent Woman. Tess grabs the microphone from Jordan, clears her throat and stares out at the audience: So my sister told my dad what I’d been up to and I hadn’t spoken to him in a while, and he laughed. My boyfriend came out to visit. He had just lost his job. He had known about the foot fetish thing. He didn’t want to kind of get in the way. He said it was my choice whether I wanted to do it or not. I got the usual Friday night text from Crystal. She said that that night it was sexy lingerie night. We had a bit of a debate about whether or not I should do it, but he had run out of money so we thought it was a good idea. We went round Brooklyn discount stores looking for the right underwear that would cover just the right amount of flesh but reveal just enough. I met him around 5am after and I remember eating all you can eat pancakes until we felt sick (with all the money).

Tess stares long and hard at the audience. Her boyfriend had been complicit in her foot fetish club job as a prostitute, even going so far as to pick out her ‘sexy lingerie’, which is a betrayal. He had also been happy to eat the pancakes purchased by her hard night of work. Tess goes onto explain: The secret also got out at the theatre company where I’d been interning, and I was really worried going in the next day, but I shouldn’t have because the director suddenly learned my name. And she used to ask me what I thought about scenes in a way she didn’t talk to the interns. The lead actor he used to flirt with me in the corridors.

Her sex work gives her a certain glamour at her internship where suddenly people see her in a new way. Her monologue culminates with her explaining that: ‘I felt like I was part of this culture now, I would hear pop songs in a new way. I felt dangerous and exciting. I felt like this was a new me: a Tess Seddon I couldn’t have been before.’ This is delivered in a deadpan way, as Tess takes her place on the ground next to Jordan. Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ comes on for the third time, it is slowed down, distorted, and is now gestic music. The celebratory nature of the song is distanced and made strange. As Tess kicks her leg up while Jordan twirls his red umbrella slowly, their bodies are available and on display to the

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gaze, but everything is automated. As an audience member, I felt complicit in that gaze as the performers stared at me, returning my gaze.

Fanny Hill and Materialism Historically there is a link between Fanny Hill and materialist philosophy. Cleland’s work is often written about in relationship to Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine or Man, A Machine, which was written the year before Cleland published Volume One of Fanny Hill. In Man, A Machine La Mettrie argues for the machine-like nature of the body after Descartes. La Mettrie argues that ‘the human body is a machine which winds up its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual motion’ (La Mettrie, 93). La Mettrie engaged directly with Descartes’s theories about the bête machine, writing that he ‘understood animal nature, he was the first to prove completely that animals are pure machines’ (La Mettrie in Rosenfeld, 143). But La Mettrie also interrogated Descartes’s mind/ body dichotomy, since he believed it was utterly impossible to imagine a working mind outside a working body. When Descartes put forward his theory of the bête-machine he always distinguished human beings from animals by their possession of a rational soul. However, La Mettrie disagreed with Descartes about the very existence of the rational soul; instead, he created a materialist argument that the human body only functioned like an automaton. He also thought that the soul could not exist outside the body, because the mind was intrinsically inseparable from the body. La Mettrie’s machine was a delicate, bespoke clockwork automaton—not the industrial mass-manufactured machine we think of today. But the sexuality in Cleland’s novel reflects back on La Mettrie’s idea of the body as a machine, because throughout the novel the penis is constantly referred to as a machine. This produces a sense of the Freudian uncanny. Indeed the very nature of repetitive sexuality comes to seem both mechanical and grotesque. As Elizabeth Kubeck has argued, ‘the main secondary affect’ in Fanny Hill ‘is one of horror, at times shaded with grotesque humour’ (Kubeck, 174). De Angelis demonstrates an awareness of the materialist history of the novel. In a seduction scene between Fanny and Mr. H, Fanny is certain she will not feel anything. However, during sex she remarks, ‘my how the animal spirits do rush mechanically to their parts!’ (32). Bodies engaged in repetitive sex become mechanical and uncanny. This is clear

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in De Angelis’s adaptation as the actors engage in ‘a dumbshow of intercourse’ (32). There is a clear effort to distance the audience from getting too involved in scopophilia or pleasure in looking. For example, in a sequence when Fanny seduces a male servant as revenge for Mr H having sex with her maid, a large brown sock is thrown onstage and Louisa wears it on her arm as a ‘sceptre member’ (35). The absurdity of the giant arm as phallus fills the audience with laughter as the scene intensifies, only to leave Dingle, upset at its treatment, saying the sock has been ‘most vilely ill used’ (38). It is impossible to not see the absurdity of the sock-cock in the play and the ridiculous quality of lust for sale. At the beginning of Part II the entire cast appears in a bizarre, copulating tableau, the stage directions state that the company ‘moves as one thing, like a machine. It gets frantic and then dies. Everyone “dies” together. The machine collapses, sags.’ This mechanical perspective on repetitive sexuality for sale climaxes in Fanny’s final dream of herself as being entirely full of holes: Sometimes I have this dream. God says, ‘Fanny, you may have one wish’, so I ask for some holes. Then whoosh just like that all these holes appear all over me, small at first but big enough to stick a finger in. I’m delighted. What a time I’ll have with these, I think. I have tripled in value and tripled again. (77)

Fanny envisions herself as full of orifices and therefore tripling her market value—she is the ultimate commodity. But the holes extend and grow swallowing her up: And then my mouth opens wider and wider and all the holes get bigger still and bigger till finally all the holes join up at the edges until I’m just one big hole. Big enough for God or a giant reader to fuck and then I disappear. (77)

The holes engulf Fanny’s body until there is nothing left—she is only an orifice which the reader projects him or herself into for satisfaction. This awareness of the emptiness of Fanny’s character as she is caught in the desire to serve/please her client and entirely loses her identity is tragic. The back stories of Swallow and Louisa are made evident. Louisa left her home in the north during the enclosure movement where she saw starving people reduced to eating grass. Swallow worked for a gentleman who

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read all the time and taught her to read, but then he raped her. Pregnant and without friends Swallow gives birth to her child alone in the woods and must tie the infant up in a blanket and put it in the river. She begs Fanny to tell her story, the story of trauma and abandonment. But Fanny is too focused on her profit, too full of the desire to sell the erotic story. Ultimately, Swallow begging Fanny to tell her story makes us aware of the tragic nature of sex work and of the miserable and traumatic conditions that lead people to choose sex work in order to survive. Fanny Hill is not a gaping hole for readers to project themselves into. Instead, in these appropriations, the novel becomes a platform for a feminism that writes back to pornography and interrogates it. As De Angelis explains: There is nothing actually wrong with erotic material. It’s the way that women are used in the industry that’s wrong … I wanted to show the reality underneath it, so that if you were to allow the people in a pornographic story to be real, what would happen? That’s where all the other stories came in; so that they weren’t just cyphers, one dimensional figures who have sex. They did have sex, but they also came from somewhere and had a background and a history and you therefore identified with them in some way. I suppose I was trying to do two things: one was to say that erotic material can be life-enhancing and the other, that when you deny the reality of the people working in pornography, then it’s exploitative just like any market force can be exploitative (De Angelis in Stephenson and Langridge, 57)

In both productions the exploitation of the women involved in the sex industry is apparent. But neither production is anti-sex or pro-censorship when it comes to pornography, instead these artists manage to queer pornography. In José Esteban Muñoz terms they have dis-identified with Fanny Hill, projecting themselves into her story, but queering it. Both productions ‘write back’ to Cleland’s pornographic novel, appropriating it and making it their own. By doing so, these feminist versions offer new insights into the politics of cultural appropriation in the contemporary moment.

Note 1.  An ‘emerging’ feminist company TheatreState has made five pieces of theatre of which I have seen two. Please see theatrestate.co.uk for more information.

190  K. Reilly 2.  All citations are from the updated unpublished The Life and Times of Fanny Hill, obtained from the author’s agent Casaratto.

Works Cited Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffins and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literature, London: Routledge, 1989. Bailes, Sarah Jane, Performance, Theatre and the Politics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, and Elevator Repair Service, London: Routledge, 2011. Barnette, David, “Toward a Definition of Post-Brechtian Performance: The Example of In the Jungle of Cities at the Berliner Ensemble, 1971.” Modern Drama. 54.3. (2011): 333–356. Cleland, John, Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, London: Wordsworth, 2000. De Angelis, April, The Life and Times of Fanny Hill in Frontline Drama 4 Adapting Classics. London: Methuen, 1996. De Angelis, Updated unpublished The Life and Times of Fanny Hill, obtained from the author’s agent Casaratto on 15 May 2015. Fanny Hill 2.0, by TheatreState. Bike Shed Theatre, Exeter. 15 May 2014, Performance. Ferguson, Frances, Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004. Kubeck, Elizabeth, “The Man-Machine: Horror and the Phallus in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and Its Influences. Patsy S Fowler and Alan Jackson, Eds. New York: Aims Press, 2003. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, Man, a Machine, trans. G.G. Bussey et all. Chicago: Open Court Press, 1912. Life and Times of Fanny Hill, by April De Angelis. Dir by Michael Oakley. Bristol Old Vic, Bristol. 7 March. Performance. Moten, Fred, “Resistance of the Object: Adrian Piper’s Theatricality.” In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003): 233–254. Muñoz, José Esteban, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. London; Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1999. Rosenfield, Leonora Cohen. From Beast Man to Man-Machine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1943. Showtime, by Forced Entertainment. Dir by Tim Etchells. Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor. DVD. Stephenson, Heidi and Natasha Langridge. Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights and Playwriting. London: Methuen, 1997.

PART III

Reinscribing the Other in Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy, Introduced by Eleftheria Ioannidou

In the oldest extant Greek tragedy, and the only surviving one that takes its subject from historical facts, Aeschylus’s The Persians, the sympathetic representation of the defeated enemy offers an affirmation of the hegemonic power of the victor. A similar ambivalence is also evident in the case of numerous contemporary feminist or postcolonial adaptations of the classics that seek to challenge authorial rule. For all its power to rewrite the canon and redefine aesthetic and cultural hierarchies, adaptation inevitably affirms the canonical power of the original. While postcolonial appropriations of the classical text have repeatedly questioned the practices through which Western culture was legitimized and imposed, at the same time, they reinscribe the canon that was instrumental in sustaining the cultural hegemony of the West. The act of reclaiming the classical canon in order to speak for the dispossessed and excluded Other reiterates its claim to universality upon which its very supremacy was proclaimed in the first instance. Tragedy as an aesthetic response to pain and suffering, and an attempt to ascribe meaning to it, is also used to determine which suffering is meaningful. It was in mid-twentieth century that the common man was first considered as worth of tragedy. Two decades after Arthur Miller’s seminal essay ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’,1 cultural materialism proposed a tragic theory that should break with the suffering of the individual hero to seek responsibility in collective suffering.2 Even though a number of contemporary adaptations have interrogated the role of the West in global

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conflict and war, tragedy still remains tied to its Western contexts, which exclude subjects outside dominant discourses and power relations. This is evident when contrasting media reports on the tragedies happening in Paris or Brussels to normalizing representations of massive loss and catastrophe elsewhere. In that regard, Mark Ravenhill’s short piece The Women of Troy in which a female group implore an imaginary bomber to spare them, insisting on their self-definition as the ‘good people’ and celebrating their civilization of ‘freedom and democracy’ is deeply ironic in its implication that only these women can be viewed as tragic victims.3 The chapters presented in this volume raise questions of otherness, displacement, and disembodiment in relation to contemporary adaptations of the classical texts. The projects under examination do not just establish narrative or structural analogies with the ancient texts in order to prompt parallels with modern contexts, but enter a dialogue with dominant tropes of representation and manifest the differences in order to interrogate the politics of appropriation. George Potter focuses on shifting representations of Syrian refuges in Jordan through a critical juxtaposition of production of Slawomir Mrozek’s play The Emigrants directed by Samer Omran and post-2011 outreach productions of Syria: The Trojan Women and Shakespeare in Zaatari, adaptations of Euripides’ eponymous play and Hamlet, respectively. Gabriel Varghese offers a detailed examination of the radical adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad in the 2015 performance This Flesh is Mine developed by the Palestinian theatre group Ashtar in collaboration with the UK-based company Crossing Borders in response to the blockade of the Gaza Strip; in this version Briseis is given the voice and bodily presence that she is deprived of in the Homeric narrative and decides to claim her land. In a different strand, Olga Kekis examines Katie O’Reilly’s Peeling and Christine Evans’ Trojan Barbie; both plays’ adaptation of The Trojan Women, as argued by Kekis, depart from the portrayal of women as the victims of war characterizing the Euripidean play and numerous modern adaptations to retell the story of the female body as one of shared strength. The theory of adaptation defines it as product as well as a process of creation,4 paying equal attention to the final artistic outcome and the conditions under which its production and reception take place. The authors of the texts included in the volume draw on similar methodologies in analysing the collaborative modes of work, the economic frameworks and the broader ideologies that shape the final outcome of the adaptation. The heuristic tools introduced in the following pages propose new approaches to the study of adaptation. Potter employs Lori Allen’s distinction between

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human rights and the human rights industry in order to interrogate the reliance on Western classics within the adaptation industry which ‘marginalizes Syrian voices that are only deemed human when in the drag of Hecuba or Hamlet […]’. Varghese’s critique of international collaborations is based on an exploration of different artistic materials, work methodologies, and political languages that intersect in rehearsal. Kekis uses Gérard Genette’s concept of the palimpsest to discuss the layering of texts as a layering of different realities in the adapted work. Adaptations of classical works that seek to voice the marginalized Other function in ways that exceed the scope of their creation. The politics of adaptation is not easy to unravel without addressing the wider economic, collaborative, and representational structures that condition the final product. As will be demonstrated in the following texts, the canonical authority of the classical text is recast in the hierarchies that are embedded in the process of collaboration and supported by funding patterns and wider political discourses. These structures would often seem to reproduce the power dynamics that they set off to dismantle within an intricate process within which the encounter between texts is often only a pretext.

Notes  1. Miller’s essay was published in the New York Times in 1949 and provided the preface to the publication of The Death of a Salesman. 2. See in particular Raymond Williams’s book Modern Tragedy, first published in 1969. 3. Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat is the collective of a cycle of short plays, first produced for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2007 under the title Ravenhill for Breakfast. The Women of Troy is the first play in the published edition of the play scripts. 4.  Linda Hutcheon (2002), A Theory of Adaptation, second edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 7-8.

References Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge, 2013 [2002]. Ravenhill, Mark, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat. London: Methuen Drama, 2008. Williams, Raymond, Modern Tragedy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1966

CHAPTER 10

Hypertheatrical Engagement with Euripides’ Trojan Women: A Female ‘Writ of Habeas Corpus’ Olga Kekis

This chapter explores two contemporary adaptations that use Euripides’ Trojan Women as a scaffold upon which they build their own construct. By using the ancient play as a palimpsest, Kaite O’Reilly’s Peeling and Christine Evans’ Trojan Barbie simultaneously place the contemporary moment in productive dialogue with the past. This analysis takes Gérard Genette’s concept of ‘hypertextuality’ and transfers the applicability of the terms ‘hypertext’ and ‘hypotext’ to the theatre and practice of theatrical adaptation, in order to explore in the most effective way these plays bear a host of connections to The Trojan Women. Genette uses the term ‘hypertext’ to refer to ‘any text derived from a previous text’ (7) and ‘hypotext’ to refer to the earlier text (1–10). The term ‘hyperplay’ is used to refer to the plays that have been written and performed bearing some relation to the play which pre-existed them, and the term ‘hypoplay’ is used to refer to Euripides’ play. The term ‘hypertheatricality’ consequently, is used to refer to all the active links and connections

O. Kekis (*)  Independent Scholar, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_10

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which set the contemporary plays in a relationship—whether overt or covert—to Trojan Women. As Genette once again suggests, there is a ‘duplicity’ in the new object, in our case the new performances, which can be represented by the analogy of the palimpsest: ‘on the same parchment, one text can become superimposed upon another, which it does not quite conceal but allows to show through’ (398–399). In the same way, the hypoplay may or may not be clearly visible behind the hyperplay, but its existence invites us to engage in a ‘palimpsestuous’ viewing or experiencing of such a performance. The defining radicality of Evans’ and O’Reilly’s hyperplays lies in that the defeated women, unlike their mythical counterparts, gain a voice to speak against those who victimize them, and ultimately manage to re-gain control of their own bodies and therefore their own existence. Consequently, the focus is shifted from the helplessness of female mourning to the politics of the female body, on its state of brokenness, and on the women’s attempt to piece it back together to a meaningful state, and to account for it. O’Reilly’s efforts converge towards highlighting the disabled/able-bodied conflict, while Evans directs her attention to the shocking encounter of us/them, west/east, here/there, fake/real. Both present a postmodern fragmentation of time by transforming the most tragic of classical female characters into twenty-first-century women who challenge and contest their social and personal status. Referring to Euripides’ play Robert Scanlan writes that it ‘was like a writ of habeas corpus: a demand that the bodies be produced and that they be accounted for’ (27). In Latin the phrase ‘habeas corpus’ means ‘may you have the/ your body’, while a ‘writ’ is a legal procedure to which one has an undeniable right. In law, ‘a writ of habeas corpus’ is a judicial mandate ordering that a prisoner be brought to court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and to showcase why the liberty of that person is being restrained. O’Reilly’s and Evans’ adaptations function as a female writ of habeas corpus: a legal demand which is drawn up and made public by the women themselves who demand and seize control of their own bodies and by extension, their own fate. Though they are victimized for varied reasons, they all essentially overturn the concept of victimhood associated with the female survivors of the war at Troy which has been central to the understanding of Trojan Women and which seems to have been a common stimulus for creative hypertheatrical engagement. At the end of Euripides’ play the women of Troy are dragged away and the play ends, implying therefore a state

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of helplessness. In these adaptations the women act; they do not accept their fate in lamentation—they reject it and re-define themselves. At the end of the performance they actually ‘habent corpus’: they have their own body, they accept who they are and are in charge of their own existence; they assert themselves and refuse to allow themselves to be victimized or held in an unlawful, victimizing gaze by the audience.

Peeling: A Painful Striptease In 2002 Kaite O’Reilly was commissioned by the Graeae Theatre Company to write a play addressing and reflecting the company’s concerns (www.graeae.org.uk). The result of that commission was Peeling, which she developed collaboratively with the director Jenny Sealey and the original performers. The play engages hypertheatrically with The Trojan Women and metadramatically with the nature of its own performance as well as with the presence of the performers on stage as actresses and as characters. It premiered in February of the same year at The Door of the Birmingham Rep and was revived in March 2011 by Forest Forge Theatre Company who took it on a rural tour in village halls and community centres in Hampshire. O’Reilly’s agreement to write this play for Graeae is connected to her observation that the canon of western theatrical tradition is abundant with disabled bodies which are frequently used to portray Otherness as a metaphor for the human condition. However, seldom are the plays that portray such individuals written or performed by disabled actors, even in parts written specifically for them (Performance Programme for Peeling, 2011). O’Reilly chose to challenge this tradition by engaging with Euripides’ Trojan Women in a radical way, which focuses on the issue of women with ‘broken’ bodies and their position in the face of personal and social warfare. It also interrogates the way performances of ­classics have been staged throughout the centuries, as the archetype of the ultimately well-written plays to be performed by and for the physically and mentally able elite (www.forestforge.co.uk). O’Reilly draws a parallel between the metaphorical peeling of the layers of clothes that the performers are wearing, and the painful revelation of their souls to each other as they peel off the layers of social conventions that restrict them as female performers who are disabled. The play is written for three characters that are given a very specific profile and have specific disabilities. Alfa, 38, is ‘fiercely independent,

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eccentric and slightly puritanical. She is Deaf and uses sign language.’ Beaty, 26, is ‘fierce, feisty, sexy and four feet tall.’ Coral, 30, ‘is small and looks very fragile, but has a ferocious, inquiring mind. She uses an electric wheelchair’ (O’Reilly, 5). The playwright has been steadfast in her insistence that the play never be performed by anyone other than deaf and disabled performers and that has been the case both in the 2002 premier and in the 2011 revival. The interesting paradox that needs to be explored in this play is that while its most significant aspect stems from the fact that the characters and the actresses are disabled, simultaneously the least important element of this theatrical melange is that very disability. By laying bare their souls as the performance evolves, these three women who are visibly impaired show the audience their strength and essentially their lack of otherness. They are just like any other women, feeling sexy or feeling low, feeling weak or strong, emotional or cold, angry or cynical, mean to each other or plain sarcastic. And just like the women of Troy, Hecuba or Andromache, they are victims of prejudice but also survivors on stage and in life. Director Jenny Sealey, who is also the Artistic Director of Graeae, says on the company’s website that one of the main focuses of the play was to try to dispel the myth that all disabled women are ‘lovely’, that they all love each other and they all share the same politics. So they created three complex characters, who found it liberating to express negativity in the same way as anybody else, without the fear that they were going to be invalidated. Alfa, Beaty, and Coral, whose very names point towards their centrality and primary importance as characters in this play, are the three disabled actresses cast as the chorus in a mainstream postmodern production of The Trojan Women, called Trojan Women—Then and Now. They are, as Coral bitterly points out the ticks ‘on an equal opportunities monitoring form’ (45) commenting on the action, watching the play, but never taking part: ‘shoved at the back, unlit, onstage’ (14). They are three bickering women, kept tucked away somewhere upstage, away from the limelight and the leading roles. Just like the women of Troy who are cast aside as insignificant entities who cannot make decisions related to their own existence, so the three actresses are confined to the margins of theatre and society. However, in this dense, complicated play, they take centre stage and assume full responsibility for the choices they make as women.

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Throughout the performance the three women are stranded on stage, looking like cake decorations in three absurd, oversized, metal-framed crinolines formed in the shape of ball gowns which take up the whole stage. Strewn on the stage are relics of war, like ammunition boxes and all sorts of items found back stage in a theatre. When The Trojan Women is playing, the women speak their parts, commenting on the action and the situation that the war victims find themselves in. The rest of the time they are waiting, bickering, chatting, and sharing stories of sex, deception, and recipes in their absurd isolation. Gradually, as the narrative weaves in and out between the production of the play and the realities of the women’s lives they help each other peel off the layers of the preposterous costumes which have been masking the metal frames they were perched on, and strip themselves of all pretence, to reveal their own dark and devastating truths. As the parallel unseen production of The Trojan Women becomes more contemporary and relevant to their own lives, so their stories become more personal, more confessional, and more painful. Finally, they strip right down to simple underclothes, bearing themselves inside and out to each other and to the audience. And as Peeling begins to do exactly as its title promises, stripping away layer after layer of hopes and secrets, and metres and metres of colourful fabric, the audience may discover it’s not just theatre directors who keep Alfa, Beaty, and Coral tucked away from the limelight and the leading roles. It might be all of us—men and women alike—who constantly push them to one side, deeming them unsuitable for certain roles and opportunities, making them ‘the right-on extras stuck at the back whilst the real actors continue with the real play’ (45). Kirstie Davis’s deeply perceptive production has Kaite O’Reilly’s entire text together with stage directions projected as surtitles while at the same time the actors audio-describe what they are doing. Clearly on one level, this is done for the benefit of those members of the audience who don’t see or hear, but it is also a comment on the self-reflexivity of the performance and the messages it communicates. Language and communication therefore become a complex, multi-faceted process that underscores the multiple layers of theatrical adaptation. On one level we have the formal English (which of course is a translation) of the Trojan Women text, on another we have the colloquial language of the women’s informal interaction. On top of that there’s audio description, text on screen, British Sign Language and Sign-Supported English which are all integrated into the production. We therefore have a ‘story’ told, retold,

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and untold on many different levels and in many different ways thus creating an ‘alternative dramaturgy’ which, as Karen Jürs Munby contends in her analysis of Peeling, combines ‘inclusivity/accessibility and gestic defamiliarisation’ and categorizes the piece as postdramatic theatre despite its dramatic structure (Lehmann 5–6). This multiplicity of levels also strips the layers of respectability that the hypoplay holds as a classic and adds on layers of interpretation, which make it a hyperplay of The Trojan Women that gives the power to ‘broken’ women to piece their existence back together and provide the audience with a female writ of habeas corpus. In his review of the 2002 performance, Dominic Cavendish astutely points out that ‘the spirits of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett hover over Peeling … in a teasing, provocative combination’. Indeed, the central image of the play, of the three women being stuck within their huge, ludicrous gowns, with their heads sticking out like toppings to a decorated cup-cake is one which alludes to Beckettian characters who are at once profoundly tragic and darkly comic, stranded within the confines of a bleak, inflexible structure, caught in an existential anxiety. Furthermore the existence of strategies such as the use of projections, sign language, and directorial/authorial comments interspersed within the theatrical performance, all bear affinities to what Cavendish calls Brecht’s ‘alienation-effect sloganising’. However, the pastiche of epic drama and petty daily chit-chat, the fusion of formal language with swearing and daily slang, the parallel discussion of genocide and recipes, the evident fragmentation, and the non-linear, self-reflective, a-temporal unfolding of ‘action’ on stage, all make Peeling a play that resists categorization as a work that is primarily existential, philosophical or epic. This is a play that does not provide a single answer to the issues it explores, nor any philosophy as panacea to the world’s problems. Rather than being purely philosophical or polemically political it seems to rest more comfortably in the space of ‘post-Brechtian’ theatre which Hans-Thies Lehmann conceives as created ‘by the Brechtian enquiries into the presence and consciousness of the process of representation within the represented’ (33) and which goes beyond the certainties and the rational socialist solutions supported by epic theatre. The play is, I would add, deliberately complicated on all levels to point towards the postmodern layering of multiple realities, or, to use Fredric Jameson’s words, the search for ‘breaks’ rather than a flowing continuity, and for ‘shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation

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of things and of the way they change’ (ix). The action—or better the in-action—opens with the chorus speaking their parts from the ancient text and lamenting the loss of Troy. Soon there is a pause, the intense lights fade, and the women are ‘off’, therefore ‘themselves’, professional actresses who have been performing as chorus members of the play. As such they are not initially that bothered by the words of the Trojan widows. They focus on their own mundane reality and comment on the conventions of theatre. ‘Every night this play’, Beaty complains, ‘Every bloody night this play. /Every night this bloody play. /It gives me a headache’ (O’Reilly, 12). They pour themselves a cup of hot chocolate but then discuss how the ‘wardrobe mistress’ will ‘kill them’ if she catches them drinking in costume, ‘these frocks cost a fortune’. Again, however, they question the very reason behind what they are doing when they wonder about the significance of all of these conventions and confound the many and complex layers of reality, which are unfolding in front of the audience of Peeling. In their very informal, chatty way Coral, Alfa, and Beaty question the nature of representation in theatre, the conventions of realism on stage and the place and motivation of ‘character’ in a dramatic script. Their parodic discourse underscores the openness of experimental staging practices, challenges every traditional staging, especially of classic texts, and sarcastically defies all theatre which constructs a world irrelevant to those experiencing it. Their apparent distance from everything that is unfolding on or off stage, however, changes as the unseen performance of The Trojan Women becomes more ‘now’ than ‘then’. It becomes an image of a world we all know, where ‘Men [are] marching forward with their uniforms and their machetes and their orders: To rape To pillage To conquer Destroy … Woman’s body as battlefield. Rape as a war tactic. Mutilation as a reminder’ (22–23). Coral responds to these images saying, ‘I don’t think I like this play very much’ (24). A story about the mothers who commit suicide with their children rather than be caught by the enemy triggers painful revelations in Alfa, Coral, and Beaty’s own lives but not always invoking the stereotype of a selfless mother figure. It is the story that forges obvious links between the horrific war stories narrated by the actresses as chorus and the bitter reality of their own lives as women, as well as their traumatic experiences related to motherhood. Beaty recalls with powerful vindictiveness the day she buried her mother, who had projected her own sense of guilt, failure, and fear of death onto her disabled daughter. ‘There’s not many with “reduced life

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expectancy” can … press the earth down on their mother’s face. Stamp on the grave. Put a layer of concrete over so she can’t rise again’ she says, before adding sarcastically, ‘I joke of course’ (29–30). So while on the one hand the women of Troy in a classic text promote the image of idealized mothers, the three women question the traditional assumption that all mothers are loving and caring individuals. Later still, Coral admits that she had had a baby herself but was forced to give it up for adoption to ‘a nice non-disabled family with a life expectancy much longer than the biological mother’s’ (57). As for herself she ‘received a special operation, without consent or knowledge’ (57), to ensure no further babies were conceived by a woman who is a ‘freaky damaged sick chick [with] an interesting and increasingly rare genetic conjunction’ (56). She brings her account to a close by using words which evoke the killing of Astyanax in an attempt by the Greeks to kill off the line of heroic Trojans—an act which our society would so readily condemn. ‘The last of my line,’ she says of herself aggressively, ‘A full stop. /The blank page following the final chapter in a book’ (57). As the women watch Andromache lamenting when her son is dragged from her arms Coral’s attention wanders. And when as a member of the chorus Beaty says ‘I should have crushed you in the womb—folded you back inside myself rather than let you die by suicide bomb in a crowded discotheque’ (50), evoking images of contemporary wars as well as her own traumatic experience, Coral breaks down and tells the other women that she is pregnant but is terrified of bringing a child into this world for fear of turning into her own mum, of making the same mistakes, or simply because this earth is not ‘an OK place to take a baby’ (51). But Beaty wants her to fight on, like she did not manage to: ‘Have the bloody baby,’ she urges her matter-of-factly, ‘To make up for what we’ve lost’ (70). As for Alfa’s tale of secret pain, it surfaces when after Beaty, as the chorus talks about women being strong and killing their babies to prevent them from suffering, she repeats Coral’s earlier words, ‘I don’t like this play very much’ (66). Alfa reveals that following an amniocentesis test that showed a missing chromosome, she had had an abortion and since then has been punishing herself and ‘serving time’. All these interweaving images of women as mothers, ancient or modern, abled or dis-abled, melodramatic or cynical, young or old, selfpunishing or liberating, stimulate Alfa, Beaty, and Coral to share their own versions of loss which have been served to them as sanitized solutions, backed up by politically correct justifications ultimately reflecting

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society’s discomfort with disability especially in relation to motherhood. Yet, even though their voices are heard loud and clear on stage, signs of their entrapment linger on at the end of this performance. They admit that they are on a search for a ‘happy ending’, to life, to this performance, to any performance that they may act in, but they also cynically conclude that anything ‘positive’, ‘uplifting’, or with a ‘happy ending’ is a ‘fantasy’ (26). They look to their audience in the theatre on the night of the performance in search of an answer, but they find the same impasse reflected on their faces: Coral:  I watch them—the audience—their heads sleek in the dark— furtive—secretive, with their little habits, tics, inappropriate coughs, gaze. I watch them—but it’s transgressive—I’m to be stared at, not them. But I look and I want to ask, who are you? Why are you here? What do you think of me? Am I just another performer? What am I? My mother could never even find the exact word for me—even though she is still searching. (as her mother) ‘What are you like Coral? I’ll tell you what you’re like: a disappointment. A let-down. And after all my sacrifices …’ (to audience as self) I’m watching you. (48) They step out of their massive dresses which constrict them and even shed their clothes as they share their painful dark secrets with each other and with the audience, but the metal frames that held their clothing, so like cages when they are stripped of material, remain on stage and indeed continue to take up the whole space even after the end of the final blackout. These cage-like frames, create an image of entrapment which leaves the audience feeling that these women may have ‘confessed their way out’ of their own constrictions but the power structures which keep them restricted as women, as mothers, as lovers, as daughters, still remain. As characters that have been deconstructed in a contemporary version of The Trojan Women, they interrogate their role as performers and are in playful interaction with the contemporary resonances of the hypoplay. But as women who seek liberation from the clichés that society has placed on them, they have a long battle to fight before their final victory. The above contradiction lies in a further catch-22 situation in which women especially in the western world found themselves, in the latter half of the twentieth century. On the one hand, women gained the right

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to control their bodies in a way that has had no precedent in history. On the other hand, society has often remained conservative and hesitant in sanctioning that right. Therefore, women have found themselves alone and unsupported in decisions that relate to their right to govern their own body especially their reproductive choices—and even today many still silently carry solitary burdens of guilt or responsibility related to these choices. By engaging with The Trojan Women, Peeling seeks to break this silence and to provide a coherent link between the experience of contemporary women, disabled or able bodied and that of women of the ancient world. The strength of this play as a hyperplay, therefore, lies in its boldness to address and reflect on the issue of disability and performance, the ethics and aesthetics of appearance, and the right of women to have a political voice of their own concerning their own fertility. It reaches a new theatre audience by peeling off layers and layers of prejudices and engaging with ideas emanating from a very old play in an innovative way.

Trojan Barbie: ‘A Dream with a Hard Core of Truth Inside.’ Christine Evans wrote Trojan Barbie as a ‘modern car-crash encounter with Euripides’ Trojan Women’ (“AS Interview”), a play that would address the many layers of time, history, and culture that have accumulated and collide between two works of art crafted with two millennia between them. The play began its life as a commission by the University of San Francisco to adapt Euripides’ Trojan Women for a student project. Its final form eventually captured the attention of the American Repertory Theatre in Boston where it premiered in March 2009, directed by Carmel O’Reilly. Evans developed a radical adaptation because she believed it was not enough to simply ‘modernize’ the dialogue in the hypoplay and assume that the same words and ideas presented with a contemporary polish could reflect in a better way the sufferings of women in war. She wanted to re-invent a new dialogue between our own time and that of The Trojan Women. She focused on the false sense of distance that we in the Western world feel exists between our reality and the suffering of countries and people who are in a war situation. Her idea of a ‘collision’ between the past and the present was an attempt to explore the concept

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of cyclical traumatic memory and her observation that in a very paradoxical way we seem comfortable living in many different times and places at once. This multiplicity of layers gave Evans a sense ‘of time collapsing, from modernity to ancient society [that] seemed true of our own strange postmodern moment’ (“In Conversation”), and provided a starting point for [her] play’s collision of times. Trojan Barbie tells the story of Lotte Jones, a middle aged, childless doll-repair expert from Reading, who decides to go on ‘a cultural tour for singles’ to the site of Ancient Troy in Turkey, advertised in her brochure as ‘Tragedy in Troy’ (Evans TB 26). Lotte packs her dreams of romantic love and cultured adventures into her suitcase and leaves her safe haven in the UK to travel to ‘the city that has been razed and rebuilt nine times’ (9). When she arrives there she is impressed by how ‘sad and quite lovely’ the place is, and observes that ‘history is all around [her], in a shopworn and dusty silence’ (26). But suddenly her naive, tourist observations as well as the surrounding silence, are shattered. Her cultural space bubble is violated by the entrance of Andromache who comes on stage and into Lotte’s reality, lost and devastated by what has been happening to her family and to her country. Lotte has somehow landed back in time in an ancient war zone—among the ruins of Troy, during the last days of the Trojan War, as the city is being burnt to the ground. From that moment on the two worlds—of Lotte, the woman who can mend and replace the limbs of broken dolls, and of the tormented women of Troy, who cannot get their ‘broken’ children, or husbands, or homes repaired and fixed—are presented in forceful juxtaposition, shattering the constructs of time and reality and identifying the harsh pain that violence and ‘other people’s’ wars bring to those who did not invite it. Trojan Barbie encompasses the two colliding worlds in its very title. While ‘Trojan’ refers us back in time to a mythological reality that invokes images of war, pain, and loss, ‘Barbie’ pushes us into a present which is plastic, playful, colourful, and related negatively to an uncomfortable re-imagining of the ideal female body. However Evans manages to evade this familiar image of the un-ageing Barbie doll. In fact she uses it as a kind of distancing device which reverses our expectations and our habitual perception of the play. The only figure in her play which could be called Barbie-like, is Helen, who uses all her feminine wiles to try to escape from the terrifying reality of the war. However, she does not promote the image of the brainless beauty, because she is the one

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who manages to escape portraying in that way an image of active resistance, fierce practicality, and clever persuasiveness rather than what she calls the ‘Wailing Women routine’ (18). Helen’s versatility and ability to ‘manoeuvre’ other human beings, especially men, is regarded as one of the ways that women in war situations manage to regain the voice that has been taken away from them and make a political statement. But the central re-invented image of Barbie comes from Hecuba’s teenage daughter Polly X who conceives of a sculpture which she calls the Trojan Barbie. She is inspired by what she sees in the only museum exhibition which has not been looted by invading soldiers: works fashioned out of found objects—mostly things that have been broken in battle and are completely useless. In a similar fashion she decides to make a sculpture out of her own ‘broken stuff’: mostly old, dismembered Barbie dolls. In an outbreak of childish excitement she says: ‘I am going to get a big piece of pink cardboard … and then I am going to get all my dolls and nail them onto it. In the shape of a heart. So when it’s finished it will be this huge heart, made of smashed up dolls … It will be very, very scary’ (11). Polly X’s creative fantasy will not be completed until the end of the play when she becomes one of those dolls, nailed in a crucifixion-like pose to the huge heart. This final image of the play, with all the implications it carries, is indeed ‘very scary’, but it is also a celebration of a young woman’s defiant attitude, of her fierce desire to live, rebel, and be creative, and of her ability to redefine her role in society not as that of the Barbie doll but on the contrary as a girl ‘who’d rather invent something than be [an] icon’ (8). ‘I don’t care about History’, Polly X says before she is sacrificed, ‘It’s full of dead people. I just wanted to live’ (68). Her defiant attitude is directly related to the re-invented image of the Barbie which I have been discussing but also to dolls as lifeless-objectsthat-could-be-living-people, which are the central recurring image of the play. As Evans experiments with the dolls as a central image running throughout her text, director Carmel O’Reilly together with designer David Reynoso translate this effectively into theatrical space. As the audience walk into the theatre they are greeted by the gruesome image of a string of mutilated dolls that hangs over the middle of the stage. Some are without arms, some without legs, some even without heads—it is just a collection of body parts. These dolls which are garishly real, yet also obviously plastic become for the director a chance to explore the tension between the doll as replica of a human and the human as real. Though

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the two look alike there is one main fracture between them. In a replica the trauma can be erased completely, in a human it cannot. Futhermore, this shock encounter between the audience and the mutilated dolls brings forward the almost impossible task that female victims of war are faced with in this performance: to put back together their own shattered bodies and to ‘show’ them in one piece, to present the body, whole and functioning. When Andromache breaks into Lotte’s world, at the café in Turkey, she is covered in ragged clothing, and fresh bruises. In her arms she carries a toddler sized doll. To Andromache this is her son, to Lotte it is ‘a precious little doll. And in such good condition’ (28). Evans poignantly highlights Lotte’s naivete as the average Westerner who cannot see beyond her glass bubble reality. Dead bodies become corpses with a name and some significance only when they come home in coffins covered in flags; they are not corpses when they are strewn by their hundreds in dusty, dry places on the other side of the world, without a name, a face, or a personal history. When we read or hear about them we can, with a haughty compassion say, like Lotte, when she is writing home about her tourist experience: ‘It’s so dusty and dry here. History’s fascinating—but bits of it stick in your throat’ (25). Furthermore while Lotte acknowledges the inevitability of history and the fact that truly terrible wars do happen, she can only see them happening elsewhere, not in her safe sterilized suburban Reading. When Andromache laments, looking at the destruction around her, ‘My broken city. Raped by the sword and flame. Ash and dust your shroud,’ Lotte coolly comments: ‘It is sad to think of the city being obliterated so many times. But on the other hand, if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have got into history, would it, and we wouldn’t be here’ (27). The horror of Lotte’s world does not lie in the things that are done to her, such as rape or killing of her people or burning of her city, but in things that happen inside her, her emotions, like her loneliness, her despair, her disillusionment, or even her childlessness, which is projected in her desire to fix dolls and bring them back to life. In lifeless doll bodies, which feel like they are alive after she spends hours repairing them, Lotte sees the potential for new life, because as she says, ‘they might become somebody, whereas we actually are, and that’s inevitably disappointing’ (28). Andromache talks about the same disillusionment, emptiness and fear of a childless future which bring them so close though they are worlds apart. And Lotte is

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drawn into her world as if to experience the other woman’s horror, that different ‘external’ pain which goes even deeper than she has ever felt. Yet Evans does not present a world which is all-impossible. There is some hope in the bonding between the women in this play that does occur though their worlds collide and smash. In a re-imagining of the scene which is the culmination point for Euripides’ play, the moment when the Greek soldiers hand over Astyanax’s dead body to Hecuba for burial, Talthybius enters, covered in blood, holding the broken body of the doll that Andromache was carrying earlier in the play. He hands it over to Hecuba and she mourns over her dead grandson. At that point, Lotte who has all along remained emotionally unaffected by the broken dolls lying around the stage, because for her they are clearly not human bodies, approaches Hecuba and offers to put him back together for her. Evans writes in her stage directions that the women bend over the doll/ corpse together and present an image of collaboration and solidarity, an image of the two disparate worlds finding a point of contact, ‘a moment of ritual—women working together as they have done for thousands of years’ (62). She paints in this way the only glimpse of hope that can possibly come through the bleak horror of war, hope which is achieved through passionate and heartfelt collaboration. Thus Trojan Barbie manages to explore political questions while simultaneously avoiding being didactic or polemical. It brings women face to face with their past, their history, their culture, their present, and their future, and shows them on a trajectory where they take control of their own realities and assert their existence. Lotte expresses her desire to explore culture and history in the very act of booking to go on a holiday to Troy, a city which has ‘resurrect[ed] itself over the bones of its previous lives and deaths’ (9). But her view of what culture and history are is superficial and naive or maybe it is just socially and historically conditioned since essentially she wishes to go to Troy not because she genuinely desires to delve into the history of an ancient people but because she wishes to bestow her ‘tourist gaze’ upon a mythological site (Urry and Larsen). When she actually does get to Troy, however, the ‘pseudoevent’ and history collide with reality (Eco). The earth cracks under her feet and she is thrown into the catastrophic events which actually make history. Past and present fuse into one apocalyptic reality which brings forth an equally hellish future. In her characteristic prophetic revelations Cassandra depicts this painful collision of past, present, and future, myth, fantasy and reality: ‘The present is pregnant with death. /Because the

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past fucked it already … [Now] I can taste blood on my tongue. That means the future is being born’ (Evans, TB, 19–20). Lotte, the women of Troy, and with them all the women who are caught in the throes of war and destruction the world over, are swept by the tidal wave of history which Cassandra speaks about: ‘I think history’s a wave’, she says, ‘I think that’s it. /It rolls and sucks at you and drags you under. / It smashes you into the future/right when you think you’re on solid ground. Like stepping on a landmine’ (30). All the women in this play are trapped in this insecure, liminal space that history has hurled them into, ‘ghosts in the dead zone of immigration’, hostages in their own bodies, refugees in their own countries. ‘There’s a black hole now, where I used to think “future”’ says Esme, one of the chorus, ‘But now/it’s like someone tore up a map/and that map was my body’ (37). Their presence on stage becomes an endeavour against all odds to piece together their broken bodies and to habent corpus. Similarly to O’Reilly, Evans shows only faint rays of light in the penultimate scene of the play and leaves the audience grappling with the bitter suggestion that while women can bring about change through collaboration, the social structures that imprison and restrict them remain largely in place. The women realise that ‘the only fertile seed is hate’ and their only comfort lies in them forming a strong support system for each other. They are raped, beaten, and taken away. Astyanax is killed by having a tank driven over his skull (on auto pilot so that no man would bear his blood on their hands); Polly X’s throat is slit at Achilles’ grave so that the sand storm can cease and the trucks can set off—her sculpture left half-finished; Hecuba is not even allowed to bury Astyanax who is grabbed from her and thrown into a ‘pit’; the city is torched and the oil tanks are about to explode; Lotte is saved at the last minute by a deus ex machina British officer and whisked safely ‘home, back to piles of bills and the terrible English weather’ (65). This ruthless re-telling of the familiar myth will leave an audience with an uncomfortable feeling that in this world we value the life of some, more than the life of others; that what for one person is a dismembered corpse for another person is just an image of a broken doll; and that one person’s apocalyptic war is another person’s holiday-gone-wrong. In the last scene of Trojan Barbie, Lotte is back in Reading. Still ‘a little bruised and band-aided’, but confident that ‘soon everything will feel normal … and the memories will fade’ (66) since this hideous tragedy only happened to some foreigners and not to anybody with a name and a face

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that she/we can identify. It is a bleak revelation to see how easily Lotte forgets what happened ‘out there’ and finds comfort within her culturally defined space bubble again. However, Christine Evans will not leave her audience with this smug feeling of false safety and security which they feel in front of their television sets—not without reminding them that the real world is still out there, whichever safe little bubble we choose to hide in. As Lotte sets to fixing a very fragile and precious porcelain doll—the very same one that was Astyanax in previous scenes—Hecuba appears in the form of a bag lady, dressed in contemporary rags and looking frantic. Lotte does not recognize her. Hecuba has survived the centuries, ‘the deserts and the seas’ (66) to look for her dead children’s bodies. She has returned because it is not enough for her simply to disappear into a mythical victimhood. She cannot rest unless the bodies are produced, accounted for, and buried. She starts rummaging through Lotte’s bags of doll parts and starts flinging them to the floor as she searches and then sees the broken porcelain body of Astyanax and moves towards it transfixed. The episode ends swiftly and cleanly for Lotte. A hospital worker, alias Talthybius, rushes in, restrains Hecuba and takes her away as he did in Troy. Lotte, visibly shaken stares as they leave ‘like the last fragment of a dream’ (67), but quickly snaps herself out of it and starts picking up the doll parts that Hecuba scattered on the floor. However, while Lotte continues to be ignorant of the reality surrounding her, the audience see a final image of Polly X, as the soldiers are ready to sacrifice her in front of her unfinished Trojan Barbie sculpture. Her work of art becomes complete only after they tie a red ribbon around her neck, killing her in a very stylized and unrealistic way, and she becomes just another one of those broken doll parts that make up Trojan Barbie. Her sculpture is finished, and, as she had promised, is now ‘very very scary’ (11), because it evidences that there is another world out there which exists whether we choose to turn a blind eye to it or not.

Peeling and Trojan Barbie; Radical and Palimpsestic When Christine Evans set off to write Trojan Barbie her intention was not to make ‘a modern paean to Euripides’ because as she said, The Trojan Women still speaks eloquently of the suffering of women in situations of war (www.americanrepertorytheater.org). She was aiming for a radical re-making, in the style of Charles L. Mee’s postmodern

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appropriations, which would take apart Euripides’ play and build a new contemporary construct to interrogate many of the assumptions that the ancient work carried (Lester, Mee, E., Mee, C.L.). Similarly, in writing Peeling, Kaite O’Reilly encountered Euripides’ hypoplay in a structure that peels off the layers of interpretation that the classical tradition has attached to The Trojan Women, and breaks away from it to reveal a palimpsestic work which gives its female characters a novel strength. What both playwrights achieve in their hyperplays is to invoke re-configurations or re-inventions of femininity that detect and emphasize individual women’s strengths but also female solidarity in the form of ‘shared pleasures and strengths rather than shared vulnerability and pain’ (Genz and Brabon, 69), thus placing the plays firmly within a contemporary feminist discourse. As adaptations, these plays have granted the central female figures a powerful presence and given them the strength of individual, political choice, while taking on for them a form of self-discovery and self-assertion in line with Adrienne Rich’s view, who writes: Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival …[it] is more than a search for identity…[it is a] drive to self-knowledge (33).

As such therefore, Peeling and Trojan Barbie become ‘female writs of habeas corpus’ which grant victimized women their undeniable right to self-determination.

Note 1. For detailed analysis of the use of these terms refer to Kekis, Ph.D. Thesis, Unpublished, 2013. Print. (53-62).

Bibliography Cavendish, Dominic. “Provocative Chorus of Disaproval.” TheDaily Telegraph. April 9 2002. Web. March 17 2011. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality : Essays. London: Picador, 1987. Print. Evans, Christine. “In Conversation with Georgeann Murphy at the University of New Hampshire on 8th April 2010.” (2010a). Web. 17 March 2011.

212  O. Kekis ———. “Interviewed by Adam Szymkovicz on June 14th 2010.” (2010b). Web. 17 March 2011. ———. Trojan Barbie. New York: Samuel French, 2010. Print. ———. “Playwright’s Note on American Repertory Theatre Website, March 1st 2009” (2009). Web. 17 March 2011. Garland, Robert. Surviving Greek Tragedy. London: Duckworth, 2004. Print. Genette, Gérard. “Palimpsests : Literature in the Second Degree.” Stages. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. 490. Print. Genz, Stephanie. and Brabon, Benjamin. Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Print. Hall, Edith, and Fiona Macintosh. Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, 1660–1914. Oxford [England] ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print. Hall, Edith. Greek Tragedy : Suffering under the Sun. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. Print. Kekis, Olga. “Contemporary Antigones, Medeas and Trojan Women Perform on Stages around the World.” Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis. University of Birmingham, 2013. Print. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Jürs-Munby, Karen. London, New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Lester, Gideon. All About Mee http://www.amrep.org/people/mee1.html 7 Feb 2000. Web. 28 March 2009. Macintosh, Fiona. “Tragedy in Performance: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Productions.” The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Ed. Easterling, P. E. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 284–323. Print. Mee, Erin. ‘Mee on Mee’. TDR/The Drama Review, 46 (2002): (3): 82–92. Mee, Charles L. A Nearly Normal Life: A Memoir. Boston, London: Little, 1999. O’Reilly, Kaite. Peeling. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. Performance Programme for Peeling. Forest Forge Theatre Company: Rural Hampshire, Spring 2011. Print. Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”. In On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978, 33–49. London: Virago, 1971. Scanlan, Robert. “Writ of Habeas Corpus: Christine Evans’ Trojan Barbie”. Theatre Forum, 35 (2009): 26–27. Urry, John, and Larsen, Jonas. The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 3rd ed. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2011.

CHAPTER 11

A Tale of Two Jordans: Representing Syrian Refugees Before and After 2011 George Potter

In spring 2009, Syrian director Samer Omran brought his Arabic-language production of Slawomir Mrozek’s play The Emigrants to Jordan for the Amman International Theater Festival. Performed in a storage space underneath the stage of the Royal Cultural Center, the tale of two Syrian immigrants confronting the complexities of immigration and identity became the must-see event of the festival, with audiences jostling for tickets every night and standing in celebratory ovation at the end of each performance. In a country with a long, complex relationship with Syria—from deep family ties to aggressive political rivalries—it was a moment of artistic union and acclaim. After years of Syrian actors having received praise throughout the region, a small troupe had brought a deeply moving play to Amman that underscored a thriving period in Syrian dramatic performance. The possibility of the reality represented in the play, however, still seemed far away. Since then, the 2011 uprising in Syria has led to a protracted civil war in Syria and an extended refugee crisis in Jordan, which has absorbed over one million Syrians into a state of 6.2 million citizens with limited G. Potter (*)  Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_11

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water and financial resources. As was the case with both Iraqis and Palestinians before them, the Syrians have been met both by limited services for refugees and discontent from the local population that worries about economic loss, violence, and a disappearing ‘Jordanian’ identity. In this context, Syrians have been reconstructed, not as a source of artistic praise, but as a threat to the nation. This chapter juxtaposes the pre- and post-2011 Jordanian imagination of Syrians, using Omran’s production as a starting point for imagining the ‘ideal’ Syrian immigrant during an era when mass Syrian immigration, let alone refugees, was a distant nightmare. Conversely, contemporary Jordanian imaginings of Syrians post-2011 often create an opposite extreme ‘other’ tied to militancy, increasing crime, and escalating inflation. In an attempt to counterbalance these stereotypes, post-2011 outreach productions have attempted to turn the plight of Syrians into spectacles for staging Western classics, such as Trojan Women in Syria: The Trojan Women and Hamlet in Shakespeare in Zaatari. These productions seek both to display Syrians as non-terrorists and to gain attention for the ever-growing non-governmental organization (NGO) complex inside Jordan. Through this comparison between The Emigres and The Trojan Women and Shakespeare in Zaatari, it is also possible to examine the cultural politics of adaptation when famous Western classics aim to do political work in the global south, specifically in the service of NGOs. Though such performances aim to alleviate suffering in afflicted communities, the intersection of the human rights industry and the adaptation industry often marginalizes Syrian voices that are only deemed human when in the drag of Hecuba or Hamlet and voiced by women and children. Such productions are a far cry from Omran’s attempt to humanize Syrians as Syrian refugees through his adaptation of Mrozek’s play The Emigrants, a text less readily known to his largely Arab audience. In the end, productions like The Trojan Women and Shakespeare in Zaatari render Syrians on stage invisible to cosmopolitan internationals in any form other than as refugee performance chic. In many ways, Mrozek’s The Emigrants provides a perfect metaphor for the relationship between Syria and Jordan: two men thrust together by circumstances, on land that they have not chosen for themselves, struggling to define their new lives, while moving between supporting and threatening one another. Likewise, the modern history of Syria and Jordan has been one of movement between fidelity and tension. Nominally on the same side in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Jordan

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also engaged in secret negotiations with Israel.1 Later, Syria tied itself to the Egyptian led United Arab Republic and the Ba’ath Party, while resource-poor Jordan sought patronage from the UK and the USA. Eventually, the Syrian military crossed into Jordan on the side of the Palestinians during the Black September fighting between the Jordanian state and PLO militias (among others) in 1970. These competing visions for modern Arab states later transformed into familial rivalries between Hafez and Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Kings Hussein and Abdullah II in Jordan. As political scientist Curtis Ryan summarizes: Throughout their histories as independent states, Jordan and Syria have had a tenuous relationship at best, marked by temporary military alliances during wars with Israel, but more often by varying degrees of mutual hostility. These long periods of hostility were so extensive, in fact, that they amounted to a local ‘Cold War’.2

In the 2000s, the tensions relented some, as President Bashar al-Assad and King Abdullah II brought a new era of Western-influenced neoliberalism and economic ties, including free trade zones on the border, to their respective states.3 However, like the uneasy relations in Mrozek’s play, these tenuous peace offerings quickly crumbled in the wake of the 2011 uprisings. In subsequent years, King Abdullah II became the first Arab leader to call for Assad to leave power, telling the BBC in 2011, ‘If Bashar has the interest of his country, he would step down, but he would also create an ability to reach out and start a new phase of Syrian life’ beyond the current regime.4 For its part, Syria has consistently criticized Jordan for hosting American-backed training of Syrian rebels as well as meetings of Syrian opposition movements.5 Despite all of this, Jordan has absorbed an astonishing number of Syrian refugees. As of 17 June 2015, the United Nations has registered over 600,000 refugees in Jordan, with the vast majority concentrated in the urban areas of northern Jordan.6 The Jordanian government, counting unregistered refugees and Syrians who had previously lived in Jordan, has long claimed that at least 1.4 million Syrian refugees reside in Jordan.7 These populations are disproportionately composed of women and children8 and are placed inside a resource-poor country, best noted by the fact that Jordan is the fourth water-poorest country in the world. As the reality of an extended civil war set-in, the United Nations turned from talking about temporary relief to discussing

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long-term infrastructure solutions.9 However, the strains on Jordan have been felt, as the population wonders why it has been left to carry the burden of a situation that multiple Middle Eastern regimes, the USA, Russia, and European powers helped escalate—and fund—in Syria, and many Jordanians begin to speak of Syrians being ‘everywhere’ in their country.10 The Jordanian government has attempted to allay these concerns by using a part of all money donated to help Syrians for infrastructure development in the Jordanian communities affected by the Syrian refugee population. As more radical forms of violence have characterized the Syrian civil war, the refugee population in Jordan has also come under increased scrutiny by the Jordanian mukhbarat (secret police).11 The Jordanian military has also long been involved in the fight against ISIS, and tensions were inflamed further when Jordanian Air Force pilot Mutah al-Kaseasbeh was executed in winter 2015. However, as former Jordanian Ambassador Omar Rifai stated, in a moment of mixed conviction and desperate hope, ‘Jordan is a land where refugees come … We have to make it eventually’.12 Of course, at the time of Omran’s production of The Emigrants in Spring 2009, the reality of a Syrian refugee crisis was far from anyone’s mind, though Iraqi and Palestinian refugees were, and remain, a regular part of life in Jordan, particularly in Amman. Instead, the production was notable both for its staging and the strong acting performances that carried the script. In terms of the former, the production was staged in a storage room beneath the stage in the Royal Cultural Center in Amman, limiting the production to 50 tickets a night. After obtaining one of the coveted tickets, the audience entered the theater as if it was attending a standard performance. However, it was led through the back of the performance space and downstairs, to a room lit merely by one dangling light and with sparse furniture in a central performance space, with seating for the audience on either side. Aside from being an innovative use of a rather traditional performance hall, the production brought the audience into the heart of Mrozek’s script, where two refugees listen to the sounds of a New Year’s Eve party above them, knowing that they have to lower their voices and stay in hiding until the people above leave. In actual performance, there literally were people above attending other performances in the festival staged elsewhere in the building. Thus, as other audiences went to performances, or a New Year’s Eve celebration was imagined on stage, the two anonymous characters— AA and XX in Mrozek’s script—contemplated their situation living and

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working secretly in a foreign country. In fact, early on, AA, the more contemplative and integrated of the pair, questions where XX escapes to when he goes out: Now, where did you go? Into the street. Everyone is free to go there. But those looks! … From a mile away people know who you are. Yes, you have the right to walk there, but they have the right to look at you. And to recognize your foreign mug. Because you’re part of our people. Your flesh and blood belong to our people.13

A view of immigration as a state of constant difference, AA’s views, when spoken in Arabic created a strong critique of how many Arab nations hosted refugees from other Arab countries. In 2009, Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria were given limited rights and access to work and education. And Palestinians within Syria had long been denied citizenship. Additionally, voice and dress were perpetual markers of this difference. As one Iraqi refugee told me, ‘When I enter a taxi and they hear my accent, they immediately ask where I am from. When I say, “Iraq”, the next question is “Sunni or Shi’a”’. He continued to explain that if he answered Sunni, the driver would praise Saddam Hussein, whom the refugee hated, but if he said Shi’a, the driver, in predominately Sunni Jordan, would consider the refugee not to be a real Muslim. As noted above, many Syrians in Jordan now face the discrimination based on accent and dress that Mrozek’s play previously critiqued beneath a Jordanian stage, thereby bringing the Polish script intimately into the Arab context. As for AA, his only response is to say that XX escaped to the cinema as a place where he could exist in anonymity: ‘Everybody is looking at the screen. You too. You watch something move, images, you don’t understand anything that’s being said. But that’s of no importance. The essential thing is that you are there and that you feel safe’.14 Unfortunately, as AA points out, there is one tragic flaw in the cinema: unlike the streets, it’s not free, leaving XX to simply reply, ‘I never go to the cinema’.15 This theme of difference is carried throughout the play, most notably in an extended exchange about language acquisition: AA:  W  hy don’t you learn the language? (XX goes on coughing, though now deliberately, in order to gain time.) I am asking you why you don’t learn the language?

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[…] XX:  You mean why don’t I speak their language? AA:   You know damn well what I mean. You’re an illiterate in this country—worse, a deafmute! XX:  I don’t want to learn their language. AA:  Why not? You live in this country. You eat here, you drink, you walk the streets like people here—so why don’t you want to speak like them? You could get a better job… XX:  They’re not people. AA:  No? XX:  No. They’re not human There aren’t any real people here. AA:  And where, according to you, are these real people? XX:  Back home.16 It is interesting to speculate on how a Jordanian audience would view Syrian actors, speaking in a different dialect of Arabic, discussing the idea of learning the local language. Within the Arab world, there are many registers of Arabic, most notably a divide between fusha (literary Arabic) and ‘amiyya (colloquial Arabic). More broadly, there are wide variants in local ‘amiyyas throughout the region, making pronunciation and word choice an instant marker of regional roots and difference, as indicated in the example of the Iraqi refugee discussed above. However, like accents in a non-native language, dialects in one’s native language are difficult to shed, particularly when the native population can understand your dialect, as Jordanians are able to do with the Syrian dialect. Thus, the Syrian accent still serves as a marker of difference and not belonging. And many, if not all Syrians, would not want to switch to the Jordanian accent, which is often viewed as a more Bedouin (i.e. inferior or less educated) register of Arabic among Arabs from the Northern Levant. Not unlike XX, the more ‘authentic’ Arabic is always that spoken ‘back home’. At the same time, the use of Syrian Arabic has now become an instant identifier of someone that can be exploited for lower-salary labor, just as XX. Meanwhile, off-the-record, many in the aid industry now speak of two common assumptions of international conflicts: conflicts lasting over three years tend to extend to at least a decade and, typically, only 50% of refugees return to their home countries. While there are many factors that could determine whether Syrians return home—political

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circumstances, development, economic opportunities, and so on—as noted above, the UN (and the US Embassy, for that matter), have begun to speak of long-term sustainability for refugees and the communities affected by their presence in Jordan. The challenge of returning home was also predicted in the performance of The Emigrants. At one point, AA even speculates that economics will prevent XX from ever returning to his homeland, telling him, Here you save a little more money every day, you lie on your bed thinking how tomorrow you’ll have a little more money, the day after still more, and in a year’s time lots and lots more. You have a goal in life that grows more seductive the further removed it is. Have you already saved enough for a little house with a little garden? So, why not try to save some more until you can afford a bigger house with a bigger garden? It’s quite simple. All you have to do is to postpone your return for a month or two. And then, why not an even bigger house with an even bigger garden? … And so you keep on postponing your return because the more money you have the more you want to have.17

As the war in Syria spirals across regional borders and grows ever more intransigent, many Syrians are being asked to turn from short-term calculations to long-term decisions: is it better to return home or live as a second-class citizen, or seek refugee status in a third-party country? While AA’s calculation in The Emigrants is based on a cynical assessment of consumerist drives, it also places a face to the reality of the refugees that do not return home. They are not merely parasites continually draining off their host states, but individuals locked in a web of difficult and limited choices. At the time of performance, a second resonance was captured due to the play’s discussion, by Syrian actors, of interrogations and informants. When AA tells XX, ‘I’m not asking you if you’ve done anything. I’m asking you if you’ve ever been interrogated’,18 it would be difficult for any member of an Arabic-speaking audience not to be reminded of the Syrian mukhbarat (secret police), an organization that has often drawn comparisons to the German Stasi, both for the depth of its informant network and the specific torture techniques it employed.19 And long before the Western world cared about violence by the Assad regime, the fear of the Syrian state was underscored when Hafez al-Assad had between 10,000 and 40,000 people killed in Hama in a single month

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in 1982 after the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood attempted an uprising.20 Thus, the fear of government informants and interrogations weaved throughout Mrozek’s play was a very real one during Omran’s production. In fact, when XX defends himself against allegations of being a government collaborator with the statement, ‘I have a wife and children!’ AA soon responds simply: Admit it. I said I was a bastard, so you conclude I must be a government agent, right? Shall we drink? Well, well. You know, if you take a dislike to a loyal servant of your government, that raises certain doubts in your loyalty to the regime. That’s bad, that’s very bad, my friend. What if I really were a government spy?21

What the performance places before the audience is the idea of a security apparatus with ties so deep and wide that they stretch across national borders, where one’s actions abroad could endanger one’s wife and children at home, and where one never knows whom one can talk to safely. In other words, two hours from Damascus, Omran was forcing his audience to engage the reality of life in contemporary Syria that would only grow worse after 2011. As AA says, ‘[I]n a dictatorship all people are equal. Fear creates that equality’.22 The height of this tension between the characters—and the real-world fears behind it—came when the lights in the performance space went out, rendering the entire area completely dark. When the lights returned, AA and XX stood close to one another, with AA holding his glass in a toast, and XX holding an axe, ready to kill his companion, as gasps rose from the audience, before XX lowered the axe and accepted the drink. A glimpse into the reality of refugees—where those with opposing politics in their native lands are thrown together based on shared heritage and desperation—this moment captured the thin line between enemies and compatriots, between life and death for so many now in Jordan. Later, as the play draws to its close, with the characters lying on their respective beds, AA contemplates the possibility of a better world: And everything will be good and true … Work will provide bread, and the law freedom, because freedom will be the law and the law will be freedom! Isn’t that what we are looking for? What we are all aiming for? And if we all have a common goal, if we all want the same thing, what prevents us from creating a community, a healthy community, wise … You’ll go back home and you’ll never again be a slave. Neither you, nor your children …23

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As the lights returned to the performance space, with this utopia of community in mind, the primarily Jordanian audience stood and applauded the two actors who had carried their nearly three-hour show, the power of the performance perhaps overriding the concern for actual refugees. No one knew just how far from a utopia the Jordanian and Syrian communities would soon move. In recent years, as the fictional scenario from The Emigrants has become a daily reality for thousands of Syrians within Jordan, performances involving Syrians in Jordan have moved further from the content of Mrozek’s play, rather than closer to it. Perhaps this is because the material is too sensitive or those staging plays are less familiar with such work or with the Syrian theatrical heritage, but there also appears to be a desire to use Syrian performers as a prop in drawing attention to refugees and the refugee industry surrounding them—particularly in shows featuring older classics of the Western stage. The most famous of these productions is Syria: The Trojan Women, directed by Omar Abusaada and produced by the Prospero World Charitable Trust in 2013 and 2014. The project’s website describes itself as a project that: combines drama therapy and strategic communications. We aim to help refugees work through PTSD, depression and mental anxiety via suitably chosen drama projects. We try where possible to provide some paid employment for refugees. We also work to help refugees and their host communities to understand each other. Through our drama projects we also spread awareness of the Syrian refugee crisis.24

These goals of awareness and healing are all, of course, noble. At the same time, there seems to be some doubt for whom the project actually exists. Throughout the development of the project, participants were filmed by documentarian Yasmin Fedda with the aims of producing a film, Queens of Syria, about the project.25 Likewise, the website for the project produces many calls for funding, yet they appear more tied toward the production of the documentary, rather than aid to Syrian refugees or the communities surrounding them. And there is now talk of producing a feature film of Euripides’ play set in contemporary Jordan. One is left to wonder, then, if the goals of the production really are to heal Syrian refugees or, instead, to use them as a spectacle for foreign audiences in order to advance the careers of theatre and film artists with international mobility and careers denied to the refugees.

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The goal of spectacle might also explain why the implications of the Trojan analogy are not fully explored. In Euripides’ play, there is no hope for the women of Troy. Cassandra is taken as the concubine of Agamemnon, later to be killed by Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife. Andromache has had her children killed and is taken as the concubine of Achilles’ son. Helen is returned to Menelaus, the king that she had fled. And Hecuba is taken away as a slave to Odysseus. Presumably, she does not survive the journey back to Greece.26 Is this to imply that the only way forward for Syrian women is to become concubines, be killed, or have their children killed? Even Abusaada, the director, questioned whether the production was the right Greek drama for the Syrian context, stating: Antigone feels more relevant to the Syrian context in many ways. Firstly, the wars they talk about are so different. In The Trojan Women, the war is coming from outside—the Greeks invaded Troy. But in Antigone, the war is coming from within, between two brothers. Secondly, The Trojan Women takes place after the war has happened, the women’s destiny and fate is decided and they have no agency, no decisions to take. Antigone is not like this. We are watching the character of Antigone take a series of critical decisions. She is active, she decides her own fate.27

As with Antigone’s Thebes, many audiences are still left to imagine a world in which Syrian women are given agency, rather than tragedy, on stage. In a discussion at Georgetown University—after the USA denied visas for the women to perform in Washington—Co-Director of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics Cynthia P. Schneider argued the opposite: ‘This story tonight is not a tragedy. It is not like Euripides’ play. It’s a story of incredible resilience, courage, personal strength, friendship, love, humor, and joy’.28 At the macro level, this might be true: performing art in the face of tragedy will be seen by many as a sign of resilience and joy. And the company’s own production may be understood as a positive intervention. However, Schneider’s own Co-Director, Derek Goldman, has focused on the women’s statements about the tragedy of their circumstances. In an article about the production, he quotes a number of cast members. Suaad says, ‘I have a scream I want the whole world to hear, but I wonder if it will be heard’. Farah

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states, ‘The line I most like in the play is “My tears had escaped, who would give eyes to cry with.”’ I love this line because I am in a lot of pain, but I don’t show anything to the world.’ And Nadine adds, ‘The character I love the most is Hecuba. My favourite line that she says is, “Oh world! Do you witness what we suffer? Our race doesn’t deserve this treatment”. I feel this speaks to us. We used to live in a beautiful life before all this and now we are nothing’.29 Given these quotes, and the women’s stories of difficult experiences in Syria and Jordan during the discussion at Georgetown, it would seem that the women’s experiences exist between the rhetoric of Schneider and Euripides’ story. They are not yet in a place of pure joy and love, nor are they defeated and without options, as with the women of Troy. Perhaps it is a production of hope, a word that Schneider strangely avoided. But the question remains hope for whom? When Euripides wrote Trojan Women, he was responding to Greek violence on the island of Melos, where the Greek army killed most of the men and sold the women and children into slavery. The play was then performed in front of a Greek audience, likely including soldiers and politicians culpable for the violence. But does anyone question the degree of violence in Syria today? Is performing the stories of Syrian women in front of an audience in Amman or students and faculty at Georgetown the same as challenging the Athenian state? Sadly, one must conclude that Syria: The Trojan Women plays much less radically in performance than Euripides’ Trojan Women or Omran’s The Emigrants. Instead, the production seems to be used because performing Euripides to foreign audiences makes Syrians more human to non-Syrians. This is not meant to imply that Syrians should only perform Syrian work, rather than Greek classics. A Mediterranean culture like Syria has a much longer and deeper relation to Greek theatre than any US company, after all. Instead, the point is that audiences may find the presentation of works deemed more ‘Western’ as more artistically viable and, therefore, worthier of humane responses than the rich Syrian artistic tradition. This was the note struck in Goldman’s introduction, where he contrasted the Syrian women to ‘the picture of Syria created by the current ISISdominated news cycle’, and argued, ‘The Syrian Trojan Women project speaks deeply to us both because of its extraordinary artistry and because we feel that the voices of these women and, by extension, the voices of three million Syrian refugees are almost entirely unknown and unheard by US audiences’.30 However, it still seems worth asking whether Syrians

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are seen as equally artistic and human when they are performing in their own indigenous plays, films, and YouTube videos about the civil war,31 or even when they are adapting less famous works, such as The Emigrants. Just as the tragic, though less common, deaths of American journalists in Syria receive more attention than the thousands of Syrian dead and millions of refugees, so it seems that cultural products that adapt to local Syrian contexts will always be less noted than those that ride Western tropes. In Spring 2014, the Qatari Red Crescent32 staged a production entitled Shakespeare in Zaatari directed by Nawwar Bulbul.33 Taking its name from the largest refugee camp in Jordan, whose size has often run over 100,000 inhabitants, the production involved 60 children from the camp performing an ‘interpretation’ of Hamlet and King Lear in the Roman theater in downtown Amman. Again, the practitioners appear to believe that staging classics will help to make refugees more visible and, perhaps, more human. Of course, such productions are engaging in a long tradition wherein Shakespeare is staged in the global south as a means to promote a culture’s ‘modernity’ and ‘development’, as well as its general artistic and intellectual worth. Geoffrey M. Ridden has argued that ‘It is commonplace for Shakespeare to be used to signal high culture in works that are intended for a popular culture’.34 Similarly, Terence Hawkes has noted, ‘[Hamlet] has come to function as a universal cultural reference point, a piece of social shorthand … Hamlet crucially helps to determine how we perceive and respond to the world in which we live. You can even name a cigar after it.’35 In the Arab context, Margaret Litvin writes, ‘Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most often translated plays; in many languages (including Arabic and Russian) it is the most translated. Despite his resistance or because of it, Hamlet is one of the most intensely appropriated literary characters of all time.’36 The Qatari Red Crescent seems to be acknowledging that the violence of the war in Syria is not enough to sustain interest in Syrian refugees, nor are statistics alone. Instead, having children recite lines from Hamlet and King Lear will make the children seem more fully human, more like wealthy foreign donors, and more deserving of salvation. On stage before the world, refugees too must now prove that they have ‘that within which passeth show’.37 As with Syria: The Trojan Women, the production’s director, Nawaar Bulbul, told Sky News Arabic that one of the production’s goals was to show the world that Syrians were more than just ‘terrorists’. This was juxtaposed

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against his ending comment in the interview, where he claimed that the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was without ‘humanity’ because it did not help the production.38 In this way, Bulbul was able to reverse the stereotype of Western humanism versus Arab barbarism. Likewise, his production received extensive international attention, including coverage from the New York Times,39 as well as all major Arabic-language satellite channels, many of whom had previously shown little interest in Syrian theater.40 And a Google search for ‘Shakespeare in Zaatari’ now returns nearly 49,000 results. Apparently, Shakespeare is a good vehicle for global refugee chic. Again, though, the question turns to whether the performance was more for the children or a global audience. On one hand, the issues of lineage, power, and sovereignty presented in Hamlet and King Lear speak as much to modern-day Syria as they did to Shakespeare’s England. Likewise, there is a long Arabic tradition, most notably presented by Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad, which argues that Shakespeare is part of a ‘global heritage’.41 And one can hardly blame a director for wanting to give the children of Syria a cultural activity to break the monotony of life in a refugee camp, not unlike many other ‘service Shakespeare’ projects around the world.42 At the same time, in addition to the extensive media coverage, the actual staging of the play underscores the idea that the show used Syrian children as a spectacle. The end of the performance came during Hamlet’s famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. Though this soliloquy is the most-cited passage from Hamlet in the Arab tradition, it also has traditionally posed one of the most interesting translation issues. As Litvin writes, ‘Since Arabic has no infinitive form (‘to be’…), there is no way to ask ‘to be or not to be’ without identifying who is doing the being. Each translator is forced to choose a pronoun’.43 In Bulbul’s production, the line was translated as (‘I am or I am not.’). The staging during the Amman production involved the young boy playing Hamlet chanting the phrase in both English and Arabic as he led a procession of actors through a cheering audience.44 On its surface, it seems natural to assume that the audience was cheering both the production and the idea of continued Syrian presence, at least in the existential sense, if not in the present-in-Jordan one. However, given that, at this point in the play, Hamlet is contemplating suicide, it makes for a rather strange segment to both cheer and to have children chanting, one that not only erases the play’s context, but also makes the children a spectacle for a political ideology and NGO

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event that has nothing to do with the play they are performing and little to do with the children themselves. Similarly, if all of the children in the production are made to recite the beginning of Hamlet’s soliloquy, then the narratalogical conclusions of the metaphor are that all of the children in Zaatari will die violent deaths. As with Syria: The Trojan Women, the relationship to Shakespeare’s text inevitably leads the performers to a much less hopeful conclusion than the staging and cheering want. Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia have argued, ‘Not the preserve of a refined dramatic culture or a rarefied metropolitan entertainment, Shakespeare is therefore intimately linked to local traditions that tell the story of how native cultures bear the imprint of contact with those peoples who were part of its history’.45 However, the ability to meaningfully imprint native cultures on Shakespeare requires a careful interrogation of the text, rather than a sloganeering appropriation meant to fill seats. Inevitably, one is left to wonder whether the show was cast to explore Shakespeare and help children overcome the trauma of war or because children are a better box office draw and more sympathetic spectacle when staging the trauma of war. More broadly, one wonders when international governments and aid workers will find a better opportunity for Syrian children than being used as a performance spectacle on foreign stages or washing ashore dead on foreign shores. In their reliance on Western classics and use of uncritical adaptations to the local context, Shakespeare in Zaatari and Syria: The Trojan Women are symptomatic of a burgeoning—and often white, Western, and Islamaphobic—NGO industry in Jordan in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Syria. In fact, what Lori Allen has written of Palestine is also becoming the norm in Jordan: The international human rights system comprises a conglomeration of organizations, ideologies, activists, discourses, and declarations. As this system has grown increasingly large since the 1980s, human rights language has come to infuse the ways in which Palestinians from all walks of life— from politicians and representatives of civil society to militants and random victims of violations—speak and relate to outsiders and to one another.46

For Allen, there is an important distinction here between human rights— the values that these institutions aim to uphold—and the human rights industry—a system of professional institutions that replicate themselves using the language of human rights.47 Similarly, one might ask if there

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is a difference between an adaptation that does local work and the adaptation industry, wherein famous foreign classics serve to fill the space for the humanity that internationals are not willing to bestow either on domestic artistic productions or non-white victims of an internationally funded and prolonged civil war. Certainly, in the realm of Syrian performances in Jordan, there seems to be a marked difference, not just between the performances before and during the Syrian civil war, but also between those made independently by Syrians and those sponsored by international aid organizations. The former move toward turning both women and children into spectacles in order to advance individual artistic careers and draw attention to organizations as much as refugees. The latter, however, ask the audience to engage in empathy with the humanity of the performers, as well as the challenge for Syrians moving across borders and being marginalized in non-native societies. They ask, in the end, that Syrians be remembered as humans, not simply because they are on stage delivering famous lines, but because their humanity remains unquestionable even when the audience does not know the words.

Notes





1.  For an extensive discussion of this history, see Shlaim, Avi. Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. 2. Ryan, Curtis. “The odd Couple: Ending the Jordanian-Syrian ‘Cold War.” Middle East Journal 60.1 (Winter 2006): 33–56. 1. 3. Ibid., 18–9. 4. “King Abdullah of Jordan Becomes Firsts Arab Ruler to Call on Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to Go.” BBC 14 Nov. 2011. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/8889653/ King-Abdullah-of-Jordan-becomes-first-Arab-ruler-to-call-on-SyriasBashar-al-Assad-to-go.html. 5. Associated Press. “Syria Criticizes Jordan for Hosting Rebel Training.” Seattle Times 3 Apr. 2013. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. http://seattletimes. com/html/nationworld/2020695248_apmlsyria.html. 6. United Nations High Commission for Refugees. “Syria Regional Refugee Response.” UN 2014. Online. 13 Jul. 2015. http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/country.php?id=107.

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7. Al Emam, Dana. “Jordan, UN Sign Fund Deal to Address Syrian Refugee Burden.” Jordan Times 28 Mar. 2015. Online. 13 Jul. 2015. http:// www.jordantimes.com/news/local/jordan-un-sign-fund-deal-addresssyrian-refugee-burden. 8. Arif, Tamim. Lecture. Jordan Institute for Diplomacy, Amman, Jordan, 19 Apr. 2014. 9. Stromberg, Paul. Lecture. Center for International Educational Exchange Faculty Development Seminar, Amman, Jordan, 15 Jun. 2014. 10.  The Jordanian comedy news program 7akey Jarayad even recorded a song, “Where Are the Million Jordanians”, about the increased refugee population—from Syria and elsewhere—within Jordan. 11. ‘Carefully Watched’ The Economist 18 Jun. 2014. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. 12.  Rifai, Omar. Lecture. Center for International Educational Exchange Faculty Development Seminar, Amman, Jordan, 15 Jun. 2014. 13. Mrozek, Slawomir. The Emigrants. Trans. Henry Beissel. London: Samuel French, 1984. 10. 14. Ibid., 10. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 48–9. 17. Ibid., 77. 18. Ibid., 33. 19. See, for example, Miller, Jonathan. “Syria’s Torture Machine.” Guardian 13 Dec. 2011. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2011/dec/13/syria-torture-evidence and McNaught, Anita. “The Business of Detention in Syria.” Al-Jazeera 1 Aug. 2012. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. 20. See Zyiad, Leen. “Hama’s Ghosts.” New Yorker 12 Aug. 2011. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hamas-ghosts and AFP. “Syrians Revolt Against Reign of Fear.” Gulf Times 11 Mar. 2013. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. http://www.gulf-times.com/opinion/189/ details/345181/syrians-revolt-against-reign-of-fear. 21. Mrozek, 43. 22. Ibid., 63. 23. Ibid., 85. 24.  Syria: The Trojan Women. 2013. Online at. 28 Aug. 2014. http://www. syriatrojanwomen.org/. 25. At the time of writing, the website for the documentary itself was password protected. 26. Euripides. The Trojan Women. Trans. Gilbert Murray. Seaside: Watchmaker, 2010.

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27.  Qtd. in Ross, Tabitha. “Interview with Omar Abusaada, Antigone Director.” Aperta Productions 8 Oct. 2014. Online. 13 Jul. 2015. http:// www.apertaproductions.org/news/2014/11/5/interview-with-omarabu-saada-antigone-director. 28.  HowlRound. “Voices Unheard: The Syria: Trojan Women Summit in Washington DC with in Amman, Jordan-Sept 19, 2014.” YouTube 19 Sep. 2014. Online. 13 Jul. 2015. https://youtu.be/OLJ3aIcnSzc. 29.  Qtd. in Goldman, Derek. “Listening for Unheard Voices—Syria: The Trojan Women.” HowlRound 2014. Online. 13 Jul. 2015. http://howlround.com/listening-for-unheard-voices-syria-the-trojan-women. 30. HowlRound. 31. The most famous YouTube reaction is probably the puppet show Massasit Matti (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF2ctaUxu20b60YRc 4l4pLQ), while Mohamad Malas has continued making films during the civil war (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt35OdFp2kk). See also Houssami, Eyad, ed. Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre. New York: Pluto, 2012, Carlson, Marvin, and Safi Mahfouz, eds. Four Plays from Syria: Sa’dallah Wannous. New York: Segal Theatre Center Publications, 2014, and Ziter, Edward. Political Performance in Syria: From the Six-Day War to the Syrian Uprising. New York: Palgrave, 2014. 32. The Red Crescent is the Islamic counterpart to the Red Cross. 33. ‘“To Be Or Not To Be”—Zaatari Children Bring Their Interpretation of Shakespeare to Amman.” Jordan Times 31 May 2014. Online. 28 Aug. 2014. http://jordantimes.com/to-be-or-not-to-be----zaatari-childrenbring-their-interpretation-of-shakespeare-to-amman. 34. Ridden, Geoffrey M. “The Bard’s Speech: Making It Better; Shakespeare and Therapy in Film.” Borrows and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 8.2 (Fall 2013/Winter 2014). Online. 11 Jul. 2015. http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/1015/show. 35. Hawkes, Terence. Meaning in Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 1992. 4. 36. In fact, Jordanian Palestinian playwright Nader Omran has his own postmodern version of Hamlet, titled A Theatre Company Found a Play and Theatred Hamlet. Litvin, Margaret. Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. 3. 37. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Norton Anthology of Shakespeare. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt, et. al. Oxford: Norton, 1997. 1.2.85. 38. “ Shakespeare in Zaatari.” YouTube 2 Mar. 2014. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =0Pno5s9BsKk&list=UUQ5sxonzSJaBXwzVv19m4HQ. 39.  Hubbard, Ben. “Behind Barbed Wire, Shakespeare Inspires a Cast of Young Syrians.” New York Times 31 Mar. 2014. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/world/middleeast/behindbarbed-wire-shakespeare-inspires-a-cast-of-young-syrians.html?_r=0.

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40. Interestingly, in a number of these television and radio pieces, the children echo the line about not being terrorists, seemingly implying that a degree of media coaching was part of the rehearsal process. 41. Litvin, 75. 42.  Jensen, Michael P. “‘What Service Is Here?’: Exploring Service Shakespeare.” Borrows and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 8.2 (Fall 2013/Winter 2014). Online. 11 Jul. 2015. http:// www.borrowers.uga.edu/1039/show. 43. Litvin, 18. 44. “ to be or not to be.” YouTube 1 Jun. 2014. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. 45. Dionne, Craig, and Parmita Kapadia. “Introduction.” Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage. Eds. Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008. 3. 46. Allen, Lori. The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013. 2. 47. Ibid., 4.

CHAPTER 12

Homer in Palestine Gabriel Varghese

With the rise of the international solidarity movement since the end of the second intifada (2000–2005), collaboration between Palestinian theatre-makers and international practitioners has become an abiding feature of theatre-making in the West Bank in the Oslo and post-Oslo periods.1 In May 2014, for example, the Palestinian theatre company Ashtar and the London-based company Border Crossings embarked on an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad entitled This Flesh is Mine, developed collaboratively but written by the British playwright Brian Woolland. Formed in 1991, Ashtar is based in Ramallah in the West Bank, and led by artistic director Iman Aoun. Over the years, the company has produced many internationally performed plays such as The Gaza Monologues (2010) and Richard II which was part of the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. As well as these productions, Ashtar has further established its reputation as a leading exponent of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, serving as the Middle East regional centre and helping to establish similar centres in Yemen and Iraq. This Flesh is Mine provides a useful starting point for discussions about the politics and ethics of theatrical collaboration between partners based G. Varghese (*)  The Kenyon Institute (Council for British Research in the Levant), East Jerusalem, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_12

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in two very different countries. The process by which Ashtar and Border Crossings negotiated a collaborative practice demonstrates the obstacles theatre-makers face when, in the context of a national liberation struggle, the stakes for one side of the partnership are far higher than for the other. When such relationships are, to some extent, pre-determined by the power dynamics at the centre of the Palestine–Israel conflict, collaborations between local and international practitioners illustrate how theatre-makers ‘talk back’ to these dynamics. In this chapter, I am interested in the process by which Ashtar and Border Crossings created an ensemble that brought together practitioners of diverse backgrounds and experiences. How, for example, was this ensemble created and sustained when the collaborative relation was inherently bound by time and geography?

This Flesh is Mine This Flesh is Mine is a radical adaptation of The Iliad that unfolds over two acts consisting of eleven and ten scenes respectively. Whereas each act is roughly of equal length, scenes themselves vary considerably with some feeling more like vignettes. The first act is situated in the ancient world before a ‘booming explosion’ (Woolland 2014a: 38) brings us into the modern world of the second act. Dark lighting and menacing soundscapes create the foreboding atmosphere of a besieged city almost destroyed by a decade-long war. Visually, there is little to situate the play in either Troy or Palestine. However, in keeping with its contemporary setting, the second act has Achilles dressed in modern army fatigues, carrying a revolver and using a mobile phone. Performed by six actors (two female and four male of which three were Palestinian and three were British) in multiple roles, the play begins in the foyer of Ashtar, with a quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over Briseis, the former’s war-prize and concubine. Whereas The Iliad presents Briseis as a marginal character, even though her kidnapping drives its plot, this version places her at the centre of the text. We learn more about her through her own monologues, her frenzied arguments with the ghosts of her father and brother (video images projected onto a white screen), in which she appears to be having a nervous breakdown, and her dialogues with Achilles and Hecuba. As this strand of the narrative develops into the modern world of the second act, the performance becomes less about Achilles’ loss of honour to Agamemnon and more about whether or not Briseis will accept his offer of safety in exile. Yet, This Flesh is Mine

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is also as much about the despair of the aging king and queen of Troy, Priam and Hecuba, and the vainglory of their son Hector who is intent on defeating Achilles. At the end of the first act, when Hector is killed in battle, Priam must humble himself to Achilles for the return of his son’s mutilated body. (I will have more to say about these characters later in this section). In an interview with The Guardian in 2014, Walling explained that the title of the play is intended to draw attention to ‘the politics of the body and living inside this experience’ of war.2 That experience is also inscribed upon the bodies of its victims as, primarily, political violence and structural oppression delimit the boundaries between the national body as subject/self and the colonized body as other. In a performance where Trojans stand in for Palestinians and Achaeans for Israelis, the play’s constant invocation of the body alerts us to the ‘historico-racial schema’ (Fanon 2008: 84) that fixes colonized bodies as both unintelligible, expendable, and unsafe. The question of who ‘owns’ whose body is a recurring motif throughout the play, and how characters refer to their own and each other’s bodies signifies ownership, autonomy, selfhood, and presence. They also signify who gets to be included in the national body and who is excluded to those ‘unliveable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life (Butler 1993: 3). These inclusions and exclusions are repeated throughout the play. For example, in the opening scene, between Achilles and Agamemnon, Achilles insists that Briseis’s ‘flesh is mine’ (Woolland 2014a: 10). As a great warrior who represents the national body, Achilles is not declaring Briseis’s inclusion within that body as a full subject. Rather, he is asserting the authority of his own body, as national subject/self, over her body, as national other. For all his avowals of love and promises to rescue her to the safety of the metropolis, she is still only war booty and hinterland. It is in a barely lit performance space that we first encounter Briseis, in the second scene of the play. A dim spotlight shines upon her and she lists all those parts of her body—feet, legs, arms, eyes—that belong to her. As she delivers this list, writhing on the floor in a catatonic state, with ever more anguish and urgency, we realise that her status as other has driven her mad. Yet, by retaining the capacity to recognize herself, she is able to resist that categorization. In another scene, between Phoenix and Achilles, Phoenix asserts a continuous, unified, and legible identity between those bodies constituting the national subject/self when he appeals to Achilles to return to battle. Holding his pupil’s arm,

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he says: ‘This flesh as good as mine’ (Ibid: 19). In a different way, the Trojan prince Hector invokes his own body when Hecuba tries to persuade him not to fight Achilles. He tells her that he is unable to ‘speak of this body as my own’ (Ibid: 22) until the Achaeans have been defeated. Ultimately, Hector is killed and Priam must abase his own body before Achilles to retrieve his son’s corpse. Hector may have believed that, by fighting Achilles, he would be able to ‘speak’ his body into being. Yet, in death, it is his corpse that reveals the illegibility of his humanity. Towards the end of the first act, Hecuba attempts to assert her body in almost the same manner as Briseis. As the queen walks among the graves of her children, she wonders what sort of mother she has become. She lists various parts of her body—legs, feet, arms, breasts, eyes—as if trying to find somewhere to locate her selfhood as ‘[m]other to a brood of ghosts’ (Ibid: 28). In these scenes, the bodies of Briseis, Hector, Priam, and Hecuba function within the wider matrix of a ‘racial epidermal schema’ (Fanon 2008: 84) that treats colonized bodies as simultaneously intelligible and unfamiliar through their categorization as other. I attended the preview performance of This Flesh is Mine at Ashtar in Ramallah on 8 May 2015, which took place before a week-long run at Testbed1 in south London. The Ramallah audience was small, not more than seventy, and consisted mainly of students from Birzeit University (where Border Crossings had facilitated a writing workshop earlier that day), professional and student actors, and other artistic practitioners. Gathered in the foyer of the theatre, the atmosphere pulsating with anticipation, it was clear people knew each other. This was not a general audience walking in from the streets. Rather, it was a selection of those educated (and, often, Western-educated), upper and middle class ‘Ramallawis’ who frequent the city’s cultural ‘circuit’ and are part of a social elite who have the English-language skills to access a play like This Flesh is Mine. Michael Walling acknowledges that the audience may have been ‘a bit of an in-crowd’ and that the play did not ‘touch as many lives as we would want to’.3 Not only did the play’s short run (just two performances) circumscribe its audience, but the fact that it was in English, without Arabic surtitles, would have excluded audiences even more. Further, that audiences from outlying areas would have had to travel through different kinds of occupied space to get to the performance would also have been a hindrance. In our discussion, Walling acknowledged that any future performance in the West Bank would have to take these factors into consideration.4

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The performance itself takes place as a promenade, with theatre staff ushering audiences between scenes through the theatre’s claustrophobic foyer, the central studio (the largest of the performance spaces) and the black box studio. This attempt at transforming the theatre building into a scenographic space had both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, the act of moving back and forth between three spaces— rooms within rooms, in fact—endangered the narrative flow of the performance. First, there was the external voice of the theatre usher; then, a small degree of confusion about where to go next; followed by time spent finding somewhere to sit or stand. This criticism is peripheral, however, because the promenade, as opposed to a static stage, actually facilitated a more dynamic relationship between audience, performers, and performance. Depending on their proximity to the performers, or by simply changing their positions or by moving from sitting to standing, audiences could gain different perspectives on the narrative as well as the subtler nuances of the performance itself.

The Collaborative Process of This Flesh Is Mine The question, then, is: Who is the subject of the play’s title? For the company to arrive at an answer to this complicated question, the production required a rigorous, collaborative process that made space for multiple and contradictory voices. The development of This Flesh is Mine evolved over a period of six years, and involved three stages of development. The first stage was in 2007 when Woolland, who is also a practitioner of drama in education, was invited by the Panhellenic Association of Teaching Drama to deliver a series of workshops to Greek teachers in Athens, exploring how The Iliad can be taught to teenagers ‘in a way which would empower them’ and how participatory theatre can feed into theatrical performance (Woolland 2014c). These experiences led to the initial idea for a theatrical adaptation of the epic poem, which Woolland first proposed to Walling in 2008 (Woolland 2014d). However, it was not until 2013 that Border Crossings was able to secure financial support from the British Council and embark upon the second stage of development (Ibid). The second stage involved a week of workshops with the Lebanese Zoukak Theater in Beirut, which was intended to culminate in a coproduction of the final play. Through a process of discussions and improvisations, in which sketches of moments from The Iliad provided

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workshop participants with stimuli for group work, a narrative structure for the eventual script began to emerge. Woolland stresses that he and Walling intentionally arrived in Beirut with sketches rather than a script in order to create an open workshop that would encourage participants to develop their own ‘ideas and concerns’ (Ibid). For example, the participants grounded their improvisations in their experiences of the Lebanese civil war, which meant that Priam’s attempt to reconcile with Achilles towards the end of The Iliad would have elided the complexities of sectarian violence, rendering the play problematic for a Lebanese audience. Border Crossings’s approach, then, allowed the play to emerge ‘in response to [participants’] contributions’ (Ibid). When Zoukak Theater was no longer able to take part in the project due to ‘their own priorities and programme as an organisation’, Border Crossings invited Ashtar to participate in a co-production.5 This marked the third stage in the development of This Flesh is Mine, giving the adaptation its final form, narrative, and structure. A co-production with Ashtar had been an early intention of Border Crossings.6 According to Walling, the cycles of violence and revenge in The Iliad and the Achaean siege of Troy resonated with the violence of the Palestine–Israel conflict and Israel’s eight-year land, sea, and air blockade of Gaza. An attempt was made to establish a partnership with Ashtar through the European Commission’s cooperation programme with ‘third countries’ (that is, non-EU/EEA countries). However, because the programme requires the participation of three eligible European countries as well as the ‘third country’ and, according to Walling, the project ‘only made sense as a bilateral partnership’, this bid fell through. However, these conversations meant that a partnership between Ashtar and Border Crossings had been established and ready to be actualized should an opportunity present itself.7 It was while workshopping in Beirut that Border Crossings was able to secure funding from the Anna Lindh Foundation for the planned co-production with Zoukak Theater. When Zoukak withdrew from the project, Walling says, Border Crossings found itself ‘exactly where we’d wanted to be in the first place’—that is in partnership with Ashtar .8 This circuitous route to Palestine, Walling insists, was ‘hugely beneficial’ to the play’s development.9 For example, their engagement with Zoukak Theater provided Woolland and Walling with a more nuanced understanding of internecine conflict than they might otherwise have been able to access, and the drafts of the script Woolland wrote following

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these workshops paved the way for a more fruitful collaboration between Border Crossings and Ashtar. This was important because, when rehearsals began in Ramallah, two obstacles had to be resolved: first, Briseis’s decision to embrace exile needed to be clarified; second, and more importantly, they had to decide whether or not to retain Helen as a character in the play. In The Iliad, Briseis is a concubine given to Achilles after his conquest of Lyrnessus during the Trojan War. When Agamemnon appropriates her as compensation for the loss of his own concubine, Achilles withdraws in protest from the battle thus tipping the war in favour of the Trojans. Briseis’s role is central to Homer’s narrative, as she ignites the feud between Achilles and Agamemnon. Yet, as a colonized body, her character is positioned at the boundaries of the narrative, never allowed to enter it as a prominent character. She appears in only a few scenes where she is objectified as war-prize, the concubine of her family’s murderer and as little more than chattel to be exchanged by gods and men alike. At the start of The Iliad, Briseis and Achilles have already fallen in love. Through Patroclus, Achilles promises that after the war he will take her to Greece where they will marry. Deeply comforted by this, Briseis accepts his promise. Briseis’s readiness to leave Troy, which Woolland had already written into the rehearsal draft, was questioned by the Palestinian actors especially by Razan Alazzeh (who played Briseis in the Ramallah production) and Iman Aoun (who played Hecuba). Although they accepted the truthfulness of her desire, Alazzeh and Aoun believed Briseis’s choice had to be challenged in a play in which Troy resonates with Palestine. According to Woolland (2014d), it was crucial that the narrative ‘dramatise the psychological, social and political struggles surrounding the issue of voluntary exile’. Walling states that the conversations in the rehearsal room became preoccupied with the issue of forced migration and ‘why it’s important for Palestinian people to stay’ in Palestine.10 So, in the performance text, when Hecuba enters Achilles’ camp and persuades Briseis not to leave Troy, it is not simply that she is convincing her to stay in a war zone thus endangering her life. Rather, as Walling explains, the discussions that led to Woolland re-writing the final scene were about how the acceptance of the life of a refugee might be at the expense of losing one’s homeland, culture, and identity. So, Briseis’ decision to remain in Troy despite the hardships she would have to endure encapsulates the transgressive practice of sumud (steadfastness) one aspect of

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which has been that Palestinians remain on their land, against all odds, in defiance of Israeli attempts to drive them out. Woolland insists that the Palestinian context ‘enhanced’ his characterization of Briseis by taking into account the practice of sumud, allowing her to embody contradictory desires and positions.11 The dramaturgical and political questions posed by the character of Helen, however, were much more difficult to resolve. Woolland says that he knew very early in the process that Helen’s corporeal presence on stage would be problematic. He adds that, even though his intention was to avoid allegory, he could see there were ‘close parallels’ between the Achaeans’ use of Helen in war propaganda and, for example, ‘the Bush/Blair alliance using the threat of Saddam Hussein having Weapons of Mass Destruction as their justification for invading Iraq’ (Woolland 2014d). One attempt to resolve this problem emerged from his reading of Euripides’ tragi-comedy, Helen, which tells a variant of the original myth—that the Helen who causes the Trojan War is actually an eidolon or spirit-image while the real Helen had been transported to Egypt by the gods many years earlier. For Woolland, the parallels between Euripides’ condemnation of unjust warfare and ‘the hypocrisy of leaders who invoke phantom causes to justify militarism’ offered a way to make ancient mythology ‘resonate with a contemporary audience’ (Ibid). In light of this, he decided to preserve Helen as a character in This Flesh is Mine and, indeed, in the early rehearsal draft, Helen and Briseis are played by the same actor (Ibid). Not only would this have driven the narrative tension of the play towards its conclusion, he writes, but it would also have allowed for an exploration of how these women resist ‘the identities created for them by possessive men’ (Ibid). Their journeys, then, would have been from victimhood (as objects of desire contested by Menelaus and Paris, and Achilles and Agamemnon) to agency (thus unravelling Achaean propaganda). However, as a result of the rehearsal process, discussions with the Palestinian actors and his own presence in Ramallah, Woolland began to realise that his solutions to these dramaturgical concerns were ‘disingenuous’ (Ibid) because the Palestinian actors began to see Helen’s presence on stage as politically problematic. Aoun describes how discussions about Helen kept re-emerging throughout the four-week rehearsal period. ‘It wasn’t an easy task because we kept going back to it’, she says. ‘You go page by page and then you go back to the same issue: “And what about Helen?”’12

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Aoun describes how the question of Helen’s inclusion in the play was wrapped up in discussions about what her presence would signify politically since, in The Iliad, her kidnapping provides the Achaeans with the pretext they need to attack and occupy Troy. In addition to this, as Woolland acknowledges, the involvement of a Palestinian company in the production means that audiences will always identify the Achaean siege of Troy with Israel’s colonization of Palestine, and Helen with the land of Palestine itself (Woolland 2014d). For the Palestinian actors, Aoun explains, the inclusion of an embodied Helen would have rendered them complicit in the Zionist narrative: that the Palestinians had stolen something when, in fact, they were the dispossessed. As the Palestinian actor Emile Saba (who played Hector and Patroclus in the Ramallah performance) points out, the presence of Helen in the Trojan camp would have been equivalent to justifying Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. This, he believes, would have led audiences to raise serious questions about Ashtar’s political commitments.13 In the end, these tensions were resolved by omitting Helen as an embodied character, thus presenting her in the play’s narrative through her absence and how other characters talk about her. In a performance lasting well over an hour, Helen is mentioned just eleven times by the Achaean characters. The single instance in which a Trojan character refers to her is when Hecuba responds to an Achaean soldier asking her about the whereabouts of Helen following the sacking of Troy. She says: ‘Helen has brought us nothing but blood and death. This hell on earth is Helen ... If I knew where Helen was I’d take you myself. If my legs had been blown off I’d still find a way’ (Woolland 2014a: 78). The decision to omit Helen made the performance I attended compelling because it integrated the political but not by sacrificing the play’s artistic qualities. These adjustments to the script required major structural changes such as losing or re-writing entire scenes. An example of this was that the company realised the script’s original dénouement— in which the Trojan king Priam humbles himself before Achilles, kisses his hand and pleads for the return of Hector’s body—would have been wholly unsuited to a Palestinian context. The presentation of a Trojan, standing in for Palestinians, humbling himself in such a manner before an Achaean, standing in for Israelis, would not have directed audiences to the nobility with which Homer accents Priam’s act. Rather, it would have rendered the ‘Palestinian’ Priam as grovelling, obsequious, and submissive to the Zionist narrative over homeland which lies at the core of

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the Palestine–Israel conflict. Although that scene is still present as the end of the first act, the sight of a king grovelling before his oppressor serves as an oblique reminder of the Palestinian Authority’s entrenched relationship with the Israeli state. The play now ends with Hecuba convincing Briseis to stay in Troy—in others words, to practice sumud—followed by Achilles’ death in a car bomb explosion off-stage. Making these decisions was difficult, as Woolland says.14 They necessitated a process involving open dialogue in which the entire group felt able to express their doubts and hesitance, and the confidence that such expressions would be respected.

Creating Ensembles In the preceding discussion of the collaborative process underpinning the adaptation of This Flesh is Mine, what emerges is the importance of establishing shared languages facilitating open dialogue between writers, directors, and performers especially in the context of international collaborations. Although shared languages are crucial to open dialogue, neither precedes the other. Instead, they are ways of making thoughts and ideas mutually recognizable. Shared languages and open dialogue augment and strengthen each other because creating open dialogue requires ensembles to establish shared languages but, in order to establish shared languages, ensembles require open dialogue. By shared languages, I refer to the ways in which a group forges common aesthetic, methodological, and political vocabularies in order to encourage and maintain meaningful collaborations in creating an adaptation. Whereas I use the term aesthetic language to refer to the material developed in the rehearsal room through performance-based tasks—that is to say, the play itself—I use methodological language to refer to the rehearsal processes and structures a group might use in order to develop that material. Although these terms might also be called product and process, it is important to acknowledge that, in rehearsal, they overlap. Finally, by political language, I refer to the vocabulary a group might use to ‘read’ and discuss the wider socio-political contexts in which the aesthetic and methodological languages meet. Different practitioners and scholars have used variations of these terminologies to discuss the need for a shared language. For example, Tim Etchells, artistic director of the British experimental theatre company

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Forced Entertainment, has described collaboration as ‘simply finding the process of developing new words for the strange situations in which a group can find itself’ (Etchells 1999: 62). Theatre scholar Alex Mermikides uses the term ‘consensus’ to discuss the work of Meyerhold and Grotowski, arguing that consensus can be ‘easy to achieve because the group shares the same values’ (Mermikides 2010: 156). Since theatre is always a collaborative practice—not just between writer, director, and actors, but also between the creative personnel who participate in the production—establishing these shared languages facilitates the dialogism that is so crucial to theatre-making. But the dangers of creating a shared methodological language should not be overlooked because, as Mermikides points out, in attempting to create consensus, the group may also display ‘a willingness to submit to the director’ (Mermikides 2010: 156). She explains that ‘too much [consensus] may hinder the opportunity for innovation and novelty, and risk what the business world would call “groupthink”’ (Ibid: 158). The risk inherent in not developing a shared language, then, is the danger that a limited vocabulary might produce work that is stale. In the case of This Flesh is Mine, the most important development in the aesthetic language occurred when the writer’s ideas were challenged by the actors. What is interesting about this process is that the group turned to a shared political language in order to resolve questions and differences about the aesthetic language. The importance of forging a shared political language in the context of Palestinian theatre cannot be overstated. Both Woolland and Walling state in their interviews that being in Ramallah and witnessing the occupation firsthand shaped how they responded to discussions in the rehearsal room. Walling mentions how the British actors’ readiness to witness their Palestinian colleagues’ experiences informed his own process as director. Specifically, he mentions how the experience of going through the Qalandiya checkpoint, which divides the West Bank from East Jerusalem and limits Palestinians living there from accessing the city, gave him an embodied reference point to listen to how the Palestinian actors were responding to the play. This is echoed by Saba who mentions how discussions became increasingly nuanced the more time the British team spent in Palestine because they started to establish interconnections between the aesthetic and political languages through their own experiences of moving through occupied spaces. He says:

242  G. Varghese The thing is that, if you want to talk about something, you have to experience it first. You have to go there. If I want to write [a play] about Palestine, and I’ve never been to Palestine, and all I know about it is what I’ve heard through the media, from books or from people, I shouldn’t write about it. […] You have to come and you have to see [for yourself]. 15

Aoun, too, states that every co-production between Ashtar and international artists begins with discussions about what a Palestinian company might bring to such a relationship. These discussions, she says, are not just about the artistic concept driving performances but also their ‘political background’.16 According to all the theatre-makers I spoke to, constructing a shared political language was crucial to establishing relationships based on mutual trust in which participants felt able to contribute to or challenge the aesthetic language. Furthermore, in contexts where what gets produced is driven by issues of international funding, and where such funding comes from foreign donors who have little experience of conditions ‘on the ground’, establishing a shared political language with international collaborators determines whether such partnerships succeed or fail. Aoun also identifies a number of qualities she believes collaborators should demonstrate in order to create fruitful co-productions. The ability to listen to each other is the key ingredient, she says.17 Furthermore, mutual respect between collaborators also eases tensions and disagreements over artistic approaches. These suggestions resonate with Walling for whom the decisive factor in ensuring a healthy collaborative relationship lies in the director’s ability to create ‘an equal and open collaborative space’.18 Part of his role, he says, was to navigate his way through a ‘complex nexus’ of statuses in the rehearsal room—not least that one of the actors under his direction, Aoun herself, is also the artistic director of Ashtar under whom the other Palestinian actors had trained. He says: I had to respect Iman’s position as an artistic leader in her own right (and somebody with an extraordinary depth of knowledge about Palestine and a passion for the cause), at the same time as empowering the younger actors to feel like equal partners in the process.19

Aoun also mentions how collaborators’ personal ambitions and opinions about themselves can hinder effective collaboration. This occurred,

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she says, during a past project between Ashtar and theatre-makers from Jordan and Tunisia in which four directors were working to produce a single play. Even though the division and allocation of roles was discussed at the beginning, Aoun explains that the partners each considered themselves to be ‘the director’. (Aoun’s own role in this project was that of producer.) Difficulties were exacerbated further by the fact that they interpreted their allocated roles, such as dramaturg or choreographer, as a reduction in status. In the end, equilibrium was restored through open dialogue and re-establishing common ground, what I have previously identified as a shared language. For Aoun, the ability to listen to each other in order to create this common ground is complemented by the ability to embrace silence. As she says: ‘Sometimes we have to stop negotiating, debating, [and] take a step back and let things resonate. In the silence many things fall or rise because it’s part of the new space we create and step into.’20

Conclusion The involvement of international practitioners in the Palestinian theatre scene presents Palestinian theatre-makers with both logistical and discursive challenges. The extensive range of collaborations is a phenomenon that has become most pronounced recently and for many reasons, not least that theatre in Palestine is being produced in the interstices of a settler-colonial occupation and in the absence of structural support from the Palestinian Authority. Their navigational tactics allow Palestinian theatre-makers to elicit a range of positive outcomes for their own benefit, from actor training to solidarity formation. By studying the processes that shaped the adaptation of This Flesh is Mine, this chapter has attempted to demonstrate why Palestinian theatre-makers establish international relationships, why they adapt classic texts, how they address the challenges with which such relationships present themselves, and how they employ diverse tactics to disrupt the inherent power imbalances. The guiding logic behind such relationships appears to be theatre-makers’ commitment to cultural resistance because, as Aoun asserts, Palestinian theatre-makers’ aesthetic practices would mean little without their political commitments. ‘Otherwise,’ she asks, ‘why are we doing it?’21

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Notes

1. That collaboration in such NGO-ized contexts as the West Bank is mediated, mainly, by Western donor organizations and patronage reflects the global flow of cultural and economic capital as well as the lack of local structural support for arts development. Over the last three decades, all the major theatre companies in the West Bank have managed to establish professional relationships with individual artists and theatre companies from (mainly) Western countries. Relations between Palestinian and Western practitioners have become so extensive that it is no longer an exaggeration to say that Palestinian theatre companies are better known around the world than they are in their own localities. In the spring of 2016, for example, I spent three months working at The Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp. In the ten years since its founding, the theatre has achieved worldwide critical acclaim as well as established positive relations with the camp itself. Yet, within Jenin city itself, located only a ten-minute walk away, the theatre remains scarcely known. There are a number of reasons for this, which it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss in great detail. For example, social relations between the camp and the city remain strained—not simply as a result of the events of the second intifada but also as a reflection of city-dwellers’ negative stereotypes of refugee camps as the loci of petty and organized crime, of violence, drug abuse, and so on. As a result, many residents of Jenin city refuse to enter the camp and remain completely unaware of cultural activities taking place there. For more on international solidarity in the context of the Palestinian liberation struggle, see, for example: Seitz (2003, pp. 50–67); Sawalha (2008, pp. 197–202); StamatopoulouRobbins (2008, pp. 111–160); and Landy (2014, pp. 130–142). 2.  Michael Walling quoted in Ellie Violet Bramley, ‘This Flesh is Mine: Homer, car bombs and Jack Bauer’, The Guardian, 23 May 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/may/23/this-flesh-is-mineborder-crossing [Accessed: 21 April 2016]. 3. Michael Walling, interview with author, 11 February 2015. 4. Ibid. 5. Michael Walling, e-mail to author, 24 February 2015. 6. Michael Walling, interview with author, 11 February 2015. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Michael Walling, interview with author, 11 February 2015. Due to other commitments, Woolland was only able to be present in Ramallah for the fourth and final week of rehearsals. So, the conversations with him took place on Skype.

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11. Brian Woolland, e-mail to author, 2 March 2015. 12. Iman Aoun, interview with author, 20 February 2015. 13. Emile Saba, interview with author, 15 February 2015. 14. Brian Woolland, interview with author, 17 February 2015. 15. Emile Saba, interview with author, 15 February 2015. 16. Iman Aoun, interview with author, 20 February 2015. 17. Ibid. 18. Michael Walling, e-mail to author, 20 February 2015. 19. Ibid. 20. Iman Aoun, interview with author, 20 February 2015. 21. Ibid.

References Bramley, Ellie Violet, ‘This Flesh is Mine: Homer, Car Bombs and Jack Bauer’. The Guardian, 23 May 2014, online at: http://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2014/may/23/this-flesh-is-mine-border-crossing, Accessed 21 April 2016. Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge, 1993. Etchells, Tim, Certain Fragments. London: Routledge, 1999. Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, trans Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto, 2008. Landy, David, ‘“We don’t get involved in the internal affairs of Palestinians”: Elisions and Tensions in North-South Solidarity Practices’. Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements, 6, 2, 2014: pp. 130–142. Mermikides, Alex, ‘Clash and Consensus in Shunt’s “Big Shows” and the “Lounge”‘, in Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart, eds. Devising in Process. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 147–164. Sawalha, Aseel, ‘Reply: Solidarity: Solidarity or Charity: International Support for Palestinians in the Post-Oslo Era’. Dialectical Anthropology, 32, 3, 2008: pp. 197–202. Seitz, Charmaine, ‘ISM at the Crossroads: The Evolution of the International Solidarity Movement’. Journal of Palestine Studies, 32, 4, 2003: pp. 50–67. Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia, ‘The Joys and Dangers of Solidarity in Palestine: Prosthetic Engagement in an Age of Reparations’. CR: The New Centennial Review, 8, 2, 2008: pp. 111–160. Woolland, Brian, This Flesh Is Mine. London: Oberon, 2014a. Woolland, Brian, ‘Part 1: Approaching a Classic’. 2014b, online at: http:// thisfleshismine.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/part-1-approaching-classic.html, Accessed 21 April 2016.

246  G. Varghese Woolland, Brian, ‘Part 2: From Workshop to Performance,’ 2014c, online at: http://thisfleshismine.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/part-2-from-workshop-toperformance.html, Accessed 21 April 2016. Woolland, Brian, ‘Part 3: The Dramatic Process of Rehearsals.’ 2014d, online at: http://thisfleshismine.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/part-3-dramatic-process-ofrehearsals.html, Accessed 21 April 2016.

PART IV

Postmodern Meta-Theatrical Adaptation, Introduced by Kimberly Jannarone

Postmodernism carries within it the element of ‘meta’—meta-artwork, meta-canon, meta-modernity. By collaging, juxtaposing, altering, and explicitly positioning itself alongside or against, postmodern art questions the notion of an artwork as a stable entity. It tears into aesthetic universes striving for wholeness and exposes them as contingent objects whose meanings and constituent parts change over time, no matter the originator’s intent. The chapters in this part demonstrate that the theatrical production process itself carries within it the seeds of postmodernism. To répéter—the French word for both ‘repeat’ and ‘rehearse’—is always to repeat with a difference, and productions are always adaptations and re-contextualizations of their source texts. Pedro de Senna makes the case for production and postmodernism’s close ties in his chapter on Ensaio.Hamlet, a production that insists that an ensaio is always both its meanings: an ‘essay’ and a ‘rehearsal’. Senna argues that the metatheatrical production of Hamlet by Brazilian ensemble Companhia (Cia) dos Atores demonstrates how production and adaptation are born in the same moment, and that any rehearsal is an act of both research and criticism. Adaptation is inherent in staging plays, his chapter suggests: a production team cuts, interprets, reveals and conceals, favours and elides, personalizes and intellectualizes. The original script is always seen through new eyes of interpreters and

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audiences—indeed, it is even eaten by contemporary artists and audiences: anthropophagy, one of the central tropes of Brazilian literary criticism, suggests that texts are eaten, partially absorbed, and spit back out into the world whenever they are staged. Eugene O’Neill appears, with his lengthy and prescriptive stage directions, to have attempted to forestall the vagaries of time, interpretation, and changing contexts from altering his play, and yet, as the NeoFuturists demonstrated with their production of Strange Interlude and as Adrian Curtin argues in his chapter, O’Neill’s lengthy work of psychological introspection becomes postmodern by the mere act of staging it with excessive fidelity. Curtin demonstrates that the Neo-Futurists created a ‘postmodern but not post-dramatic’ O’Neill in their production through taking the script at its word: reading the stage directions aloud, staging the intimate asides intimately, following emotional stage directions with precisions, etc. They heightened the work’s strangeness rather than glossing it over, making the work mean anew: they created an adaptation by examining every part of the work with a magnifying glass, creating a production that is even more fully O’Neill’s play than a naturalist staging of it would be. Nora J. Williams’ chapter on the Young Vic’s 2012 Changeling supports this reading of fidelity as adaptation: by taking seri ously Middleton and Rowley’s vastly different dramaturgies and pushing each to their far reaches, the production creates dramatic collisions invisible to those who attempt to smooth over the play’s jagged edges. Making another case for production as adaptation, Scott Proudfit argues that Bill Rauch and Tracy Young’s Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, by staging each canonical play in a contemporarily uncontroversial style, creates an adaptation by doing so simultaneously. For a generation used to styles of visual appropriation, musical sampling, and meme-ing, a theatrical mash-up may feel more a hommage, an assemblage, than an alteration, but Proudfit argues that the theatrical ‘mash-up’ re-contextualizes each piece by staging it alongside the others, illuminating each through productive moments of congruity and incongruity. Metatheatricality is built into such a simultaneous performance, forcing audience members to compare three products of three different theatrical traditions; but meta-canonicity is, too, as the juxtaposition enables a bird’s-eye view of three ‘classics’ of the Western tradition—as different as they are—all at once. Perhaps the most clearly adaptative of the works discussed in this section, Rupert Goold and Ben Power’s Faustus (2004)—which

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incorporates Christopher Marlowe’s text and the Chapman Brothers’ visual work Insult to Injury—takes the idea of postmodern canonicity to its furthest extremes. If staging a text re-inscribes that text into the canon (as the chapters in this part suggest), that staging may not come from a place of adoration: it may also be a work of aggression. As Sarah Grochala argues, Goold and Power stage their love/hate with Marlowe’s play in the same spirit as the Chapmans ‘rectified’ Goya: crossing out, defacing, altering, substituting, arguing with, spitting on, and, ultimately, situating that work ever more firmly into the collective imagination, adding layers of meaning and cultural accumulation as they do so. In fact, hating a work so much you have to exhume it in order to scream at it face-to-face (as Goold, Power, and the Chapmans did), brings us back to the opening image of anthropophagy: the intimate act of eating and digesting, taking something into yourself in one form and parting with it in another. Repeating and eating; rehearsing and critiquing; producing and adapting: the chapters in this part demonstrate that the act of live performance—with its fleet of actors and producers and bodies in rehearsal rooms, on stages, and in seats, with its absolutely contemporary minds and contexts and cultural referents—questions the canon and the notion of a stable work of art through its very enactment. Whether by displaying the thought behind rehearsal, by creating a collage or a mash-up, or by committing to an inflexible fidelity, the works discussed here situate the performance process as intimately tied to adaptation and reflexivity, shading different colors into the living art of performance.

CHAPTER 13

The Neo-Futurists(’) Take on Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude Adrian Curtin

In 2009, the Goodman Theatre in Chicago presented a two-month festival of Eugene O’Neill’s work. Billed as a global exploration of his plays in the twenty-first century, the festival included productions by various companies of plays from the early to middle part of O’Neill’s career.1 The aim was to re-examine these challenging, problematic plays and offer new interpretations of them, revitalizing texts that might otherwise seem passé. The Neo-Futurists (founded by Greg Allen in Chicago in 1988) offered their take on O’Neill’s 1928 play Strange Interlude. The five-and-a-half-hour-long production was both rapturously and rancorously received, prompting standing ovations and walkouts in its short run. At the first performance, an audience member—an older man apparently moved to anger—voiced his displeasure from the balcony at the end of Act 2, rhetorically asking the performers why they were ‘butchering this play, this beautiful play’ (or words to that effect), before storming out. It was a thrilling moment. I was sitting behind him and was tickled to have witnessed what appeared to have been a classic case of épater le bourgeois. Funnily enough, there was another disruption at A. Curtin (*)  University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_13

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the following performance, which might lead one to suppose that the audience malcontents were planted there, but Greg Allen, the director, denies this. Why, then, did the production generate such polarized responses? The Neo-Futurists’ used their distinctive aesthetic, which is inspired by Italian futurism, dadaism, surrealism, absurdism, and fluxus, to adapt O’Neill’s play. Known for their long-running show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, a topical, eclectic, hour-long collection of short, newly written plays, the Neo-Futurists do not ask audience members to ‘suspend their disbelief’. Instead, they acknowledge and make a virtue of theatrical artifice. They abjure the so-called ‘fourth wall’. Typically, they do not act characters but perform truthfully as themselves and undertake ‘real’ actions. The Neo-Futurists delight in brevity, spontaneity, spoofing, audience interaction, and game playing—not characteristics one would readily associate with O’Neill or his work. They usually write or devise their own plays, which are sometimes physically led or abstract. Strange Interlude is then, on the face of it, a peculiar match for the Neo-Futurists given the play’s earnestness, verbiage, and length (nine acts, hundreds of pages), but this aesthetic mismatching may be what made the production so rewarding for some and infuriating for others. This was a twenty-first-century, ironic take on Strange Interlude that exploited and revelled in the play’s strangeness by revealing it anew. The Neo-Futurists subverted a subversive play; they theatricalized an antitheatrical drama.2 Strange Interlude interrupts mimesis through sustained diegesis in the form of extensive, recurrent, psychoanalytically tinged character asides that puncture and suspend the action, lending the play a novelistic quality. The characters tell us what they are thinking, or rather they verbalize their thoughts to themselves. This is the play’s central conceit. Allen found clever ways of staging these side commentaries, changing tactics each act, and added to the weight of words by voicing O’Neill’s copious, literary stage directions as well.3 The production offered a metacommentary on the act of staging this ‘problem’ play—a play that seems to have an idealized existence on the page, in O’Neill’s imagining. Consequently, The Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude offers insight not only into O’Neill’s play but also into his authorial presence in the text, the construction of his authority and canonicity (i.e. his cultural cachet), and the legacy of modernist experimentation. This chapter ponders the way in which modernist play-texts can be ‘re-made new’ for the stage, to

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adapt Ezra Pound’s famous dictum, using this inventive, irreverent production as a case study.

The Strangeness of Strange Interlude Strange Interlude occupies an uneasy position in O’Neill’s oeuvre and in dramatic criticism. First produced by the Theatre Guild at the John Golden Theatre on Broadway in 1928, the play was a critical and commercial triumph, earning the author his third Pulitzer Prize and enhancing his popular recognition and notoriety. It was banned in Boston and Provincetown on account of its supposedly scandalous and immoral content, and was performed in the suburbs instead. It enjoyed a 17-month run on Broadway (414 performances in total), had two successful touring company productions over the course of three seasons, and became a best-selling book and then a 1932 MGM film starring Clark Gable and Norma Shearer (Dowling 432). Groucho Marx made comic reference to it in Animal Crackers (1930).4 The Broadway production inspired repeat attendance and devoted audiences, and had unique event status (its duration meant that the performance included a dinner break).5 In short, the play was a cultural phenomenon. It was arguably O’Neill’s most successful play in his lifetime. The play’s reputation subsequent to O’Neill’s death (in 1953) has generally been unfavourable, however. It has been infrequently staged in comparison with O’Neill’s later work and so is little known.6 Critics have lambasted it, contradicting the generally rave reviews for the original Broadway production. Richard Gilman, writing about the 1963 Actors Studio revival directed by José Quintero, called it ‘the most atrociously ill-written and ill-conceived play of our time, the falsest “masterpiece” in the theatre, as very likely the worst play that has ever been written by a dramatist with a reputation’ (Gilman 68). This was not the only excoriation, but it was probably the harshest. O’Neill’s artistic experimentation, his effort at serious and intense characterization, his plethoric excess, and his treatment of Freudian ideas were originally lauded but later appeared misconceived and dated. The play has subsequently become ‘the scandal of the O’Neill canon’, according to Robert F. Gross; it is considered an embarrassment of sorts, melodrama masquerading as high art (3). In the estimation of cultural arbiters and those who wish to maintain hegemonic norms, modernism and melodrama are uncomfortable bedfellows;

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their potential collusion between the sheets, as it were, must be criticized or else hidden from view.7 Strange Interlude tells the soap operatic story of Nina Leeds, whose unhappy love life, unfortunate circumstances, and unstable personality provide fodder for O’Neill’s extended psychological dramatization. A brief synopsis is in order. The play is set in a small New England town. In Act 1, we learn that Nina, who is 20, had been engaged to Gordon Shaw, an air force pilot who was shot down two days before the end of World War I. His death has devastated her. She has a strained relationship with her father, a professor. Gordon never appears in the play, except in portrait form, as a recurrent point of discussion, and an implicit absent-presence. Throughout the play, Nina toys with the affections of three male suitors/companions: an ineffectual novelist named Charles Marsden (coded gay), Sam Evans, an amiable chump, and Edmund (Ned) Darrell, a clinical physician. Nina marries Evans and becomes pregnant, but aborts the pregnancy on the advice of Evan’s mother, who tells Nina a terrible secret (unknown to Sam): insanity is hereditary in the Evans family. Nina decides to become pregnant by Darrell and pretend the child is Evans’. She falls out of love with Evans and in love with Darrell, but nevertheless remains married to her husband. Twenty-five years pass as the nine acts proceed. Nina’s son, Gordon Evans, grows up and gets engaged to a Miss Madeline Arnold. Nina confesses the torturous secret of her son’s parentage to Marsden. Evans (unrelatedly) dies of a heart attack. Nina acquiesces to marry Marsden, who serves as a comfortable old slipper. Nina concludes by musing, distractedly, that ‘our lives are merely strange dark interludes in the electrical display of God the Father!’ (347). Synopsizing the play foregrounds its melodramatic content as well as the peculiarity of some of its plot points: notably the congenital insanity storyline, which appears to harken back to Gothic literature. Yet, as Tamsen Wolff has argued, the play’s engagement with hereditary theory (e.g. Mendel) and popular ideas about eugenics had special resonance for O’Neill and may have contributed to the early appeal of the play.8 The drama might also be considered a study of protracted and unresolved trauma: Gordon Shaw’s death destabilizes Nina and prompts her epic moroseness and erratic behaviour; she never appears to recover fully or be ‘truly’ happy. O’Neill documents her contrary mental state along with the internal conflicts of those in her orbit. This can make for uneasy engagement on the part of the reader/audience member, especially when

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Nina turns vaguely schizoid (referring to herself in the third person as ‘Sam’s wife’ in Act 4) or pontificates on metaphysical themes. There are many odd and inscrutable lines in this play that leave one scratching one’s head. As Nina remarks to Darrell: ‘There are so many curious reasons we dare not think about for thinking things!’ (293). Quite. It is clear from reading the play that it is meant to be a serious drama. O’Neill’s authorial commentary makes this plain. The stage directions do not contain the slightest indication of levity. To a contemporary reader/ audience member, however, the play may be thought to take itself too seriously, or else it fails to acknowledge its own potential for humour. O’Neill was reportedly adamant that the first production would not be played for laughs (Shafer 237). The characters often appear overblown and exaggerated. It is almost embarrassingly earnest.9 The drama is frequently pitched to an extreme (exclamation points are de rigeur) or pushed into pregnant pauses (recurrent ellipses) as though parodying expressionism, or not using it effectively. The play is nonetheless captivating, despite—or perhaps because of—its stylistics. It is full of choice phrases that showcase O’Neill’s literary flair, and weird digressions such as Nina’s metaphysical meditations. The play veers between disturbing and surprising incidents, such as Nina deciding to abort her baby on the dubious counsel of her mother-in-law, and humdrum domestic drama, as exemplified by Nina’s endless mooning about her dead fiancé or worrying about her marital duplicity. Moreover, O’Neill’s conceit of verbalizing character thoughts is often unintentionally amusing, as the interior monologues demonstrate the artificiality of the characters’ social masks (they say one thing but think another). Brian Friel does something similar in his 1964 play Philadelphia, Here I Come!, where the main character is split into a public and private self, but Friel mined the dramatic and comedic potential of this device; the comedy of O’Neill’s play is accidental. It might make us laugh, but this does not appear to have been the author’s intention. Audiences can derive pleasure from the strangeness (read: theatricality, excessiveness, occasional ridiculousness) of O’Neill’s play even if this is an accidental by-product of its design. Robert F. Gross has written about the ‘camp appeal’ of Strange Interlude—‘its low, soap opera-like complications, its exclamation point-ridden invitations to melodramatic acting, and the indecorous shifts from melodrama to comedy (often by way of bathos) and back again’—and suggests it has a ‘queer presence in the predominantly male heterosexual (not to mention sexist and

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heterosexist) ethos of the O’Neill canon’ (4). O’Neill scholars have traditionally been reluctant to acknowledge these elements, Gross notes, even though they have contributed to the play’s popularity. Strange Interlude is suffused with irony, aestheticism, theatricality, and humour; it lends itself to a queer reading very easily, especially given the character of Marsden, whom O’Neill famously describes in stage directions as having ‘an indefinable feminine quality about him, but it is nothing apparent in either appearance or act’ (12). It is Marsden who ends up with Nina at the end of the play—an ambiguous resolution to the play’s fraught sexual dynamics. O’Neill’s play is multiply subversive, and makes an effort to explore modern American womanhood via the character of Nina, showing the complexities of her inner life (despite the fact that she is completely oriented toward her function within patriarchy).10 In his reading of the play, which is ostensibly ‘against the grain’, Gross concludes that ‘in its extreme theatrics, deflation of machismo heroics, ironic view of the nuclear family as a place of deception and incipient insanity, and ultimate decentering of heterosexuality, Strange Interlude can be appreciated as a queer interlude’ (19). Gross is right to highlight the queerness of O’Neill’s play, but its hegemonic superstructure is just as important. O’Neill stokes the fancies of readers and audience members with his aesthetic strategies but he also strives to police the drama and dictate its effects with absolute control (an impossible task). Strange Interlude may be highly theatrical in performance, depending on how it is staged, but its dramatic design is anti-theatrical, or at least antiperformative. The meta-drama of this would-be closet drama is that the dramatist plays all the parts; hence the lengthy, authoritarian-sounding stage directions. O’Neill’s penchant for providing prescriptive, elaborate stage directions is well known, as is his antipathy for actors and the business of theatrical production. ‘Outside of the financial aspect, productions are only nerve-wrecking interruptions to me—‘show business’—and never have meant anything more’, he stated in 1937. ‘The play, as written, is the thing, and not the way the actors garble it with their almost-always-alien personalities (even when the acting is fine work in itself)’ (qtd. in Bogard and Bryer 467). For O’Neill, the play-as-dramatic-text was ‘the thing’; the play-as-performance was an inferior copy, a less-than-perfect realization of the dramatist’s original conception. This text-centric perspective, which places performance in a subsidiary, ministerial position to drama,

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has plagued both theatre and adaptation studies. Elevating the play as a high-culture literary artwork positions performance as a knock-off, parasitic on the text. Performance adapts the text by necessity, but this act of adaptation (transposition, transformation, recreation) is not always valued for its own sake. O’Neill was not unique in advancing this ideology. Anti-theatricality is a major component of modernism (see Puchner). Modernist dramatists such as Stein, Brecht, Beckett, and O’Neill made their apprehension about theatricality into a driving force of their aesthetics. Theatricality was something they creatively worked against by opposing (or infusing) mimesis with diegesis and enhancing the authority of the page. In writing plays that frustrated or complicated the mimetic function, modernist dramatists worked to ensure their vision of the play; they made the page perform, so to speak, adopting the positions of de facto director and author-God. The ideology of print supported them in this endeavour: the idea that the printed text effects unitary stability of meaning across time and space in contradistinction to the scrappy, multiform ephemerality of performance ‘texts’. W.B. Worthen explains: The insistence that these palpably distinct objects [various reproductions of printed texts] are the same thing, or—to use the rather theoretical jargon of editing—that they transmit the same substantial work, clothed in the merely accidental differences of punctuation, capitalization, type style, layout, words on the page, marks the deeply ideological working of print in print culture. (7)

The printed text, it must be said, can be just as versional as other iterations of a work, such as performance. Nevertheless, the notion of print authority is pervasive. Modernist dramatists sought to use it to their advantage by occupying the territory of the page-as-stage, rendering it overtly literary. Worthen’s account of G.B. Shaw’s mise-en-page is indicative of O’Neill’s approach in Strange Interlude. He writes: Shaw’s stage directions describe the play from the perspective of the reader-as-spectator. Shaw’s plays occupy the [page] much as novels do, as a single block of type, the white page blackened from margin to margin. […] Shaw’s page materializes the play as complete in its reading: reading line to line, margin to margin, the reader enacts the pace of the play. […] The individualized Author is everywhere in view, from the title page to the

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O’Neill, like Shaw, presents a novelistic drama in Strange Interlude in which the author goes to extreme lengths to supply the reader with the finest points of detail about his characters’ appearances (which change over time) as well as their every last thought and inflection, moment to moment. There is hardly a single line of speech in the play that does not have a stage direction that explains, typically using an adverb, how the line should be uttered or what motivates it. These stage directions are frequently super-specific and difficult, on the face of it, to communicate and distinguish (e.g. ‘thinking frightenedly’, ‘thinking distractedly’, ‘thinking wearily’, ‘thinking torturedly’, ‘thinking bitterly’) (18, 27, 27, 28). If casting directors were to follow O’Neill’s precise character descriptions to the letter, the pool of potential actors would be very small indeed. Most likely it would be impossible to find an actor who could match O’Neill’s descriptions completely; they can include a character’s eye colour and skin hue (Darrell is described as having acquired skin that is ‘Mongolian yellow’ in Act 9) (329). O’Neill’s stage directions are so lengthy and detailed that they are collectively difficult to execute with complete fidelity, and may be a hindrance. Director Arvin Brown, in conversation about O’Neill’s ‘overtly explicit stage directions’, says that they are a trap for actors; following the precepts of psychological realism, he encourages actors to block out O’Neill’s ‘emotional blueprints’ until they can find the ‘truth’ of the characters and their actions for themselves, temporarily bypassing O’Neill’s instructions in order to arrive at the intended result ‘faithfully’ and ‘honestly’ (177). Prior to the Neo-Futurists’ version of Strange Interlude, productions of this play tended to tiptoe around its manifold peculiarities of design and content, choosing not to draw attention to these elements for their own sake. The Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude was not the first production to exploit the play’s accidental humour—a 1984 London revival directed by Keith Hack featuring Glenda Jackson as Nina also made light of its melodrama—but it mounted a more blatant tone and genre shift than had previously been attempted. Allen transformed O’Neill’s play into an ironic, dark comedy with tragic elements by metatheatricalizing it, foregrounding its artifice, and ventriloquizing O’Neill through his stage directions.

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Neo-Futurist Estrangement Allen’s production of Strange Interlude contained a bagful of theatrical tricks: each act was staged in a slightly different manner or had some new twist. This kept the audience engaged and entertained throughout the 5½ hour performance—at least those audience members who considered the Neo-Futurists’ game-playing and theatrical conceits ingenious and fun rather than disrespectful and gimmicky. Presenting each act of O’Neill’s nine-act play in a distinctive fashion defamiliarized both the text and the conventional procedures of dramatic theatre. The Neo-Futurists approached the staging of Strange Interlude as though they were unfamiliar with, or chose not to follow, standard protocol for putting on a play. They made their own rules instead. This was made apparent from the outset. One of the actors, Jeremy Sher, began the performance by entering a bare stage, sitting on a stool, and smiling as he acknowledged the audience.11 He began to read, amidst slight audience tittering, from a small, old-looking hardcover book: ‘Strange Interlude—a play by Eugene O’Neill. First part. Act One. Scene: The library of Professor Leeds’ home in a small university town in New England …’12 Sher proceeded to read selected stage directions for the rest of the act, serving as a de facto narrator, the voice of the author. Sher spoke some of the stage directions; other actors, in and out of character, spoke the rest. The directions provoked some laughter, and not just when Sher ‘mispronounced’ the word ‘sedulously’ (he ‘mistakenly’ put the emphasis on the second syllable), at which point he was corrected from offstage by another performer, and then said it properly.13 The word, along with a pronunciation guide, was projected above the portrait of Gordon Shaw, which overlooked the stage (act and scene numbers, as well as occasional words are phrases were projected in kind).14 The actors brought out items of furniture onto the stage as Sher mentioned them; the audience was therefore privy to the creation of the stage setting, minimal though it was.15 When the characters began speaking to one another, the actors prefaced their speech with their character name and accompanying stage directions. This had the Brechtian effect of distancing the actor from their character and exposing the constructed nature of the enterprise. True to form, the Neo-Futurists did not ask the audience to suspend their disbelief and pretend the actors really were the characters they were playing; rather, they drew attention to the fact that they were playing

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parts while playing themselves (or some version of themselves) onstage. This allowed for ironic commentary both on O’Neill’s character descriptions and the actors’ abilities to portray them—or not, as the case may be. In a comic routine, Joe Dempsey as Marsden tried to illustrate the various features listed in the stage directions as Sher read them out (‘His face is too long for its width, his nose is high and narrow, his forehead broad, his mild blue eyes those of a dreamy self-analyst, his thin lips ironical and a bit sad’) (12). He responded with confusion to the mention of Marsden’s ‘indefinable feminine quality’ that is not ‘apparent in either appearance or act’, getting Sher to repeat this direction, before shrugging it off as something he did not apparently have to worry about, given that it is ostensibly auratic. The performers had sport with the stage directions throughout. Upon mention of the fact that Marsden ‘never liked athletics’, Dempsey fumbled to catch a ball that was, without warning, thrown at him from offstage; this became one of a number of running gags used throughout the show to generate complicity between the performers and the audience in the form of shared in-jokes, continuities, and rituals (the ball was thrown at Dempsey/Marsden at the beginning of Act 2 for no other apparent reason than to pick on him; the actor, mock upset, protested) (12). The performers regularly came off the stage and wandered (read: clambered) among the audience, sometimes sitting on people, discovering a prop, or projecting a character onto someone (Dempsey singled out an audience member to serve as a focal point for Marsden’s recurrent flashbacks about a prostitute he once had relations with in his youth).16 In the first act, the actors delivered their spoken thoughts—the dramatic asides that are the central feature of the play—straight to the audience and faced one another when delivering dialogue, pointedly switching between the public and private sides of their characters, and not attempting to smooth over these transitions. In the second act, certain asides were spoken (sometimes simultaneously) into a microphone held by Dean Evans, who played multiple roles in the production. Evans took over the principal narrator job from Sher in this act. Still costumed as Professor Leeds, whom he played in the previous act, Evans ghosted his former character (Leeds’ death occurs before Act 2) while continuing to serve as Mary, the maid, when the occasion demanded by putting on a maid’s hat and changing his physicality and voice. The levels of performativity involved here and elsewhere in the production were considerable, as characters, personae, and selves were stacked on, and swapped

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with, one another. The performers did not emphasize these complexities, however, but simply engaged in a spirit of play, acknowledging, but not fixating on, the performative puzzles of the proceedings. Evans was not fazed when, serving as the narrator rather than a named character, other actors sat on him while he sat on a chair (he was simultaneously both ‘there’ and ‘not there’). Merrie Greenfield, who played Nina, did not look askance when Dempsey as Marsden produced a Cabbage Patch doll near the end of Act 2 and used it to double Nina in a paternalistic fantasy of her as his ‘little girl’, speaking Nina’s lines in the text (77). The Neo-Futurists were able to compound the serious (in this case, the mildly disturbing) with the ridiculous, having their cake and eating it too, so to speak. They cannily switched in and out of the text’s melodrama, playing it ‘straight’ in certain sections (i.e. not ironizing or distancing it) and then sending it up. Act 2 concluded with Dempsey as Marsden trying and failing to carry a sleeping Nina offstage in his arms (following O’Neill’s impractical stage direction). Dempsey, buckling under Greenfield’s weight, eventually dragged her off like a limp doll or theatrical corpse, to audience guffawing. Act 3 further revelled in artifice and fakery. In this act, the asides were presented in the form of recorded voiceovers, to which the actors artfully mugged (‘showing’ their thought processes in their faces and actions, or idly whistling along). Juxtaposing the live and the recorded lent the scene a cinematic or televisual quality, turning the stage into a virtual screen by using an old, now somewhat hackneyed, filmic trope. (The 1932 MGM adaptation of the play used the same device for the asides, with mixed results.) Voiceovers in classic Hollywood cinema were typically used to create a sense of intimacy between character and viewer. The Neo-Futurists were more interested in estrangement, however—allowing the audience to recognize the oddities of the characters and their thoughts and actions, even when the characters do not fully recognize or acknowledge this about themselves or, indeed, each other. They used the surrealist-inspired aspect of their aesthetic to highlight this. Dean Evans appeared in drag in Act 3 as Mrs. Evans (Sam’s mother), portraying this formidable character, who seems like she wandered in from a Tennessee Williams play, in a Southern Gothic style with an accent to match and a recurrent cackle (Fig. 13.1). Having a male actor perform this role in drag emphasized the character’s grotesqueness as well as the hoariness of her plot line (i.e. inherited madness). The fact that the character’s surname is the same as the

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Fig. 13.1  Brendan Buhl as Sam Evans and Dean Evans as Mrs. Evans in Act 3 of the Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude (photo by Charles Osgood)

actor who played her is pleasing, but coincidental. Allen, the director, enhanced the production’s theatricality and the darkness of the text at the end of the act by staging Nina’s abortion. In the text, the act concludes with Mrs. Evans consoling Nina maternally, having cajoled her into terminating her pregnancy. At this point in the production Evans as Mrs. Evans reached under Greenfield’s top and removed the inflated balloon that signified Nina’s baby. Tenderly, and terribly, with Greenfield as Nina watching with anguish, Evans released the air in the balloon. It let out a protracted, death-rattle squeak before conducting a brief, fateful flight across the stage, quickly falling flat, deflated. The theatrical abortion was simultaneously hilarious and horrific to behold. In the following act the actors dropped the procedure of announcing their characters’ names before saying their lines, and delivered their asides to the audience again, thus resetting the presentational framework,

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making it seem more like conventional dramatic theatre. However, they continued to speak the stage directions, dividing this text among them and ensuring that it was spoken, even when an actor/character was ‘unwilling’ (at one point, Evans and Dempsey made a ‘reluctant’ Sher read O’Neill’s full account of his character’s alteration since the previous act). The Neo-Futurists’ presentation of these characters lent them a Pirandello-like quality, as though the characters were seemingly aware of the fictional nature of their existence and resisted, ever so slightly, O’Neill’s authorial control over them. Act 5 saw perhaps the most radical adaptation of the text. In this act, the characters’ speech was cut almost entirely (with the exception of about six lines here and there, some of which were slightly modified); principally the stage directions were read. The performers acted out the scene, going from one stage direction to the next, prefacing it with their character name, sometimes delivering the stage direction in the manner it suggested (e.g. stammering over the word ‘stammeringly’). This would seem to be a recipe for incoherence and confusion but the performers were still able to convey the sense of the scene (the handful of spoken lines clarified key plot developments). O’Neill’s stage directions are so plentiful and specific that the basic plot points were communicated. Spotlighting his text in this way drew attention to the wonderful variety of adverbs and adjectives used to direct the drama. Furthermore, it defamiliarized the business of putting on a play, making the dramatic text uniquely present in performance, as though an acting exercise had been taken too far. Allen took a different tack again in Act 6. The principal presentational mode of this act was that the performers spoke only their asides, not the dialogue or stage directions. As with the preceding act, the fact that a lot of the text was cut did not impede the sense from emerging, even if the characters’ public selves were muted. Singling out just the asides effectively and humorously demonstrated the characters’ self-absorption as well as the often-unknowable nature of another’s thoughts. The actors were seated at two adjoining tables and were positioned in front of table microphones. They each had a hardcover book (an old edition of the play) to hand and were individually spot lit (Fig. 13.2). The actors were generally only illuminated when they were speaking or about to speak soon; this meant that each of them was periodically put into darkness as the sequence of asides proceeded. They mostly disregarded each other and spoke into their microphones, not embodying

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Fig. 13.2  (L to R) Jeremy Sher, Merrie Greenfield, and Joe Dempsey in Act 6 of the Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude (photo by Charles Osgood)

their spoken thoughts. This made them seem disconnected from one another, and rendered them as existentially free-floating consciousnesses, like the figure in Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel L’Innommable (The Unnameable), or else fatefully trapped, like the three urn-bound protagonists of Beckett’s play Play (1963).17 The scenario was thrown into relief near the end of the act when Sher and Greenfield pushed their microphones aside and delivered dialogue to one another, feelingly and without irony, getting up from their seated positions. The dialogue was played out straightforwardly for a while before the actors reverted into isolated asides again. The final three acts continued to shake up the presentational arrangements. In Act 7, the actors spoke their asides into a microphone held by Dempsey. He would rove from person to person, Geraldo Rivera style, presenting them with the microphone, into which they would utter their character’s private thoughts; the dialogue was spoken as normal. In one section of the text, the characters’ asides were intercut: the performers would continue to mutter their own thoughts sotto voce while

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Dempsey dashed between them, picking up snatches of babble. About midway through the act, and several hours into the performance as a whole, Allen pulled off a typically Neo-Futurist coup de théâtre. Dempsey, having just exited as Marsden, bounded back onto the stage, and, along with the rest of the cast (except Sher), led the audience in a seventhinning stretch: a baseball tradition in which attendees stand and stretch their limbs. Dempsey led the standing, stretching audience in a rendition of the chorus to ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’. Sher, who remained in character as the ever-rational Darrell, was left looking perplexed, as though he could not comprehend the performative antics (this was, of course, a performance of confusion on Sher’s part). In Act 8 Allen employed the staging device used by Philip Moeller, the first director of Strange Interlude, to differentiate the dialogue from the asides: he had the performers freeze whenever an actor uttered an aside. This device, which now seems contrived, was mined for humour: at one point Sher/Darrell had to shake Greenfield/Nina out of her freeze-stupor. The Cabbage Patch doll also made a re-appearance in this act, this time representing the character of Madeline Arnold. Dean Evans, who, in the preceding act portrayed the eleven-year-old Gordon Evans (the stage direction ‘He looks older than he is’ got a laugh), here manipulated the doll and spoke Madeline’s lines (234) (Fig. 13.3). Unusual performance dynamics emerged when Sher took over as Madeline’s puppeteer, leaving Evans with nothing to do onstage but watch a fictional rowing race as himself; Brendan Buhl, in character as Sam Evans, looked at him bemusedly as though seeing him for the first time. The Neo-Futurists’ self-reflexive, non-illusory, often absurdist performance style enriched O’Neill’s text by adding to its inherent strangeness. The final act began with Sher reading the stage directions, as he did in Act 1. This time, however, he trailed off after the first three sentences and left the stage saying ‘blah blah blah’. The troupe had finally dispensed with this procedure. The presentation still resisted conventionality, however. Cabbage Patch Madeline Arnold, manipulated by Buhl and Evans at different points in the act, gave a star turn. The sight of these men puppeteering and speaking for the doll—indicating the character’s asides by raising the doll into the air, standing the doll on the stage floor or perching it on an actor’s shoulders to conduct conversation with human scene partners, endeavouring to make the doll carry a bunch of roses given to the character—was highly amusing and quite absurd.

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Fig. 13.3  (L to R) Jeremy Sher, Joe Dempsey, Brendan Buhl, and Dean Evans (with a Cabbage Patch doll) in Act 8 of the Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude (photo by Charles Osgood)

Allen and the performers extracted maximum comedy from the puppet, staging an outré sequence in which Evans (as Gordon Evans) simulated various sex acts with the Cabbage Patch doll—his character’s bride-tobe—to the visible discomfort of Buhl, Madeline’s puppeteer, while Dempsey as Marsden droned on with one of his asides, appalled. Allen and company took great liberty with the following stage directions: ‘He takes her in his arms. They kiss each other with rising passion’ (324). They made what might be considered a rather trite romantic scene into something ribald and prurient. This was unfaithful to O’Neill in one respect yet strangely faithful to him in another, in that they arguably staged the characters’ physical desires with the same forthrightness that O’Neill investigated the characters’ thoughts in his copious asides. Despite the general tone of frivolity and playfulness with which the Neo-Futurists performed the text (Cabbage Patch Madeline exited by ‘flying’ off like Superman; the doll later reappeared as part of an airplane pantomimed by Dean Evans), the actors periodically played the drama ‘straight’, taking it seriously as O’Neill evidently intended. In doing so, they amplified

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the play’s sinister undertones. Allen gave some of Nina’s final lines, in which she apparently makes peace with her decision to pair off with Marsden, to Marsden, thus subverting the couple’s ‘happy’ union and making it seem like another act of patriarchal control—an illusion of freedom.

Modernism’s Neo-Future The Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude provided a controversial conclusion to the Goodman Theatre’s O’Neill festival, provoking debate about artistic license, fidelity to the text, auteurship, and audience expectations. Robert Falls, the Goodman’s artistic director, welcomed this debate and considered it part of the festival’s goal of exploring O’Neill’s earlier work in the twenty-first century: ascertaining what these plays—some of which are now over 90 years old—mean today and how they might engage a contemporary audience.18 The Wooster Group, who were also part of the festival, have been deconstructing O’Neill, along with the work of other authors, since the early 1990s.19 If O’Neill’s work—and, more generally, modernist drama—is to have a continued future on the stage, then one cannot be precious about it or ignore its historicity. One has to appreciate the irony of calling work that is nearly a century old ‘modernist’. The act of reproducing this work, of creatively and self-reflexively remaking (or adapting) it, highlights its potential as work-in-process. O’Neill’s work, like the work of any other historical dramatist that is still produced, is put into flux when staged; it is destabilized and possibly defamiliarized. Margaret Jane Kidnie, writing about Shakespearean adaptation and Hamlet’s ontological existence, argues that text and performance co-construct and reciprocally engage one another. She writes: Performance is […] never incidental to an idea of Hamlet—it is not an embellishment of, or deviation from, the ‘real’ thing. It is a basic part of the way the next synchronic point (and the next, and the next) are constructed in a diachronic process called ‘Shakespeare’s play,’ thereby creating and thus perpetuating an illusion of relative canonical stability. Shakespeare’s plays change over time, and in a particular place, under the ongoing pressure of cultural and creative processes. It is in part through performance, above all through the ways performance is brought into a relational tension with text, that one can arrive at all at a provisional and subjective knowledge of the ‘real’ thing. (115)

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This is not only true for Shakespeare. The work of other playwrights, including O’Neill, also changes over time, or rather is revealed anew when revived at a later stage, even when the author has advanced an ideology of print that strives to make the ‘book’ of the play the last word, so to speak, the ‘real thing’. In theatre, the ‘real’ is never entirely knowable or straightforward, nor is the surreal for that matter, as the Neo-Futurists demonstrate. Their take on Strange Interlude prompted a conversation about this play (to which this chapter contributes) that extends its existence as a theoretical work-in-process into the present day. The Neo-Futurists complicated O’Neill’s construction of his characters’ interior lives via asides that supposedly demonstrate their thought processes. In O’Neill’s play, characters have a public self and a private self that are generally discrete and autonomous. They are fully able to verbalize their thoughts and feelings, if only to themselves; as such, their unconscious is a knowable entity, something to which they readily have access and are able to articulate. By ironizing O’Neill’s dramatic conceit, the Neo-Futurists implicitly critiqued the notion that psychological interiority can be represented so neatly. They highlighted the collusion between public and private personae and the complex web of performativity through which this operates. Furthermore, they exposed the play’s gender and sexual politics: highlighting Nina’s character as a male-authored fantasy, parodying Mrs. Evans as a melodramatic type, making Madeline’s puppet qualities literal, and emphasizing Marsden’s coded queerness as well as the play’s overall camp appeal.20 Most significantly, perhaps, they contested O’Neill’s textual authority by figuratively including him in the dramatis personae courtesy of his stage directions, thereby foregrounding his patriarchal script. In making the dramatic text into an overt, displayed part of the production rather than an invisible, unacknowledged guiding force, the Neo-Futurists defamiliarized the procedures of dramatic theatre and engaged alternative, resistant ways of utilizing text in performance, in line with contemporary writing and staging practices. Ezra Pound’s modernist dictum ‘Make It New’ remains an artistic imperative, even when the ‘it’ in question is modernist art, the modernity of which inescapably recedes with the passage of time. O’Neill’s modernity is not our own; his modernism can seem strange to us now by dint of historical circumstance alone. Theatre-makers are justified in approaching historical texts from a present-minded perspective; there is arguably little point in doing otherwise, notwithstanding efforts at

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reconstruction, which can only be partial and approximate. Embracing modernism’s historicity, recognizing its temporal distance from the hereand-now, as the Neo-Futurists did with Strange Interlude, need not entail a superior attitude on the part of theatre artists and audiences— a shared amusement at, and exploitation of, artwork that now appears dated. Some audience members, like the aforementioned heckler who bemoaned the fate of O’Neill’s beautiful play, may have felt that the Neo-Futurists were simply being glib and exploitative, but this overlooks their artful, self-reflexive engagement with the text. By signalling the play’s peculiarities—those that are part of its aesthetic design as well those that are a product of its historicity—the Neo-Futurists made O’Neill’s play productively strange (again); they exploited its lapsed modernity in order to make it new in an ironic manner. The idea of an historically informed futurity that is itself a repetition (with a difference) is implied in the very name of this particular company, which is, after all, a neo-avant-garde, a refashioning or adaptation of historical futurism. Innovative productions of modernist drama may come from recognition of modernism’s slippage, its temporal paradox (the ‘modern’ that is no longer modern but obviously historical). This makes the work strange in ways it would not have been originally, thereby suggesting new interpretive possibilities for theatre artists willing to engage this conundrum. The cultural and ideological biases of modernist drama, which may be easier to discern retrospectively, can provide fodder for creative interrogation and politically inclined performance. This means that modernist experimentation is not aesthetically defunct. It can take new forms as it flashbacks and flash-forwards, remaking modernism anew.

Notes



1.  The Wooster Group presented The Emperor Jones. Toneelgroep, from Amsterdam, staged Rouw Siert Electra (Morning Becomes Electra). Companhia Triptal, from São Paulo, mounted Homens ao Mar (‘Sea Plays’). The Chicago-based company The Hypocrites put on The Hairy Ape. Robert Falls directed a production of Desire Under the Elms. 2. This was not the first time Greg Allen had directed, adapted, or parodied the work of a canonical modernist author, as indicated by the titles of two of his shows: The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett As Found In An Envelope (partially burned) In A Dustbin In Paris Labeled ‘Never

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to be performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I’ll Sue! I’LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!!! (first produced in 1999 as part of the Rhinoceros Theater Festival in Chicago) and The Last Two Minutes of the Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen (premiered in 2005 at the Neo-Futurarium in Chicago). 3. Interestingly, O’Neill considered having recorded stage directions accompany live dialogue as a soundtrack for his 1941 play Hughie (Sheaffer 523). 4. ‘Pardon me while I have a strange interlude’, Groucho remarks, freezing a conversation with two actors and delivering a private monologue (in which he mentions the character of Marsden from O’Neill’s play). A clip of the scene is currently available on YouTube. 5. Tamsen Wolff makes the point about repeat attendance and devoted audiences (220–1). 6. Its fortunes are improving, however. The National Theatre in the UK staged an abridged production of the play in 2013, directed by Simon Godwin and starring Anne-Marie Duff as Nina. The production, which had a running time of three hours and fifteen minutes (including an interval), was well received. 7. Modernism and the musical are equally unharmonious in critical terms, yet consideration of connections between them makes for a richer, more complicated, theatre history. David Savran writes: ‘[Musicals] are neither outside the tradition of theatrical modernism nor transparent cultural texts. Indeed, because of their status as popular entertainments, they often take up—more explicitly and pointedly—many of the same historical and theoretical problematics that allegedly distinguish canonical modernist texts’ (215). 8.  Wolff writes: ‘In the course of introducing common eugenic assumptions and contesting those assumptions in Strange Interlude, O’Neill challenges the role of the audience and stretches the bounds of dramatic form’ (218). 9. Robert Falls, in conversation, remarks: ‘[O’Neill is] so un-ironic, he’s so out there, and he’s so desperately…truthful in what he’s doing that it actually becomes embarrassing for an audience. His purity of emotion is so embarrassing that it’s very difficult for the actors to go there and it’s difficult for the audiences to go there’ (Weber). 10.  Dowling observes: ‘There is no question that Nina Leeds is one of [O’Neill’s] most fully realized female characters, and her needs supersede those of her men. But in the end, there is little to Nina as a gendered being than her desperate need to procreate in pursuit of self-fulfilment and happiness’ (441).

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11.  My account of the Neo-Futurists’ production of Strange Interlude is based on a video recording of one of the live performances that was provided to me courtesy of the Goodman Theatre and Greg Allen. I am grateful to both parties for letting me access the recording. 12.  This recalls Elevator Repair Service’s production of Gatz, which premiered in 2006, a several-hour-long performance in which the entirety of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was read aloud and acted out. 13.  Later on, in Act 7, Joe Dempsey as Marsden similarly pretended to misread the text, in this instance not attending to punctuation properly. Dempsey overlooked a comma when speaking the stage direction ‘Marsden comes in from the rear, smiling, immaculately dressed as usual’, misreading it as ‘smiling immaculately’ before registering his ‘mistake’ and then repeating the line correctly (O’Neill 251). The fact of Marsden entering the stage ‘from the rear’ was sometimes emphasized when another actor spoke this stage direction—a nod to the character’s implicit queerness. 14. ‘Some of [the] text was projected onto the screen above Gordon’s portrait, accentuating at times the juxtaposition between text and meaning, or, at other times highlighting the dated language—but always keeping an eye toward the deliciousness of O’Neill’s language’ (Johnson 117). 15. The portrait of Gordon Shaw, which hung above the stage, was present prior to Sher’s entrance. The stage floor was full of scuffmarks and crisscrossing strips of masking tape—a legacy of the actors’ work upon it, in line with the Neo-Futurists’ presentational aesthetic. 16. As the performance proceeded, the actors highlighted the passage of time when reading O’Neill’s references to previous acts in the stage directions. It is part of the Neo-Futurist aesthetic to acknowledge the real conditions in which performance takes place. At one performance, when an audience member had a sneezing fit during one of Nina’s speeches, Greenfield as Nina worked ‘bless you’ into the conclusion of the speech. If an actor flubbed a line they sometimes acknowledged their mistake and ad-libbed around it. In Act 8, Greenfield acknowledged the titular phrase ‘strange interlude’ in her character’s aside, inflecting it archly and delivering it to the audience. Offstage voices declaimed the phrase with her. Greenfield curtseyed in reaction to the audience’s laughter and applause. 17. Dean Evans performed as the maid in this act. This mostly involved pretending to be asleep and then getting up to answer the door—rudimentary actions that Evans made brilliantly comic. The maid, it should be noted, does not have any textual asides. Evidently O’Neill did not care about her interior life or wish her to have one—a potential case of class bias.

272  A. Curtin 18. Robert Falls: ‘I’d hoped that there would be controversy. I’d hoped that there would be a dialogue. I wanted to provoke a dialogue. I think that theatre is only exciting if there is a dialogue. What’s been remarkable to me has been the extent and the breadth of the dialogue. You go to blog sites, you go the internet, you look in the newspapers: this dead white man … created with these plays an extraordinary controversy in this city for two and a half months, you know, and I think that’s fantastic’ (Weber). 19. The Wooster Group first presented work-in-progress performances of The Emperor Jones at The Performing Garage in 1992 and work-in-progress performances of The Hairy Ape at the same venue in 1995. In 2012 the group performed Early Plays, based on O’Neill’s ‘Glencairn’ plays at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. 20.  As Johnson notes about the production: ‘While Mrs. Evans at first appeared ridiculous in her spinster drag and southern drawl as played by [Dean] Evans, when the audience hears the stage directions describing her […] it becomes clear that the use of drag is spot on, revealing how Mrs. Evans’s femininity is underwritten by the voice of patriarchy’ (Johnson 120).

Works Cited Bogard, Travis, and Jackson R. Bryer, eds. Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Print. Dowling, Robert M. Eugene O’Neill: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. Vol. 2, 2vols. New York: Facts on File, Inc, 2009. Print. Gilman, Richard. Common and Uncommon Masks: Writings on Theatre, 1961–1970. New York: Random, 1971. Print. Gross, Robert F. “O’Neill’s Queer Interlude: Epicene Excess and Camp Pleasures.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 12.1 (1997): 3–22. Print. Johnson, Katie N. “When Strange Is Good: A Neo-Futurist Strange Interlude.” The Eugene O’Neill Review 31 (2009): 114–21. Print. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. “Where Is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation.” A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (2007): 101–20. Print. O’Neill, Eugene. Strange Interlude. London: Jonathan Cape, 1928. Print. Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002. Print. Savran, David. “Towards a Historiography of the Popular,” Theatre Survey 45.2 (2004): 211–217. Print.

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Shafer, Yvonne. Performing O’Neill: Conversations with Actors and Directors. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Print. Sheaffer, Louis. O’Neill: Son and Artist. Boston: Little Brown, 1973. Print. Weber, Anne Nicholson. “Talk Theatre in Chicago.” March 16, 2009: Robert Falls and Greg Allen. Web. Wolff, Tamsen. “‘Eugenic O’Neill’ and the Secrets of Strange Interlude.” Theatre Journal 55.2 (2003): 215–34. Print. Worthen, William B. Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.

CHAPTER 14

Theatrical Mash-up: Assembled Text as Adaptation in Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella Scott Proudfit

This chapter focuses on a particular kind of textual assemblage in the scripts of recent devised theatre productions in the USA, exemplified by Bill Rauch and Tracy Young’s Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella (M/M/C). In these productions, the cultural divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ sources is not emphasized or seemingly of interest to the assemblers, as if the postmodern impulse to bring together such theoretically distinct regions of culture, typified by the work of the Wooster Group, had lost its urgency. By contrast, all material assembled into the spoken text of a play such as M/M/C is familiar to, and celebrated by, the audience and the assemblers—all sources are considered as culturally undifferentiated. In addition, while acknowledging a contemporary culture of radical plurality, these recent productions de-historicize their subjects and performers with the goal of finding ‘universals’ performers can share with their audiences. This de-historicization clearly distinguishes this work from the assembled-text productions common in modern documentary theatre, which seek to present an authentic ‘truth’ of their subjects’ experiences grounded in a clearly delineated socio-historical moment.1 S. Proudfit (*)  Elon University, Elon, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_14

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Most importantly, the pleasure audiences derive from productions such as M/M/C, unlike from documentary theatre or other assembled-text devised productions, seems largely a result of the ways in which they are encouraged to pay attention to the similarities and differences among the production’s source materials. For these reasons, the term best used to describe these productions might be ‘mash-up’, a term borrowed from recent trends in popular music, specifically hip-hop. An exemplary mash-up, Medea/Macbeth/ Cinderella was most recently presented in 2012 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), under the co-direction of Bill Rauch and Tracy Young. M/M/C simultaneously stages Euripides’ Medea (in Paul Roche’s translation), Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Cinderella in an overlapping mélange. This chapter argues that this mash-up and others like it actually have more in common with pop-music tracks from, for example, Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album or the Electronic Control Committee’s ‘Whipped Cream Mixes’ than with these plays’ theatrical antecedents, the postmodern ‘collages’ and ‘pastiches’ of late twentieth-century US theatres—such as the Wooster Group’s Route 1&9 (1981)—or with assembled-text documentary theatre such as the Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie Project (2000). In their ‘purposeful reassembly of fragments to form a new whole’ theatrical mash-ups should be considered adaptations of their source texts, as Julie Sanders suggests in her 2006 book Adaptation and Appropriation. Nevertheless, in a number of significant ways, these plays are distinct from those single-source adaptations common in contemporary theatre. Tracing the similarities between musical mash-ups and theatrical mash-ups helps explain the mixed reception M/M/C has encountered in its production history and helps pinpoint what different audiences expect from adaptations that rely heavily on the direct quotation of canonical sources. At first glance, Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella may seem similar to the assembled-text theatrical collages or pastiches presented by US avantgarde collectives since the 1980s. For example, Young and Rauch constructed the text of M/M/C by cutting and pasting together canonical plays in the same way that the Wooster Group’s members quoted extensively from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in constructing Route 1&9 and the way that SITI Company assembled the spoken text of Small Lives/ Big Dreams (1995) entirely of lines from the plays of Anton Chekhov.

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Moreover, Young and other members of the Los Angeles theatre company, the Actors’ Gang, who helped devise M/M/C trace a methodological lineage to SITI Company, at least in terms of their devising processes, as they have trained with Anne Bogart and her company over the years.2 Young, in particular, has often modelled her devising process on Bogart’s, for example with her Actors’ Gang production DreamPlay (2000). However, unlike at SITI Company, the way in which M/M/C’s creators assembled their script does not imply that certain sources are culturally ‘high’ or ‘low’. The sources in the assembled text are presented as different but culturally equal, not as a postmodern juxtaposition of a lightweight ‘low’ Broadway musical with the canonical ‘high culture’ plays of Shakespeare and Euripides. When the Wooster Group members, in Route 1&9, juxtaposed portions of Wilder’s play with a scatological comedy routine from Pigmeat Markham, among other ‘low’ sources, they seemed to be making a point that there were a lot of things missing from Wilder’s Our Town: sexual desire, race relations, the physiological workings of the human body (The Wooster Group 10). Assembled-text devised works such as Route 1&9, then, are often more an example of appropriation than adaptation. As Sanders has described it, in these cases the assembled text’s relationship with its sources is ‘oppositional, even subversive’. Companies seek out opportunities ‘for divergence [as much as] adherence, for assault as well as homage’ (Sanders 9). In Route 1&9, Wilder’s Our Town is at times presented as anemic and distant. At other times, the Wooster Group seems to sincerely credit the enduring value of Wilder’s ‘classic’. The assembled text of M/M/C in performance on the other hand is, to recall Sanders, more adaptation than appropriation, a homage to all three sources and an assault on none. While the three-source mash-up Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella has been altered slightly with each version, the play, in a form quite similar to its latest, was co-produced by Cornerstone Theater Company and the Actors’ Gang at the Actors’ Gang Theatre in Hollywood in 1998 (2 April–9 May). This 1998 adaptation was made together by directors Rauch and Young. The play was presented once previously without Young in a much different form by Rauch and his fellow undergraduates at Harvard University in 1984.3 The group of creators on this production two years later became the core of Cornerstone Theater Company, of which Rauch was artistic director from 1986 to 2007.4 One of the major differences between the original version of M/M/C and all subsequent productions is that the first version had what Rauch has called

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the company’s ‘terrible’ choice of performing the Medea portion of the mash-up in a ‘Country & Western’ style.5 In all subsequent versions, M/M/C has been styled to reflect ‘traditional’ productions of the works, including in its various incarnations in Los Angeles and at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2002 (26 September–12 October). The Greeks are costumed as vaguely Ancient Greek; the Scots are costumed to reflect medieval/Renaissance dress; the costumes for Cinderella look fairytale-ish and Broadway-musical flashy. In M/M/C, the three plays share stage space and time. Indeed, if audience members could simply concentrate on one play for the duration of the performance, they would recognize large chunks of each of these three plays unchanged and in sequence. However, M/M/C challenges spectators to follow all three shows at once. On one level, M/M/C is an exploration of thematic intersections among three theatre ‘classics’. As Rauch and Young wrote in their program notes for the OSF production, in laying these three plays side by side ‘[t]he counterpoints but especially the shared rhythms were revelatory’ (16).6 In terms of congruities, M/M/C revolves around a central interest in ‘ambition’ in these three plays, exploring the idea that ‘wishes can come true’, for better or worse. Often the characters perform their scenes unaware of the parallel universes beside them. Cinderella might be singing ‘In My Own Little Corner’ while next to her Medea plots revenge against Jason, their words overlapping. At other times, characters acknowledge one another in the shared space. When Macbeth asks, ‘Is this a dagger I see before me?’ Medea holds the dagger he sees as she contemplates killing her children. (Macbeth sees only the floating dagger, not Medea holding it.) In this way, M/M/C makes corporeal what Marvin Carlson in The Haunted Stage claims audiences experience metaphorically in the theatre, the way in which ‘every play is a memory play’ because the ‘present experience is always ghosted by previous experiences and associations’ (2). At the same time, the tone of the play is not weighty or reverential. Rather, the production is playful and populist. Nor are the three source plays spliced and recombined in a way that make them hard to identify, as is often the case in the assembled-text collages of the Wooster Group and SITI Company. Rather, M/M/C is accessible, and, at turns, broadly comic. Like other mash-ups, M/M/C relies on the alternation between moments of congruity and moments of incongruity across its ‘tracks’ to create this mixed tone, a tone that has proven challenging to some audiences despite the overall accessibility of the source material.

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Musical Mash-Ups Before explaining why ‘mash-up’ is the best term to describe contemporary devised work such as M/M/C, it is useful to describe briefly the origins of this form of popular music. A mash-up is made when recorded selections from more than one song are mixed together to form a new song. Mash-ups trace their lineage to early hip-hop music, which ‘sampled aggressively in building beats’, and disco, which in order to provide ‘a continuous flow of sound piped onto the dance floor’ featured ‘seamless segues built upon songs bleeding into one another’ (Serazio 80). The earliest mash-up may have been the 1986 hit ‘Walk This Way’, Run-D.M.C.’s rap cover of the Aerosmith rock song of the same name from 1975. Much like mid-1980s rap artists, Steven Tyler in the original version of the song delivered his verses, packed with internal and end rhymes, in a rapid-fire, syncopated manner. In the cover, the group RunD.M.C. rap Tyler’s lyrics, sampling the Aerosmith instrumental track underneath, with the addition of a drum machine and turntable scratch. Tyler sings/screams the chorus, and eventually joins the group in singing the final verses of the song. Charting higher than Aerosmith’s original, the cover song combined two groups and genres that didn’t seem to go together and yet did, a quality that has defined most subsequent mash-ups. While acknowledging this early proto-mash-up, critics often point to The Electronic Control Committee’s (ECC) 1994 ‘Whipped Cream Mixes’ as the first true mash-ups. These two mash-ups lay the Public Enemy songs ‘Rebel Without a Pause’ and ‘By the Time I Get to Arizona’ over two instrumental tracks from the 1965 Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album Whipped Cream & Other Delights. Most impressive about these first mash-ups is that they were produced ‘analog’; the ECC simply found the appropriate place to start Public Enemy member Chuck D’s vocals playing as they recorded them over Alpert’s music. They synced the tracks in order to have the vocals ‘fit’ the breaks in the underlying music without digitally altering (compressing, stretching, doubling, or mixing) the music or vocal track. Again, the contrast in genre and tone between Chuck D’s angry rap protest lyrics and Herb Alpert’s cheerful, playful jazz is key to this mash-up’s humour, appeal, and perhaps meaning.7

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The ‘Whipped Cream Mixes’ exemplify the most common type of mash-up, the A + B form, in which an a cappella track is laid down over an instrumental. Since the late 1990s, particularly with the advent of Sony Acid software, the creation of mash-ups has become widespread and the forms increasingly diverse. Many mash-ups, unlike the A + B form, combine shorter, sampled cuts of instrumentals rather than using an entire instrumental track, the most famous example of this ‘choppedup’ mash-up being Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (2004) , which selected portions of songs from the Beatle’s White Album (1968) to form the instrumental tracks beneath the vocals of Jay-Z’s The Black Album (2003). Other mash-ups create ‘duets’ by playing multiple vocal tracks simultaneously, or mix songs without stripping one track down to an a cappella version, or sample instrumental cuts from numerous songs. As mentioned earlier, the DJ and assembler of source materials, Danger Mouse, does not seem to be operating in a ‘postmodern’ mode when combining the music of the Beatles and Jay-Z. He does not consider one artist as representative of ‘high’ culture and the other of ‘low’. Instead he is celebrating both, and exploring congruities and incongruities across genres and time. Nevertheless, while Danger Mouse and fellow mash-up artists do not seem to follow the assumptions of postmodern juxtaposition, in describing the impetus and social significance of mash-ups, music critics often adopt language reminiscent of Fredric Jameson’s descriptions of postmodern pastiche in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. For example, pop music critic Michael Serazio, writes ‘the mash-up … as a definitive generational statement … hesitates to espouse anything more than detached, wry commentary …’ adding, ‘[i]t exposes the arbitrariness of styles and signs, which is an apolitical way of making a political statement’ (91–92). Serazio’s characterization of ‘mash-up’ recalls Jameson’s oft-quoted definition of ‘pastiche’, which centers on pastiche’s ahistoricism and inability to critique: Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists… (Jameson 17)

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According to Jameson, pastiche does not allow an artist to contrast her voice with past voices, and therefore to engage in critical thinking by challenging a past from which she sees herself as separate. Yet when these same music critics specifically historicize the technology that enabled the widespread creation of mash-ups, this form of assembling typically gets more usefully differentiated from earlier visual works of collage as well as from the works of film, art, and architecture labelled ‘pastiche’ by Jameson. Indeed in the same article in which Serazio ventriloquizes Jameson, he also offers a hopeful view of mash-up makers as culture ‘re-producers’, echoing Theodor Adorno’s more positive predictions of future consumers empowered to remake (and make meaningful) existing and mass-produced cultural products, as opposed to the dire Frankfurt School warnings that Jameson sees fulfilled in pastiche (Adorno 362). As Serazio writes, ‘[T]he mashup is a response to larger technological, institutional, and social contexts … Technology plays out in this reading as the tool by which audience-creators fend off and produce contentious counterpoints to the corporate and institutional powers of today’s culture factories’ (79 and 83). The reason Adorno’s occasionally hopeful views are more applicable to understanding the work of mash-ups than the Frankfurt School’s generally dire warnings may be due largely to the fact that mash-up makers of the 1990s and 2000s had different technologies and audiences available to them than did the collage artists of the first half of the twentieth century or even the artists, filmmakers, and architects of the 1980s who are used as examples by Jameson in Postmodernism.8 Pop music critics have suggested that audio-cassette technology of the 1980s laid the groundwork, technologically and culturally, for mash-up-making in the 2000s (Manuel 3). Any teenager with a cassette player in the 1980s could make a mix tape and participate in a process that ‘identifies the scattered pieces of pop detritus that litter the media-soaked landscape (and, with it, identity) and manages to make them coherent at the same time’ (Serazio 90). As it later was for the mash-ups makers they spawned, for mix-tape makers the ‘songs themselves’ became ‘notes anew’ and ‘[t]he act of appropriating … represent[ed] a kind of liberation from our status as helpless sponges’ (Serazio 90). These mix makers were thinking in terms of ‘metamusic’, in the same way that M/M/C is a piece of metatheatrically devised theatre. The scenes and moments from the three source plays become ‘notes’ for the ‘song’ that is M/M/C as composed by its assemblers. Moreover, in the same way that a good 1980s’ mix tape might bring together different genres of music that

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mainstream radio stations kept separate, so is any good mash-up ‘a culture clash’ of sorts, as ‘Walk This Way’ and the work of the ECC exemplify— and as is the case, I will argue, with Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella. While pop-music critics frequently disagree over the efficacy of mashups as political statements, or whether mash-up makers are interested in political statements at all, there is consensus among critics that the tone of mash-ups is almost always celebratory. ‘Their celebration of sources, as opposed to the obscuring of them, [is] one of the key factors that distinguishes mash-ups from other sample-based music forms’, note Ragnhild Brovig-Hanssen and Paul Harkins (91). In visual-art terms, unlike a Picasso collage made of cigarette wrappers, for example, in which the found materials blend seamlessly into the artwork and the materials are often not distinguishable or ‘beautiful’ in themselves, mash-up makers want audiences to recognize the works they are sampling and want them to love these works as much as they themselves love them. Besides the sense of ‘empowerment’ mash-up culture offers its participants, pop-music critics have defined the central pleasure of mashup making and mash-up consuming as the opportunity the form offers listeners to carefully attend to similarity and difference. As mass culture becomes more uniform, the mash-up both highlights the ‘sameness’ of all popular music and, at the same time, reveals the differences between art works and genres, allowing for a kind of individualization of artists and listeners. A mash-up ‘works’ when it is able to exploit and emphasize ‘contextual incongruity of recognized samples and musical congruity between mashed tracks’ (Brovig-Hanssen and Harkins 87). In other words, a listener appreciates the Whipped Cream Mixes for two main reasons: one, Public Enemy’s lyrics and Herb Alpert’s music seem to come from different worlds, which creates humour; and, two, together the lyrics and the music in these mash-ups actually make tracks that sounds ‘right’, as if Chuck D had written his lyrics to fit the music of the Tijuana Brass Band. This inspires awe, appreciation, pleasure, and perhaps critical thinking as strict but ultimately unstable categories are challenged.

Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella as Mash-up When Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella was presented at the Actors’ Gang Theatre in Los Angeles in 1998, the companies that came together to co-produce it, the Actors’ Gang and Cornerstone Theater Company, participated in a theatre-company culture clash that anticipated the

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mash-up they would create together onstage. The Actors’ Gang, founded in 1981 by a group of UCLA alumni including Tim Robbins, is a native Los Angeles theatre, one of the area’s most important in terms of longevity and influence. Its early work had a reputation for being loud, testosterone-heavy, and strictly representative of what the Actors’ Gang members have termed ‘the Style’. The Actors’ Gang’s Style is based on the commedia-influenced devising methods of the Théâtre du Soleil. In the Style, using stock commedia dell’arté characters, the company workshops scenarios, with or without a script, for which the performers need to be in one of four states at all times: happy, sad, afraid, or angry. Any actor not ‘fully stated’ as determined by whomever is ‘in the chair’—whomever is directing the improvisation during any given workshop—is asked to leave the stage and try again later. Performers working in the Style directly address the audience at all times and only interact with other performers in order to ‘share states’ and ‘pass the food’, to give another performer the chance to talk to the audience. Actors’ Gang members learned the Style from longtime Théâtre du Soleil actor Georges Bigot during the 1984 US Olympics Arts Festival and, by 1998, had modified it for their own purposes and interests. In addition to devising original work, the Actors’ Gang often took canonical dramas and Style-lized them. The results were highly presentational and broadly comical with a punk-rock aesthetic. Director Tracy Young, a member of the company since 1984, and a group of performers who were dedicated to her work as a director had shifted the creative culture at the Actors’ Gang’s prior to M/M/C (1998), bringing a queer sensibility to the work, diversifying the company in terms of race, gender, and sexuality, as well as introducing SITI Company’s training method, Viewpoints, to the company.9 According to Young, combining Viewpoints with the Style allowed the work at the Actors’ Gang to shift from a competition of ‘who can dominate the improvisation’ to one in which everyone is trying to share the food and/ or in which everyone is completely focused on everyone else getting his or her say. For Young, the fully stated aspects of the Style are visceral and emotional, complementary to Viewpoints. ‘[The Style] is blood, shit, and all that stuff’, said Young, and, according to Young, it makes for a great hybrid with ‘the cerebral quality of some of the things that the Viewpoints offers and the coolness of it’ (Young). Young was known in particular for her collectively devised work at the company, including Hysteria (1992) and Euphoria (1995).

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Cornerstone Theater Company, on the other hand, from its aforementioned founding by Harvard University alumni in 1986 until 1992, had travelled around the USA co-creating theatre with different communities before settling in Los Angeles. Unlike the Actors’ Gang, Cornerstone is committed to seeking out non-traditional theatre audiences, a commitment the company forged during its trek across the nation in the late 1980s, as the company travelled from small town to large city and back again adapting canonical plays with local communities. The decision to settle in Los Angeles after years on the road made sense in terms of Cornerstone’s interest in finding new audiences and energizing diverse communities towards co-creation. Moreover, the size and the ethnic range of the small, mostly ‘White’ theatre company increased immediately upon moving to Los Angeles. Two of the most important additions to the company were Shishir Kurup and Page Leong (Macbeth and Medea, respectively, in M/M/C in 1998), who along with a handful of other actors formed the core of Cornerstone’s performing company for many years in Los Angeles. While touring in its formative years, Cornerstone developed a model of working one-by-one with a series of diverse and often geographically distant communities and then creating a ‘bridge show’ that brought these towns and theatre makers together for a single, joint production. It continued to use and develop this model in Los Angeles.10 Prior to M/M/C, then, both Cornerstone and the Actors’ Gang had experienced significant cultural ‘mash-ups’ within their company membership and aesthetics as they developed and diversified. With its roots in the Style, the culture at the Actors’ Gang was one that perpetually challenged the individual performer in confrontational ways, in many ways the opposite of the community Cornerstone strives for within its company and within its performances. As frequent Actors’ Gang writer/director Mike Schlitt described it, the Style ‘is great because you can be an ass to people. Sometimes I’m just very sadistic in the chair. It’s therapeutic for me, because I’m a really nice guy in real life. So when you yell at someone, “You suck!” that’s going to get a reaction. It helps them be “stated” [fully happy, sad, afraid, or angry]’ (Schlitt). Cornerstone, on the other hand, models a collectivity founded on bridge-building, tolerance, and dialogue. While performers from both companies had appeared in the other companies’ shows occasionally, and while Young had previously directed shows for Cornerstone, the difference between the two groups’ cultures and methods were

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stark, and created the right atmosphere for a mash-up whose success, like every mash-up, was based on balancing congruity with incongruity. Cornerstone and the Actors’ Gang in the rehearsal room were a kind of mash-up that anticipated their mash-up production onstage. Choosing three shows from historical periods that might be considered pinnacles of populist theatre—the Ancient Greek, the Renaissance, and the mid-twentieth century (the heyday of the modern American musical)—was not arbitrary. In this way, M/M/C’s creators hoped to examine what theatre can do as an art form. Not surprisingly, then, what is most electrifying in this staged mash-up are the moments when the three shows ‘sync up’, the unexpected congruities. For example, late in the show, Medea confronts her fears about actually killing her children, a deed she has plotted but now must perform. Simultaneously onstage, Macbeth is receiving his second round of predictions from the witches and facing his fears that, despite his efforts, Banquo’s descendants will be crowned king. And also the Prince is wooing a frightened Cinderella with the song ‘Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful?’ as the young girl decides if she really wants what she thought she always wanted now that it is being offered her. While congruity in musical mash-ups can inspire thought and appreciation of the mash-up maker’s skills, incongruity most often creates the humour. Such is also the case with M/M/C. For example, during many of the musical numbers from Cinderella, Young and Rauch have the actors from the other shows stop what they are doing and join in the chorus. Forcing congruity is what highlights the incongruities in these moments, the most memorable of which is Banquo covered in blood, smiling broadly as he sings along with the guests at Cinderella’s Prince’s ball. M/M/C’s script is a purely assembled text. Only the words from the three source plays were used in the production, and the words were not altered. While cuts were made to Macbeth, they were very much like the cuts you typically find in contemporary productions of the play. For example, the Hecate scene in Act Three has been removed. In this sense, M/M/C is much like the A + B form of mash-ups, which use macrosamples as opposed to cutting up and rearranging the source samples to create the new track. Very little commentary on the source plays, in terms of parody, is offered by the production. Though presented at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Cinderella, for example, is not presented as a lesser art form

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than Greek tragedy or Shakespearean drama. There is no low art or high art here. Indeed, at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where the show was last presented, subscription audiences who make up the majority of the house had been prepared by an eclectic yearly diet of Shakespeare, canonical modern drama, Greek tragedy, musicals, and new works, to accept all three genres as legitimate and worthy of attention. Unlike in an assembled-text pastiche, no ‘normal’ tongue is privileged, as Jameson would have it. Rather, like musical mash-ups, M/M/C denies the possibilities of marginality. As in ‘Walk This Way’ or the ‘Whipped Cream Mixes’, M/M/C brings together different genres in a way that can be satisfying for an audience member whose tastes are diverse. And, as with mash-ups in general, the sources are celebrated, and audiences, unlike those at Route 1&9 or Culture of Desire, are expected to recognize all the works being sampled and recognize which sample comes from which work. In addition to the pleasure that tracing the congruities and incongruities between these three sources gives audience members, M/M/C, like all mash-ups, ‘exposes the arbitrariness of styles and signs, which is an apolitical way of making a political statement’ as Michael Serazio has said of the hip-hop musical form of mash-up. This can be seen in the way in which M/M/C dealt with issues of gender. Medea was performed by an all-female cast; Macbeth by an all-male cast, and Cinderella by a cast of mixed gender, including some drag performances: most notably Daniel Parker as the Fairy Godmother. The only exception to this three-show gender-specific concept is the actor who plays the role of the Herald in all three onstage realities. On one level, an all-male Shakespeare cast and all-female Greek tragedy cast can be understood simply as these companies trying faithfully to recreate performance traditions (or the myth of performance traditions): in other words, Shakespeare wrote for an all-male company, and the Greek drama may have arisen out of all-female dance rituals: the Dionysian revels.11 However, the gender-specific divisions in M/M/C were also employed to challenge notions of appropriate or ‘natural’ sexuality. The simultaneous or serial staging of love scenes between two male, two female, and a male and a female performer, for example, enacted these pairings as a series of options. Rather than highlighting gender, as contemporary allmale or all-female productions are apt to do, M/M/C tried to eliminate gender as a significant category, in the same way that musical mash-ups try to eliminate genre as a significant category.

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This is what John R. Severn has described as ‘the queer potential of adaptation, its potential to destabilize categories of identity’ (542). The very form of the mash-up is committed to this type of destabilization. In single-source adaptation, often ‘relocations of an “original” or source text’s cultural and/or temporal setting [occur], which may or may not involve a generic shift’, as Sanders notes (24). In M/M/C, however, there is no single identifiable ‘source text’. All three source plays shift genre in the course of performance—the musical comedy Cinderella takes on tragic tones when surrounded by the bloody events of Macbeth and Medea, the tragic Medea evokes bizarre moments of levity in juxtaposition to the celebrations of Macbeth or Cinderella, and so on—until the shifting among the three sources begins to challenge the coherence of generic categories. In the same way that gender and genre categories are challenged by the production, historical periods are blurred as well—in a way that would frustrate Jameson and confirm some of his concerns about assemblage as a creative technique. By the end of this show, the historical markers of costuming and period props are stripped away. All performers end up in black, unisex garb, as if the historical periods had melted away into a single, uniform stage reality. This kind of de-historicization is exactly Jameson’s problem with pastiche, and it applies to musical and staged mash-ups as well. Yet de-historicization is the goal here, as Cornerstone and the Actors’ Gang aim toward universals—such as the lesson ‘Be careful what you wish for’—while recognizing a world of radical plurality. As mentioned earlier, this commitment to universal truths also further differentiates M/M/C from postmodern assembled-text productions at companies such as the Wooster Group and SITI Company. The reception of M/M/C in Los Angeles in 1998 was ecstatic.12 However, the reception at OSF in 2012 was mixed, due in part to the different demographics of the audiences. The Actors’ Gang audiences in 1998 were generally young people—as in younger than 40—many of whom were involved in the entertainment industry in one way or another. As pop-music critics have noted, the reception of mash-ups may depend on ‘a set of listening skills’ shared by the makers and their audiences (Brovig-Hanssen and Harkins 87). Pop music had primed audiences in Los Angeles to appreciate M/M/C. However, at OSF, many older audience members in particular were perplexed: ‘We did not enjoy Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella as it was too complex for our old minds’ wrote one patron, while another noted ‘Perhaps, I was too tired to

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follow it, but Medea Macbeth and Cinderella [sic] was much too hard for me to make sense of’.13 Of course, there were young people (at least young according to their Facebook profile pictures) who did not appreciate the show either, and their comments reflect problems many listeners have with mash-ups in general: the fact that they combine genres some fans insist should remain separate. As one patron wrote, ‘I was reminded of secondary school papers that compare and contrast Shakespeare with lets [sic] say Buffy the Vampire Slayer … it wasn’t an exercise made for a stage and audience as smart as the OSF stage in my opinion’.14 These postings echo outraged posts on YouTube from mash-up listeners upset that, for example, a ‘classic’ Public Enemy track has been ruined by playing it over ‘cheesy’ jazz music. Being a mash-up does not guarantee that audiences, young or old, will have the listening skills to appreciate the work, though it does suggest that those who have been exposed to mash-ups in other media will be more receptive. Some audience members will still insist upon categories of high and low culture, perhaps because these categories are important for them in maintaining their own stable identities.

Other Theatrical Mash-Ups (Few and Far Between) Comparing a mash-up such as M/M/C to its pop-music counterparts can help identify two largely separate audiences for contemporary theatrical adaptations as well as explain why productions such as M/M/C are few and far between. The only place and time that M/M/C seemed to ‘find’ its audience was in Los Angeles in 1998. The subsequent productions at Yale Rep and OSF, while they had their fans, received tepid response from audiences and critics. At OSF, in particular, many of the audience members who did not appreciate the production seemed reverential of the sources (whether Shakespearean or musical) and suggested that the fidelity of these sources was compromised by the ‘mixing’.15 Responses sent anonymously to OSF’s ‘Comments’ page online or posted on the company’s Facebook page included: ‘I’d like one play at a time’; ‘Any one of the three constituent plays was well worth watching alone, but NOT as a blended composition’; and ‘I would ask could you also put [any] three great works of art in a hat and randomly pull them out to find things, text, themes, characterizations that overlap’.16 It is not surprising perhaps that regional-theatre audiences subscribing to venues that present almost exclusively classical repertory are typically

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more receptive to a single-source adaptation ‘inspired by’ but distinct from its source (Cheryl West’s musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Play On!, is a good example). Such adaptations appeal to these audiences, it would seem, because they keep the original sources intact. Audience members can feel ‘in the know’ as the canonical source is alluded to but also feel comforted by the fact that the adaptation is not ‘messing with’ or attempting to replace the original. Clearly, this is not the ideal audience member for a ‘mash-up’. Neither, though, is an audience member with little familiarity or affection for the sources. Anne Bogart has noted that even if an audience member had never seen a Chekhov production it would not hinder his or her enjoyment of SITI Company’s Small Lives/Big Dreams (Bogart 2007). Likewise, one does not have to love Our Town to love the Wooster Group’s Route 1&9. Indeed, reverence for Wilder’s source text might prove a stumbling block to enjoying its deconstruction. For audience members to enjoy a theatrical mash-up, though, it would seem that the better they know and love the sources the better they will enjoy the ways they sync-up and diverge. The ideal audience for a theatrical mash-up, then, seems fairly limited, composed of those deeply knowledgeable of the adaptation’s sources and yet also willing to see those sources played with—indeed to play with the sources themselves, as active cultural ‘re-producers’, as Adorno would have it. Not only is the reception of theatrical mash-ups a challenge for contemporary adapters working in this vein, but also the production of such mash-ups presents significant difficulties. Sources for musical mash-ups are easily at hand. ‘Original’ songs are downloaded in an instant and specialized software enables listeners to become culture reproducers of mash-ups with little effort. Theatrical mash-up are not so easily made. Onstage, mash-ups, particularly of the A + B type, work best when the individual sources are ‘untouched’ before they are mixed. Likewise, no one produces or listens to a mash-up of ‘covers’ of original songs. The pleasure derived from mash-ups is largely the result of recognizing the similarities and differences among the production’s source materials, which means the source materials—the ingredients—must be distinguishable and recognizable: ‘classics’. It must appear, for example in M/M/C, that if the Cinderella portions of the production were not being mixed in with the other sources they could stand alone as a Broadway-ready production. Finding a company large enough and skilled enough to present three repertory

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pieces of this calibre simultaneously is no easy task, one of the reasons that the Los Angeles production was co-presented by two of the area’s largest theatre companies. While easier to create than theatrical mash-ups, musical mash-ups similarly do not dominate the market. Jay-Z’s The Grey Album was downloaded extensively, perhaps more than any other mash-up, yet it did not start a trend so that today one finds mash-ups topping the iTunes download charts. One of the main reasons mash-ups (musical or theatrical) are still at least partly under the mainstream radar is that their makers are wary of visibility and the possibility of subsequent legal action because of the materials they sample. For this reason alone, it would seem that mash-ups in any medium will continue to be more of an underground than a mainstream phenomenon. Even the producers of M/M/C admit that, with the recent Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, they doubt they would again be able to obtain the rights to present the show. Nevertheless, companies, often with an alternative theatre pedigree like the Actors’ Gang or Cornerstone Theater Company, have devised mash-ups similar to M/M/C in recent years. Examples include Les Freres Corbusier’s Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which premiered in 2008 in a Center Theatre Group production in Los Angeles and eventually played on Broadway in 2010; New Paradise Laboratories and the Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis’ Prom (2006); Mixed Blood Theatre’s production of 1001; and the site-specific mash-up Shuffle, presented by Elevator Repair Service at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library in autumn 2014. If theatrical mash-ups seem to be a larger trend, this may be due to the fact that a number of recent productions appear to be mash-ups (and even advertise themselves accordingly) but actually work against the form’s strengths in ways that suggest they are better understood as simply parody. Purely humorous, and relying on the most canonical works for their source material—often Shakespeare or Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—these productions appeal to mainstream audiences by assuming and then combining ‘high and low’ sources in ways that oddly reinscribe them.17 In a production such as MacHomer, for example, it is not always clear that the production views The Simpsons and Macbeth on equal footing. While beloved, the lowness of the popular cartoon is mocked as often as is the highness of Shakespeare’s work. Moreover, the

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presentation suggests that the source text is clearly Shakespeare’s play (the high art), which has been given a ridiculous Simpsons’ makeover. Theatrical mash-ups, then, are a small subset of the larger devised theatre scene in the USA and will most likely remain a small subset. Labelling these productions more accurately connects this work to movements in other media as well as explains their appeal to particular audiences. At the same time, acknowledging this particular subset of devised theatre suggests that critics’ concerns about devised theatre entering the mainstream or fears that ‘devised theatre’ has become simply a form of branding disconnected from the political roots of collective creation require some tempering. After all, the devised theatre mash-up cannot be compromised by mainstream acceptance, because it has always been a populist form aimed squarely at the mainstream. Moreover, as M/M/C exemplifies, the mash-up is a form that can still be political in its own way, through the destabilization of categories. In this way, it is a form with more in common synchronically across media today than diachronically with its seeming theatrical antecedents, the devised work of avantgarde collectives such as SITI Company and the Wooster Group.

Notes





1.  Variously labeled ‘documentary theatre’, ‘docudrama’, and ‘verbatim plays’, these include the works of Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project, Anna Deavere Smith, Marc Wolf, Theatre Passe Muraille, and Culture Clash. Their roots are in the Living Newspapers of the 1930s in the USA and Russia. 2. Young and a number of Actors’ Gang company members participated in SITI Company’s Suzuki/Viewpoints workshops in Los Angeles in 1998 as part of the Oasis Theatre Company-sponsored Framework’ 98. 3.  This first production of Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella opened on 13 February 1984, in the basement of the Harvard University dormitory Adams House. 4. Cornerstone Theater Company was officially founded in 1986 as a travelling ensemble. In addition to Rauch, founding members included: Tim Banker, John Bellucci, Amy Brenneman, Alison Carey, Peter Howard, Lynn Jeffries, Christopher Liam Moore, Douglas Petrie, David Reiffel, and Molly White. 5. Kendt. Rauch thought the choice was ‘terrible’ because, with a show that is already so complex, to set the Ancient Greek play in the American Old

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West was asking audiences to process too much; besides, it muddied the telling of the Medea myth. 6. It was this characterization of M/M/C that first suggested to me the connection between this type of adaptation and the musical mash-up. Rauch and Young themselves have not used this term to describe the play, though in a recent email exchange with the author, Young wrote that she was not opposed to the label: ‘As for the term “mash-up,” I suppose that would be accurate in some ways (in a newfangled way all the kids can relate to?)’. 7. While Salon writer Charles Taylor has suggested that the Whipped Cream Mixes are supposed to send a message to Chuck D to ‘Lighten the fuck up’ (Taylor), the ‘meaning’ of ECC’s mash-up might be the assertion that the medium of popular music is not appropriate for Chuck D’s political exhortation. 8. Andy Warhol, David Lynch, and John Portman, for example (Jameson 1, 287, 39). 9.  Viewpoints are nine points of awareness that a performer/creator has at her disposal while working in rehearsal. They are specifically: tempo, duration, kinesthetic response, repetition, shape, gesture, architecture, spatial relationship, and floor pattern. Sound is sometimes considered a tenth Viewpoint. 10. For example, during the ‘B.H. project’, 1997–1999, Cornerstone collaborated with four Los Angeles communities with the initials B.H.: the primarily African-American South Los Angeles community of Baldwin Hills; Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, a primarily Mexican-American community; Broadway/Hill, which is considered Los Angeles’s ‘Chinatown’, and the affluent, primarily ‘White’ Beverly Hills. Performers from these four community shows were then brought together in 1999 for a ‘bridge show’ by Lisa Loomer. 11. The idea that the all-female Dionysian revels are the ‘origins’ of Ancient Greek theatre is certainly problematic, though Rauch and his fellow Harvard students could have encountered this idea in any number of textbooks, from Oscar Brockett’s History of the Theatre to E.T. Kirby’s Ur-Drama: The Origins of Theatre (New York: NYU Press, 1975) or even in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. 12. Besides garnering positive reviews in almost every major Los Angeles publication that reviews theatre, M/M/C won multiple awards including a number of Back Stage West Garlands for 1998. 13. E-mails sent to Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s ‘Comments’ page, anonymously, on 12 September 2012 and 24 September 2012. 14. Posting on Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Facebook page. From Jenny Shadley, 16 October 2012, online at: https://www.facebook.com/

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photo.php?fbid=10150824260485763&set=a.10150764403635763.46 6760.66607615762&type=1, accessed 4 June 2014. 15. The recent furore over OSF’s plans to commission translations for the entire Shakespeare canon shows that critics and audiences alike are as reverential and protective of classical repertory as they ever have been. See James Shapiro’s “Modernizing the Bard?” in The New York Times, A27 (7 October 2015) and Bill Rauch’s response: “Why We’re Translating Shakespeare,” American Theatre (14 October 2015); http://www.americantheatre.org/2015/10/14/bill-rauch-why-were-translating-shakespeare. 16. E-mail sent to OSF’s ‘Comments’ page, anonymously, 21 August 2012; postings on OSF’s Facebook page from Cliff Preen and Jenny Shadley, online at: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150824260 485763&set=a.10150764403635763.466760.66607615762&type=1, accessed 4 June 2014. 17.  There have been: Rick Miller’s MacHomer (1995); the numerous Shakespeare mash-up productions of the Los Angeles-based Troubadour Theatre Company: All Kool That Ends Kool (2002), Fleetwood Macbeth (2003), A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream (2013), and so on; as well as the subgenre of Shakespeare mash-ups—Bryan Renaud’s Twelfth Night of the Living Dead (2013) and John Heimbuch’s Land of the Dead (2009), inspired from the success of the mash-up novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith. In terms of Dickens’ chestnut, there have been: The Illegitimate Players’ A Christmas Twist (1992), combining the Carol with Oliver Twist, and Adam Brooks and T. C. Cheever’s What the Dickens? (2011), combining it with A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Reid Farrington’s A Christmas Carol (2012) among others. (Farrington, interestingly, was formerly a video designer for the Wooster Group.)

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. London: Routledge, 1984. Bogart, Anne. Personal interview. Saratoga Springs, NY. 11 July 2007. Brovig-Hanssen, Ragnhild, and Paul Harkins. ‘Contextual Incongruity and Musical Congruity: The Aesthetics and Humour of Mash-Ups.’ Popular Music 31.1 (2010): 87–104. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 2003. Hoesterey, Ingeborg. Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, and Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001.

294  S. Proudfit Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Kendt, Rob. ‘Three for One.’ Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Illuminations. 2012. Manuel, Peter. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1993. Rauch, Bill, and Tracy Young. ‘Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella: From the Codirectors.’ Oregon Shakespeare Festival Playbill, vol. 2 (2012). Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Schlitt, Mike. Personal interview. Hollywood, Calif. 7 July 1999. Serazio, Michael. ‘The Apolitical Irony of Generation Mash-Up: A Cultural Study in Popular Music.’ Popular Music and Society 31.1 (2008): 79–94. Severn, J.R. ‘All Shook Up and the Unannounced Adaptation: Engaging with Twelfth Night’s Unstable Identities.’ Theatre Journal 66.4 (2014): 541–557. Taylor, Charles. ‘A Love Song to Bastard Pop,’ Salon. 9 August 2003. http:// www.salon.com/entertainment/music/feature, date accessed 4 June 2014. Wooster Group, The. ‘Route 1&9.’ Benzene 5/6 (1982). Young, Tracy. Personal interview, Hollywood, Calif. 11 July 2006.

CHAPTER 15

Controversial Intentions: Adaptation as an Act of Iconoclasm in Rupert Goold and Ben Power’s Faustus (2004) and the Chapman Brothers’ Insult to Injury (2003) Sarah Grochala

In this chapter I intend to analyse the approach to adaptation that Goold and Power developed through their work on a free adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, which combined Marlowe’s original text with a contemporary narrative featuring the visual artists the Chapman Brothers and their controversial rectification of a set of Goya’s Disasters of War etchings for their 2003 series Insult to Injury. Goold and Power’s Faustus originally premiered at Northampton Theatre Royal in 2004. While the work is considered by both Goold and Power to be ‘very much juvenalia’, their later adaptations (both working together and separately) have become well known within the British theatre scene, most notably their adaptation of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (Headlong/Chichester 2008) which had both a successful run in the West End and toured internationally. Goold and

S. Grochala (*)  Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_15

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Power’s ‘extreme intervention’ approach to adaptation can be argued to have played a major role in a siginificant shift in approaches to staging the classical text in the UK during the 2000s, away from fidelity to the source text and towards radical reinterpretation. (Haydon 80) Looking closely at Faustus, one of their earliest collaborations provides us with a valuable insight into the development of Goold and Power’s creative process and working relationship. My analysis in this chapter will focus mainly on the process of adaptation as opposed to the final pieces produced. As Linda Hutcheon notes, adaptation is both ‘the process and the product’. (Hutcheon 7) I will argue that just as a product of adaptation can be thought of as an adaptation of a pre-existing product (the source text), so a process of adaptation can be thought an adaptation of a pre-existing process. I would argue that artists frequently adapt the processes of other artists in the creation of new work. Through this analysis, I intend to demonstrate the ways in which Goold and Power’s dialectical approach to adapting Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus can be read as an adaptation of the Chapman’s approach to adapting Goya’s Disasters of War. Goold and Power import an adaptation process pioneered in the medium of visual art into the medium of theatre. Throughout this chapter I will invoke the unfashionable idea of artistic intentions. Intentionality was discredited as a decisive factor in ­establishing a particular reading of a text by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in the 1940s. At the time, the prevailing critical tendency in literary studies was for the critic to justify her reading of any text on the grounds of her view of the author’s intention. Wimsatt and Beardsley discredited this approach by arguing that it is impossible to determine authorial intention purely from a text and that the worth of a text should therefore not be judged on the basis of whether it fulfils its author’s supposed intentions. (Wimsatt and Beardsley 3) The fate of intentionality as a critical benchmark was sealed by Roland Barthes in 1970 with his essay ‘The Death of Author’ in which he argues that the meaning of text is found in the reader’s interpretation as opposed the writer’s intentions. (Barthes 148) Recently, there has been a move to rehabilitate the idea of artistic intention in the field of Adaptation Studies. Hutcheon argues that because adaptation is a process of rereading, rerelating and retelling— an act that involves both the critical interpretation of the existing text and the creative process of remaking it into a new text—the question of

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why a particular artist has chosen to adapt a particular story in a particular way is highly relevant to the analysis of adaptations. Adaptations are comparative versions of the same story. Therefore, the artistic choices made in the retelling of that story are more visible to the reader: ‘the text bears the marks of these choices, marks that betray the assumptions of the creator—at the least insofar as those assumptions can be inferred from the text’. These ‘variations function as indicators of the adapter’s voice’. (Hutcheon 108–109) I would disagree with her argument that authorial assumptions found within the text itself can be read as intentions on two counts. First, as Hutcheon recognizes, ‘intending to do something is not necessarily the same thing as actually achieving it’. (Hutcheon 109) The intentions that we read in a text may not be the actual intentions that the author had in creating the work. Second, many authorial assumptions are the product of what Frederic Jameson terms the ‘political unconscious’. Instead of being the conscious intentions of the author themselves, they are the assumptions of the social and cultural context in which they live. (Jameson ix) I do, however, agree with Hutcheon’s argument that if authorial intention can be clearly established, as is often the case with contemporary artists, then ‘these statements can and must be confronted with actual textual results’. (Hutcheon 109) I would argue that this is particularly important in the analysis of creative processes where the question is not so much ‘Why adapt?’ but rather ‘How to adapt?’. In this case, artistic statements of intent provide us with an important context for understanding the processes through which an artistic idea becomes a fully realized work of art.

Rupert Goold and Ben Power: Finding a Dialectical Method Rupert Goold and Ben Power first met in a quiet area of the National Theatre Foyer around 2003. At the time, Goold was the artistic director of Northampton Royal and Derngate Theatres and was looking for someone to help him create a stage adaptation of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Power was working as administrator for a charity and trying to work out ‘how to get a career as a writer of adaptation’ (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”). Power jumped at the opportunity and so their working relationship was born. Their contemporarized version of Paradise Lost, featuring Jesus as a ‘young hood-cum-narrator figure’,

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hell as a place of ‘inner-city blight’, and a garden of Eden resembling ‘Center Parcs without the bicycles’, premiered at the Theatre Royal Northampton in January 2004. (Gardner) It was a surprise hit: ‘We were outselling the Ayckbourn. It was incredible’. Goold and Power were keen to capitalize on its success and immediately began work on another production in a similar vein, Faustus, which premiered at Northampton in November 2004 (see Fig. 15.1) (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”). Goold and Power describe the process of creating Faustus as an important step in developing their working practice; ‘part of a potential new enquiry’. They developed a dialectical methodology whose starting point was what Goold terms the ‘central inquiry’ and Power ‘a point of contention’. This is the central question the play appears to be posing. Having identified the question, they would then take opposing sides and argue it out: ‘we would do a lot of “Okay you take this position and I’ll take this position and then let’s let that argument be the heart of it”’. Goold and Power articulate two conscious intentions for putting the dialectic at the heart of their process. First, as artists their intention was to find a way to transcend ‘humanism’ in their approach to making theatre. Second, they wanted to create an experience that would give a contemporary audience a visceral sense of the play’s impact on its the original audience: ‘in making an adaptation of something you want to try to go back to the moment of creation and the feeling for an audience at a first night of a performance’. In light of this second intention, there was a need for the dialectic to bridge the gap between world of the play and the modern world: ‘the reference point had to be in contemporary society’. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”) This approach to adaptation has had a lasting impact on their work. Goold and Power brought this dialectical methodology from Northampton to Headlong. At Headlong, they further developed this approach by applying it to contemporary as well as classical work: ‘all the new plays we did afterwards [were] very much in dialogue with the political moment now and had this sort of dialectic in them’. (ibid.)

Marlowe as an Iconoclast The central inquiry or point of contention that formed the starting point for creating Faustus was the question: ‘What does it mean to kill your God?’ The question of iconoclasm stands at the heart of Goold and

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Fig. 15.1  Poster for Faustus, which premiered at Northampton in November 2004, used with permission of Scott Doran and Eureka! image design 

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Power’s interpretation of Marlowe’s play. (ibid.) The Oxford English Dictionary defines iconoclasm as ‘the breaking of images’ or ‘the assailing of cherished beliefs’. (Allen 584) Goold and Power identify both Faustus and the Chapmans as attempting to challenge a set of cherished beliefs within the social and political context of their different worlds: ‘The Chapmans wanted to be iconoclastic. Faustus wants to be iconoclastic’. In pairing them together, Goold and Power attempt to provide an understanding of what an iconoclastic act might look like in our contemporary secular world: ‘We wanted to find a modern situation that replicated the controversy, the whiff of danger, that necromancy embodied for Elizabethan playgoers’. (Power) Marlowe is often imagined as an iconoclastic figure because there is a tendency to conflate him with his most famous characters and to recast him in their image. Traditionally Marlowe is seen as ‘a rebel, an aetheist, a fiery soul whose works expressed his heady exuberance, aspirations and despairs’. (Steane 9) There is, however, little historical evidence for Marlowe’s iconoclasm. What there is takes the form of several dubious and unsubstantiated accusations of atheism and iconoclasm made against him in the aftermath of his death. For example, a document was handed into the authorities in which a Richard Baines attests to the dangerous opinions being spread by one Christopher Marly: ‘this Marlowe doth not only hold them himself, but almost into every company he cometh he persuades men to Atheism, willing them not to be afeared of bugbears and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both God and his ministers’. (ibid.) The playwright Thomas Kyd, who was under arrest at the time of Marlowe’s death, testified that Marlowe ‘would jest at the divine Scriptures, gibe at prayers, and strive in argument to frustrate and confute what hath been spoke or writ by prophets and such holy men’. (ibid.) While there is little reliable historical evidence of Marlowe’s iconoclasm, in performance Dr. Faustus involves the staging of an iconoclastic act, which could be read as an act of iconoclasm in itself. In Act IV, the the signing away of Faustus’s soul involves the performance of what C. L. Barber identifies as ‘in effect a black mass’ during which Faustus gives ‘his blood and testament instead of receiving Christ’s’ (Barber 114). In his analysis of this scene, Daniel Gates argues that it contains several wicked reversals of sacred ritual of the Eucharist. Faustus signs his soul away with a the words ‘Consummation est’ (Marlowe I. v. 73) quoting Jesus’s final words as he dies on the cross. With these words,

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Jesus gave away his blood to save mankind. In this reversal, Faustus uses his own blood to damn himself for eternity. Immediately after signing Faustus’s arm is magically inscribed with the words ‘Homo fuge!’ (Marlowe I. v. 76). During the Eucharist, the word becomes flesh. Here instead, ‘Faustus flesh literally becomes words’ (Gates 74). J. L. Austin argues that some speech acts, particularly those associated with rituals such as the Eucharist, are performative acts: ‘the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just saying something’ (Austin 6–7). Based on Austin’s thinking, Gates argues that the words uttered during the Eucharist are performative utterances of ‘seemingly transcendental power’. (Gates 75) In the Catholic church the words of the Eucharist are thought to literally, as opposed to symbolically, transform communion bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Thus the transgressive reversals that Faustus voices within this scene to enact the pledging of this soul to the devil can be thought of as ‘an extraordinary powerful instance of performative language’ (Gates 76). Though Marlowe’s biography fails to yield up any conclusive proof of his iconoclasm, his representation of Faustus’s act of blasphemy can be seen as an iconoclastic act in itself as it involves a performance that distorts a set of cherished beliefs.

The Chapman Brothers as Iconoclasts Whereas Marlowe can be considered an iconoclast on the basis that his plays challenge cherished beliefs, the Chapman Brothers can be accused of iconoclasm on both counts, for challenging cherished beliefs and for the breaking of images. Brothers Jake Chapman (b.1966) and Dinos Chapman (b.1962) graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1990 and began working together after an apprenticeship with Gilbert and George. Like Gilbert and George, the Chapmans make their work together without identifying specifically who creates what. The intention behind this practice is to challenge to the concept of individual ­authorship: the work we make, I mean is, the interchangeability of the work, of the techniques, of the abilities to do stuff is nothing to do with the signature of the identity of a person. I mean the work is not really about our identity so the idea that actually we can make separate work under the sort of guise of one artistic agency is really what the work’s about (What Do Artists Do All Day?)

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The brothers describe their working relationship as ‘a kind of critical one-upmanship filtering process’: When you have two people … you have your own critic and you also have this whole other body that has a whole set of ideas that are often very annoying to you but become part of the process of sharpening up an idea.

The brothers argue that, although this process might sound like a recipe for chaos and disagreement, it actually helps them to work more efficiently: ‘We actually arrive at decisions very quickly because we’re able to expel all of the anxieties that a single person has in the production of their own work’ (Ramkalawon 69). In 2001, the Chapmans purchased a valuable set of Goya’s Disasters of War etchings printed from his original plates. These etchings depict acts of cruelty and suffering during the Peninsular War of 1808–1814. The Chapmans rectified all 80 of the Goya etchings by adding clown and puppy heads to the figures of the victims in each image to create a new artwork entitled Insult to Injury. (Chapman and Chapman) The Chapmans’ rectification of the Goya etchings caused controversy in the art world, with some art critics positioning it as an act of sheer vandalism. (Gibson) It is this desecration of another artist’s work that Power positions as a contemporary secular act of iconoclasm: an ‘irrevocable act, this deed which cannot be undone’. (Power) The Chapmans’ breaking of Goya’s images can be positioned as an iconoclastic act because of the God-like position that Goya occupies in the Chapmans’ work. One of their earliest pieces, Disasters of War (1993), is a recreation of the images in Goya’s Disasters of War as a series of miniature tableaux featuring toy figures. The Chapmans first came to public prominence with a life size sculpture of one of the images from Disasters of War, which was included in the infamous 1997 Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy. Jake has stated that the brothers were so obsessed that at one point they even considered changing their surname to Goya. (Turner) They claim that one of their reasons for their obsession with Goya is that his work, like Marlowe’s, grapples with the idea of a godless world: ‘He points out this kind of sudden removal from a state of grace. You suddenly are responsible for everything you do.’ (Bad Art for Bad People) While Goya’s work is a productive source for the Chapmans, their attitude towards Goya alternates between reverence and violent

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iconoclasm. Their 2005 rectifications of two sets of Goya’s Los Caprichos etchings are entitled Like a Dog Returns to Its Vomit and Like a Dog Returns to Its Vomit Twice. When once asked if he would have liked to have met Goya, Dinos responded in violent terms: ‘I’d like to have stepped on his toes, shouted in his ears and punched him in the face’. (Turner) It is this destructive iconoclastic impulse that interests Goold and Power: ‘The way the Chapmans talked about their relationship with Goya, when you are so blinded by and enthralled to your inspiration, is murder the only escape?’ (Goold and Power). This iconoclastic attitude towards Goya is in keeping with the Chapmans’ view of art as a force for destruction as well as creation. They state that one of their intentions as artists is to challenge enlightenment ideas of the arts as an force for the improvement of both the individual and society in which they live: ‘we’re trying to just ruin the assumption that art has some progressive motion to it’. (Chapman and Chapman) The Chapmans’ reworkings of other artists’ work are positioned as an effective method of achieving this intention: ‘working on someone else’s work, it optimises the idea that making art is a destructive act rather than a creative act, which is kind of pretty much what we are probably about’. (Art Happens) The Chapmans contextualize their work on Goya as a deliberately destructive act. They repeatedly use the term ‘rectify’ to describe their approach to adapting his etchings. The Oxford English dictionary defines the word rectify as meaning ‘adjust or make right; correct, amend’, ‘purify or refine, esp. by repeated distillation’ or ‘convert’. (Allen 1004) Dinos, however, identifies a specific and murderous etymology for their use of the term: ‘that nice word from The Shining, when the butler’s trying to encourage Jack Nicholson to kill his family—to rectify the situation’. (Jones) There is a sense in which their continual rectification of sets of Goya etchings, set after set after set, is an act of murder, an attempt to destroy all traces of anything that could be positioned as an original Goya: ‘The whole kind of idea was to kind of do as many of these as we could ideally until every single edition had been done. And that is the intention’. (What Do Artists Do All Day?) Their iconoclasm is positioned as being extreme. They don’t just want to shock by defacing some of Goya’s etchings, they want to obliterate every trace of them. The Chapmans use two different tactics to defend their rectifications of Goya’s etchings. First, they argue that they have improved the etchings by defacing them. On their website they identify the Goya prints not

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as having been rectified but as having been ‘reworked and improved’. (Chapman and Chapman) This argument holds particularly strongly if you take the position that the Goya etchings, printed after his death, are reproductions not originals. The Chapmans’ additions can then be seen as transforming Goya reproductions into Chapman Brother’s originals. The Goyas are simply ‘very expensive colouring books’ used as the material for the creation of a more valuable work of art. (What Do Artists Do All Day?) Second, they defend their rectification of Goya’s etchings by referring to a historical precedent. Christopher Turner classifies this as a ‘canonical defence’. They cite Willem De Kooning’s willing donation of a valuable piece of his work to Robert Rauschenberg so that Rauschenberg could erase it to create a new work of art, Erased De Kooning Drawing. This act of reworking, the Chapmans claim, gives precedent for their reworking of Goya’s etchings. (Turner) Whereas Faustus doubts the wisdom of his actions and repents of his iconoclasm, the Chapmans seem to revel in theirs. The reference to Erased De Kooning Drawing, however, also highlights the complex relationship that artists creating new work have with the canon, with the work that precedes them. When Rauschenberg asked De Kooning (an artist who he highly revered) for a drawing, De Kooning deliberately gave him a drawing in crayon and ink that would be very hard to erase. The traces of the original can still be seen, if only faintly, in Rauschenberg’s adaptation. Rauschenberg’s work, like the Chapmans’ reworking of Goya or Goold and Power’s reworking of Marlowe, can be read as both an act of destruction and creation. It acknowledges the role the canon plays in providing the ground on which artists make new work. In order to create new work, artists may have to challenge or even attempt to obliterate the work that precedes them, but traces of the influence of the canon are inevitably still visible in their work.

Goold and Power’s Faustus Goold and Power’s adaptation takes Marlowe’s play and cuts it down to its bare bones. They indicate the level of licence taken with Marlowe’s text in the published script by stating that this particular version of the Faust legend is ‘after Christopher Marlowe’ as opposed to ‘by Christopher Marlowe’. (Goold and Power, Faustus) They take what Goold terms an ‘interventionist approach’ to adapting Marlowe’s play,

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weaving a contemporary narrative around the original text. Goold and Power preserve the skeleton of Marlowe’s original play. Its pivotal turning points form a backbone onto which the contemporary Chapman Brothers’ narrative is grafted. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”) The production starts with Faustus in his shadowy study, lit by a single candle (see Fig. 15.2). In the distance, monks take up a Gregorian chant. Faustus goes through his books, rejects all forms of scholarly inquiry and then decides to take up necromancy. He blows the candle out and the dark walls of his study wheel around suddenly to reveal the bright white cube space of the Chapmans’ studio. The chanting transforms into dance music. The Chapman Brothers are being interviewed by an arts correspondent, while being filmed by a camera woman, Helena. They announce their intention to paint over the Goya etchings (see Fig. 15.3). Jake invites Helena to film them doing the deed the following night. We return to Faustus’s study as Faustus conjures up the devil Mephistopheles. Faustus offers to give his soul up to Lucifer if Mephistopheles will agree to serve him. In the Chapmans’ studio, Helena is filming. The Chapmans are preparing to paint over the Goya etchings. There are protestors outside. Helena tries to persuade Jake not to paint over the images (see Fig. 15.4). In his study, Faustus is wavering over his decision to sign away his soul (see Fig. 15.5). The Chapmans appear above him. It is 1998 and they are with an art dealer sealing the purchase of the Goya etchings. They view the etchings for the first time. Dinos is so overwhelmed that he throws up. Below the Good Angel and the Bad Angel fight for Faustus’s soul. Faustus turns back towards God and Mephistopheles summons up Lucifer, who takes the form of the art dealer, to persuade him to sign. Both the Chapmans and Faustus sign. (Goold) The second act starts with Mephistopheles showing Faustus around hell, but the hell that he shows him is the opening night of the 2000 Apocalypse exhibition at the Royal Academy, where the Chapmans are showing Hell, their ‘concentration camp diorama’. (Searle) Mephistopheles introduces Faustus to the seven deadly sins who double as guests at the party. The scene ends with the Chapman Brothers admiring Maurizio Cattelan’s The Ninth Hour, a sculpture depicting the pope struck down by a meteorite. Suddenly the Pope lifts off the meteorite and rises to become the real Renaissance Pope surrounded by his friars. Mephistopheles makes Faustus invisible so that he can play tricks on him. The friars transform into the guests at yet another art world party.

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Fig. 15.2  Faustus in his shadowy study, lit by a single candle. Photo credit Manuel Harlan

The Chapmans are waiting to hear if they have won the Turner prize. They lose to Martin Creed’s The Lights Going On and Off. While the lights go on and off, they decide to start work on rectifying the Goyas. Faustus enters having aged many years. An old man, one of the guests at the Turner Prize party, encourages him to look to heaven for salvation. Faustus decides that it is too late for him to be saved. As midnight approaches, Faustus is still torn between repentance and despair. Below him, the Chapman Brothers are preparing to paint over the Goya etchings. Jake begins to waver in his purpose. Dinos accuses Jake of having

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Fig. 15.3  Jonjo O’Neill (Dinos) and Stephen Noonan (Jake). Photo credit Manuel Harlan

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Fig. 15.4  Jake Chapman (Steven Noonan) and Helen/Helena (Sophie Hunter) in the studio. Photo credit Manuel Harlan

succumbed to Helena’s pleas because he is blinded by his attraction to her. Above, Mephistopheles warns Faustus that to repent would have dire consequences. Faustus asks Mephistopheles to show him Helen of Troy as her beauty will dissuade him from all thoughts of repentance. Helena becomes Helen of Troy. Faustus descends to join Jake and together they sing her praises. Jake comes to his senses and throws Helena out. The brothers paint over the Goyas. Above them, Faustus calls to God for help as his final hour approaches but he receives none. When midnight strikes, Faustus is drawn into hell. (Goold) The structure of Faustus is both diachronic and dialectic. Goold and Power bring the world of mid-sixteenth-century Europe into debate with the contemporary British art world to see ‘what connections and collisions occur for an audience’. (Power) The play creates a Hegelian dialectic between these two worlds. At first the worlds are placed in opposition. The audience are bumped from the scholarly Renaissance world into the contemporary art world and then back again. In the fifth scene, the worlds begin to blend. This synthesis reaches its peak when

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Fig. 15.5  Faustus 2007—Jason Baughan (Mephistopheles) and Michael Colgan (Faustus). photo Manuel Harlan

Faustus and Jake join together to voice their praise of Helen/Helena’s beauty. Finally the modern world consumes the Renaissance world as, in the final image of the play, Faustus has a clown mask pulled over his head by Mephistopheles, becoming one of the defaced victims in the Chapmans’ Insult to Injury. Goold astutely compares the overall architecture of the play to ‘the pyramid in the Louvre’. The contemporary scenes, like the Louvre pyramid, are a modern ‘intervention’ inserted into a classical edifice. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”). Comparisons between the two worlds are clearly drawn as moments of decision, doubt, betrayal, commitment, hedonism, and desire coincide with each other on stage. Faustus announces his intention to take up necromancy in the first scene, the Chapmans announce their decision to paint over the Goyas in the next. Faustus signs his soul away as the Chapmans sign the papers sealing the purchase of the Goyas. When Faustus’s blood congeals before he can sign, the ink in the Chapmans’ pen dries up. Jake’s moment of doubt coincides with Faustus’s calls for God to save him at his final hour. Elements from one world are literally transformed into elements in the other. The Pope from The Ninth

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Hour becomes the Pope who Faustus torments. Goold recognizes this as a habitual way of working for him: My default, particularly at that point as a director, but full stop as a director, is that if I see snap between two cards I’ll say snap even if there’s not much joining them because I’m interested in what happens.

Goold identifies the Momart fire as a particularly strong snap moment and one that was pivotal to the early development of the production. In May 2004, a fire swept through the Momart warehouse in East London, where many valuable works of modern British art were stored. Among the works lost was the Chapmans’ Hell. For Goold, this event felt ‘Marlovian in all sorts of ways’. The Momart fire determined the initial structure for the two parallel narratives. The painting over of the Goyas would be equated with Faustus’s decision to sign his soul away. Then ‘just as Faustus goes on his big round the world journey and ends up in hell, so would the Chapmans go on some post success journey which would end in the Momart fire. These two fires would consume our central protagonists’. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”) Goold and Power soon discovered, however, that such a close mirroring of the arc of Marlowe’s story in the contemporary story simply didn’t work. The story ended with the brothers being punished for the iconoclastic nature of their work: ‘if we judge them in the same way and make that complete equivalency between them and Faustus then they should go to hell as well’. This narrative structure articulated a stance that was in direct opposition to Goold and Power’s intentions. They ‘were pro-Chapman and therefore by default pro-Faustus’. Rather than using the Faustus narrative to damn the Chapmans, they had intended to use the Chapmans’ narrative to redeem Faustus and so bring into focus what they rightly or wrongly perceive to be Marlowe’s true intentions. Goold argues that Marlowe provides his religiously conformist ending out of a ‘sense of generic social duty rather than out of a real belief in that sensibility’. This argument is supported, Power confirms, by the fact that Faustus only truly repents at the last minute and so Marlowe spends most of the play revelling in all the fun and mischief that Faustus has with the powers Mephistopheles has given him. Marlowe’s true intentions are revealed by the fact that ‘the writing of the sin is far more vital than the writing of the repentance’. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”) (see Fig. 15.3).

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The solution was to create parallel narratives with opposing rather than identical arcs. Goold and Power found an earlier point in the Chapman narrative that could stand in parallel with Faustus’s decision to sign away his soul: We worked out that purchase of the Goyas could stand for the signature moment. So we got a new equivalent for Faustus signing his soul away and then a kind of freedom not to follow an identical arc in the Chapman story. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”)

Faustus being dragged down to hell is now equated with the Chapmans’ act of painting over the Goyas. The final moment of the show is a projected statement affirming, that despite the fact that Hell was burnt in the Momart fire, the Chapmans’ most iconoclastic piece ‘Their rectified Goya sketches, Insult to Injury, survive’. (Goold and Power 85) By creating an ending that condones the Chapmans’ actions, Goold and Power can also be seen as attempting to salvage Faustus himself.

Adapting the Chapman Brothers’ Insult to Injury While the above description might suggest a balance between the two narratives, in performance, the Chapman narrative, along with Goold and Power’s pro-Chapman stance, dominates. The critic Alfred Hickling observed that, unless the actor playing Faustus can take full command of the role, the Chapman narrative is ‘so well realised that the Renaissance episodes could begin to seem irrelevant’. (Alfred Hickling) Although Goold and Power’s Faustus can ostensibly be read as an adaptation of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, it is more truly—in terms of its form and intentions—an adaptation of the Chapmans’ Insult to Injury. As Goold and Power note, central to adaptation process was the intention ‘to do to the Marlowe what the Chapman Brothers had done to Goya’s Disasters of War’. Like Goya’s etchings, Marlowe’s text becomes the object of an act of iconoclasm. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”) Goold and Power did consider abandoning the original text completely and appropriating the skeleton of Marlowe’s play as the basis for an entirely new play: ‘We talked about the idea that if we don’t like it enough then we should do a modern version. We should tell the story, tell the myth and write a new play about someone selling their soul to the devil in some form or another’. Power explains that the decision to

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retain the original Marlowe text was inspired by Goold’s initial interest in the Chapmans’ rectification of Goya: ‘because of what your idea was for what that modern story might be, then the idea of retaining bits of the original came in.’ Faustus is an adaptation of an adaptation strategy, as much as it is an adaptation of a particular story. An approach to adaptation developed by the Chapmans in the visual arts is transposed to the medium of theatre. Goold and Power take Marlowe’s work and perform the theatrical equivalent of painting clown and puppy heads all over it. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”) Goold and Power define their act of adaptation as an iconoclastic act. Both Marlowe and the Chapmans are positioned as artistic idols. Power admits to being ‘very Marlowe’ at the time, while Goold identifies Marlowe as major influence on his work: ‘the Marlovian anti-hero, for better or worse, troublingly and undeliberately has basically been the main character as a director that I’ve kept returning to’. Goold also admits to having been in awe of the Chapmans and equates their work with that of Goya’s: ‘I would put the Chapmans, certainly at that point right up there with Goya’. Though the Chapmans allowed Goold and Power to use their images and came to see the production during its run at Hampstead Theatre in 2006, there was little contact between them. There was, however, a sense of the Chapmans watching the progress of the adaptation from above, ‘huge God-like figures over the Marlowe’. This image is clearly captured in the Headlong publicity for the show, which shows the huge figure of Jake Chapman looking down forensically on the tiny figures of Faustus, Dinos and Jake, who are in turn looking up at him from below. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”) Whereas Goold and Power take a reverent attitude towards the Chapmans, their attitude towards Marlowe is much more of a love/ hate relationship, mirroring the Chapmans’ relationship with Goya and reflecting the complex relationship between the artist and the canon. Marlowe’s play is positioned as a polluted text that needs to be rectified, reworked, and improved: ‘yeah, it’s great Faustus, it’s a shame so much of it is shit’. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”) Dr. Faustus exists in two versions. A shorter 1604 A version, which is traditionally seen as closer to the play as it was performed during Marlowe’s lifetime, and a longer 1616 B text, which is though to have been supplemented with ‘new additions’ by other playwrights. (Steane, “Dr Faustus: The Text”) Goold and Power’s intention in adapting Dr Faustus is to rectify it by getting ‘rid of all the so called other hand stuff’, retrieving and

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distilling the original Marlowe out of the adulterated text. They defend their actions, just as the Chapmans do, with a canonical defence. Citing John Barton’s addition of 550 lines from Marlowe’s main source, Johann Spies’s Historia von D. Johann Fausten, to his 1974 production of the play for the RSC, Goold explains that Dr Faustus ‘has always been fiddled around with because it’s a complete disaster of a play.’ The production, however, questions the ethics of both the Chapmans’ and Goold and Power’s rectification of other artists’ work in its final image, reinscribing a dialectical position. Faustus is literally defaced, reiterating the idea that Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, like Goya’s etchings has become the victim of its modern adaptors’ rectifications. The positioning of Faustus as one of the victims in Goya’s original etchings raises a challenge to Goold and Power’s predominantly pro-Chapman stance. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”) Goold and Power’s approach to adaptation extends beyond the adaptation of two works of art and the adaptation of a particular adaptation strategy. During their development of Faustus, Goold and Power also adapted elements of the Chapmans’ working relationship, in which the two separate artists are merged into a single entity. Goold talks about the adaptation process generating a ‘series of doubles’, not only between the Chapmans and Marlowe, but also between the Chapmans and themselves. Goold states: what the Chapman Brothers say about the way they make art and that one of the reasons they make it together—and you can’t tell whose idea is whose in the play. There’s an ability to de-biographise. You move further away from everything you know about these artists. I think that was appealing to us more out of nervousness, but it did appeal.

There is an interesting conflation of the Chapmans with Goold and Power in this statement. It is difficult to clearly define at points whether Goold is referring to the Chapmans or to Power and himself. Goold sees the Chapmans’ partnership as a way to disassociate the individuality of the artist from the work and, specifically for Power and himself as ‘nascent’ theatre makers, a way of providing a safety net for more risky work. More importantly, Goold and Power’s partnership mirrors the Chapmans’ partnership in terms of the idea of a critical and creative hive mind. His description of Power and his working relationship resembles the Chapmans’ description of theirs:

314  S. Grochala We’d also developed an MO which was that we would walk around a lot and talk. And then we’d write different bits. In general with the Faustus, I’d take a stab at the Chapman stuff and Ben would rework the Marlowe and then we’d pass it between us.

Talking to Goold and Power, this hive mind quality to their work together is quickly apparent. For example, in a moment where they are discussing a pre-Chapman version of the modern narrative whose traces remain in the character of Helena: BP:  T  he ghost of the third world immigrant cleaner is unfortunately a recurring trope. Actually, not just in us, to be fair. RG:  Like in Lepage. BP:  The working class. RG:  The liminal figure seated against the major cultural force. BP:  There in the background but who turns out to be at the centre. RG:  Yes, exactly, they carry all of the Kurdish conflict with them in their broomstick. BP:  Yeah. RG:  And unsurprisingly we struggled to get much traction off this. Together, they raise, confirm, build on, refine, challenge and, in this case, discard artistic ideas. It can be argued that Goold and Power both recognized and adapted elements of the Chapmans’ working relationship, during the process of creating Faustus, in order to refine their own working relationship (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”). Many artists, like Goold and Power, adapt the creative practices of other artists, both from within their own medium and from outside it, to develop their own individual creative practice. Practices in literature and the visual arts inform practices in drama and theatre and vice versa. The study of adaptation needs to expand its scope to include the study of these adaptations of processes, shifting the focus from the products of adaptation to the creative practices that underlie it. Within this context, the idea of artistic intention needs to be rehabilitated, not as a benchmark by which to judge the success of a work of art, but rather as a key to unlock the creative process. Where artistic intentions have been directly stated or can be established in conversation with the artist, then these intentions should be taken into consideration, not as the source of all meaning, but as a valuable tool in helping us to understand the how’s and why’s behind the production of an artistic work.

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Works Cited Alfred Hickling. “Faustus.” The Guardian. 12 Nov. 2004. Web. 28 Feb. 2015. Allen, R. E., ed. The Concise Oxford Dictionary. 8th edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Print. Art Happens: A Major Exhibition of the Chapman Brothers at Jerwood Gallery. 2014. Film. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Print. Barber, C. L. Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theatre of Marlowe and Kyd. Ed. Richard P. Wheeler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Print. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977. Print. Chapman Brother’s Bad Art for Bad People. 2006. Film. Newsnight Review. Chapman, Jake, and Dinos Chapman. “Insult to Injury.” Jake & Dinos Chapman. 2003. Web. 27 Feb. 2015. Gardner, Lyn. “Paradise Lost.” The Guardian. 5 Feb. 2004. Web. 7 Mar. 2015. Gates, Daniel. “Unpardonable Sins: The Hazards of Performative Language in the Tragic Cases of Francesco Spiera and ‘Doctor Faustas.’” Comparative Drama 38.1 (2004): 59–81. Print. Gibson, Eric. “Insult to Artistry: Modern Vandals Feed Off Greatness.” Wall Street Journal. 8 Apr. 2003. Web. 27 Feb. 2015. Goold, Rupert. Show Capture: Faustus. Hampstead Theatre: Headlong, 2006. Film. Goold, Rupert, and Ben Power. Faustus: After Christopher Marlowe. London: Nick Hern Books, 2008. Print. ———. Personal Interview. 17 Jan. 2014. Haydon, Andrew. “Theatre in the 2000s.” Modern British Playwriting: 2000– 2009: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations. Ed. Dan Rebellato. A&C Black, 2013. 40–98. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2012. Print. Jake and Dinos Chapman: What Do Artists Do All Day? 2014. Film. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. London: Routledge, 1983. Print. Jones, Jonathan. “Look What We Did.” The Guardian. 31 Mar. 2003. Web. 21 Feb. 2015. Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays. London: Penguin, 1986. Print. Power, Ben. “This Is Hell, nor Am I out of It.” Faustus: After Christopher Marlowe. London: Nick Hern Books, 2008. Print. Ramkalawon, Jennifer. “Jake and Dinos Chapman’s ‘Disasters of War.’” Print Quarterly 18.1 (2001): 64–77. Print. Searle, Adrian. “Apocalypse.” The Guardian. 21 Sept. 2000. Web. 7 Mar. 2015. Spies, Johan. “History of Doctor Johann Faustus.” 1587. Web. 28 Feb. 2015.

316  S. Grochala Steane, J. B. “Dr Faustus: The Text.” Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays. London: Penguin, 1986. 261–262. Print. ———. “Introduction.” Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays. London: Penguin, 1986. 9–37. Print. Turner, Christopher. “I’d like to Have Stepped on Goya’s Toes, Shouted in His Ears and Punched Him in the Face.” 1 Sept. 2006. Web. 7 Mar. 2015. Wimsatt, William Kurtz, and Monroe Curtis Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. London: Methuen, 1970. Print.

CHAPTER 16

Multivalence: The Young Vic and a Postmodern Changeling, 2012 Nora J. Williams

This chapter analyses the 2012 Young Vic production of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling as a postmodern adaptation of this notoriously difficult English Renaissance play. The Changeling has, since 1960, become a staple of the Shakespearealternative early modern canon. Despite the play’s relative popularity, its text has long been criticized for perceived problems of unity and coherence, and most contemporary productions have grappled with how to reconcile its two, seemingly disconnected plot lines. As a result of these disunities—this apparent ‘discourse of fragments’—The Changeling offers postmodern theatre-makers an ideal stimulus for a fragmented and collage-based approach to producing a classical play (Hassan 125). Whereas Aristotelian dramaturgical models require attention to the unities of time, space, and action, postmodernism encourages artists to think in multiplicities and to see the ‘space for debate’ (Malpas 1). Postmodernism requires an acknowledgement of the potentialities erased by any act of choice, and an awareness that the narratives of history are neither fixed nor inevitable. As a result, the very qualities that have made N.J. Williams (*)  Independent Scholar, Buffalo, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_16

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The Changeling unpalatable to academics and audiences at various points in its history—its perceived structural disunity, for example—also make it a perfect canvas for a postmodern theatrical experiment. More specifically, the 2012 Young Vic production and its revival the same year embraced divergence in their staging choices, resulting in a production that consciously created multiple, overlapping significations and rejoiced in multivalence. Director Joe Hill-Gibbins and dramaturg Zoë Svendsen described the intended aesthetic of their production as one of ‘jarring dissonance’, which they strove to achieve at every level of design, interpretation, and staging (Hill-Gibbins np). Speaking to Theatre Voice ahead of the revival, Svendsen defines the setting and time period of the Young Vic Changeling as self-consciously multiple: ‘We weren’t going to create a kind of simple, empirical location that was one world and one period’ (Svendsen np). Whereas most other twentiethand twenty-first-century productions have attempted to smooth over the play’s rough edges, the Young Vic Changeling pushed the inherent ambiguities and disjunctures of the play’s text to their logical extremes, creating an excess of signification in which potential but unrealized meanings existed—sometimes uncomfortably—alongside the meanings actually signified. This production was able to take on a multiplicity of meanings in large part because of the status of The Changeling as a classical and even canonical text. While adaptation theory has largely moved beyond what Hutcheon and others identify as the ‘fidelity debates’, adaptation as subsumed under Shakespeare studies and early modern studies more broadly still grapples with questions of faithfulness to a lost or even imagined ‘original’ text (xxvi). Unlike intermedial adaptations—movements from novels to films or from films to video games, for example—theatrical productions adapted from plays by Shakespeare and other early modern playwrights are inevitably intra-medial, springing from an existing theatrical text and performance history, and therefore obsessively preoccupied with and ghosted by their previous incarnations (Carlson 7). As M. J. Kidnie points out, ‘academics, students, theatregoers, theatre practitioners, [and] interested general readers’ still invoke a given play’s text as a benchmark for discriminating between ‘Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptation’ (5). Since The Changeling is less familiar to contemporary audiences, it sits uncomfortably between canonicity and obscurity. As a result, The Changeling both participates in and resists the debates around adaptations of Shakespeare.

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Particularly in the wake of the 2007 Oxford Collected Works of Thomas Middleton—a volume seemingly designed to re-make Middleton as a poetic genius in the image of Shakespeare—The Changeling and its contemporaries are still subject to the limiting and excluding forces of the author as identified by Foucault (159). Hill-Gibbins’s and Svendsen’s irreverent treatment of the play’s text, however, underlines the extent to which their production departed from both the textual and performance histories of The Changeling. The treatment of The Changeling at the Young Vic, therefore, more closely resembles Barthes’s dead author than Foucault’s limiting one: scenes were cut, swapped, and/or combined, jokes were updated and rewritten, whole characters were excised. While these, in themselves, are not postmodern interventions, they attest to the adaptive spirit of the Young Vic production. Furthermore, the production’s playful use of food and beverages and its multi-casting across the two plots accentuated rather than obscured the play’s gaps and fissures, creating a postmodern aesthetic and an undeniably adaptive Changeling. Some background on The Changeling and its performance history will be useful here to foreground my analysis. Written in 1622 and set in Alicante, the play hinges around two thematically connected but ‘superficially divergent’ plots (M. Neill x). One, usually dubbed the ‘main’ or ‘castle’ plot, focuses on Beatrice-Joanna, an heiress who falls in love with another man on the eve of her wedding. Seeing no route out of her predicament, she enlists her father’s disfigured and loathsome servant, Deflores, to murder her fiancé. She promises Deflores an ambiguous ‘precious’ reward without realising that he harbours a secret lust for her (2.2.130). He takes his payment for the murder in the form of Beatrice’s virginity, kick-starting a chain of events that eventually leads to their murder-suicide. In the parallel plot, usually referred to as the ‘hospital’, ‘madhouse’, or ‘sub’ plot, Isabella has been confined to her husband’s madhouse because he fears she will be unfaithful to him. Unbeknownst to her husband Albius, two gallants have disguised themselves as his patients in order to seduce Isabella. These two—Antonio and Franciscus—are joined by the madhouse keeper Lollio in their pursuit of Isabella. She plays them against each other and maintains her chastity to the end of the play, at which point she berates her husband for being a ‘jealous coxcomb’ (5.3.210). The castle and the madhouse physically intersect at only three points in the play’s text: the inmates of the madhouse are asked to perform a dance at Beatrice’s wedding

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in Act 3; Antonio and Franciscus—the disguised gallants—are briefly blamed for the murder of Beatrice’s fiancé in Act 4; and the madhouse characters are present in the castle during the final moments of the play. The Changeling has seen some thirty productions in the UK since Tony Richardson’s 1961 revival for the Royal Court, which brought the play back to English professional stages after a three-hundred-year hiatus; the last known professional production prior to that point was in 1668. Following Richardson’s example, most mainstream twentieth- and twenty-first-century productions have played it safe in design and interpretation, retaining a traditional Spanish and often Goya-inspired setting, cutting or changing very little of the quarto text, and employing a psychoanalytical interpretation via a broadly post-Stanislavskian acting style. Although the madhouse plot was the primary attraction of the play for early modern audiences, it has since been derided as irrelevant, offensive, and poorly written. This is perhaps understandable given its out-of-date portrayals of mental health and learning disabilities, yet most objections from the nineteenth century to the present have been made on the grounds of aesthetics rather than politics. Even contemporary critics seem to crave a greater degree of Aristotelean unity between the plots, referring to the madhouse plot as a ‘perennial problem’ (Billington np) and ‘dramatically unsatisfying […], commensurate with Rowley’s inferior skill’ (Pringle np). Despite this, the madhouse plot has rarely been entirely excluded—except in radio and television adaptations—and most productions have been praised for their attempts to integrate the two plots, to make the subplot ‘fit’: for example, Peter Gill was almost unanimously praised for achieving ‘unity’ between the two plots in his 1978 production (Scott 58). Within the context of the play’s history, it is somewhat surprising that the heavily adapted, deliberately disjointed, and distinctly non-naturalist Young Vic Changeling was the play’s most commercially successful production since the seventeenth century—and the only modern production of the play to merit a revival. I suggest that the successes of Hill-Gibbins, Svendsen, and their team arose from their willingness to cast aside the narrative of what a ‘classic’ play should be or do—predominantly because they were not worried about the audience reception of the play, as The Changeling is less well known than Shakespeare. By rejecting the performance tradition of The Changeling, the expectations placed upon a canonical text in performance, and the dominant Stanislavsky-derived approach to performance, the Young Vic team created an adapted

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Changeling that can be read as distinctly postmodern, full of multiplicity and celebratory ambiguity. In their efforts to cultivate this multivalence, Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen manipulated the ‘source text’ of The Changeling in a number of ways. While many of these changes were made to the script, the creative team’s work was most noticeable at the level of performance, particularly for audience members unfamiliar with the play. While Lyndsey Turner was criticised in 2015 for making relatively minor adjustments to the text of Hamlet at the Barbican, Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen received no such comments from the press on their radical changes to The Changeling’s script. Middleton and Rowley’s text may have been the jumping-off point for Hill-Gibbins’s and Svendsen’s interpretation of the play, but text was not foremost in their audiences’ minds. Reviewers almost unanimously described the production in terms of extra-textual contradictions: it was variously ‘creepy, sexy, and at times downright bonkers’ (Spencer 33), ‘flamboyant and frightening’ (Brown np), ‘warped and ironic, hysterical and hideous’ (Trueman np). These descriptions highlight the production’s postmodern aesthetic: it defied tidy definitions and straightforward interpretations, and revelled instead in the kind of divergence and multiplicity that defines the postmodern movement itself (Kaye 144–145). Ironically, in responding to and building their production around the ‘dissonance’ that so many critics have observed in the text of The Changeling, Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen created an adaptation that seemed to eschew textual fidelity.

Postmodern/Classic/Adaptation Although the Young Vic Changeling can and should be considered an adaptation at all levels, the production did not announce itself as such. Publicity materials cited only Middleton and Rowley as authors, and the title of the play was not changed. The audience, too, seems to have accepted the production as a ‘genuine’ instance of The Changeling, rather than an ‘adaptive’ one; not a single review uses the word ‘adaptation’ (Kidnie 29). Again, I would argue this is largely because audiences were not familiar with the play. In addition, Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen do not appear to have considered themselves adapters of The Changeling. Indeed, they position themselves in relation to the 1653 quarto, claiming that their aesthetic of ‘jarring dissonance’ was inspired by the text itself: ‘[d]ifferent parts of the play have different dramaturgies […].

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The language is different but more than that the actual, underlying style is different’ (Hill-Gibbins np). Nonetheless, I insist that this production is best treated as adaptation. The intention may not have been to adapt, but the resulting production functioned ‘as adaptation’ in a number of ways, not least in its use of postmodern principles to deconstruct and forground the performance as a dynamic process rather than a polished, monolithic, and predetermined product (Hutcheon). Although Linda Hutcheon defines adaptation as an ‘acknowledged’ or self-identified form, she also reminds us that ‘intending to do something is not necessarily the same thing as actually achieving it’ (109). Hill-Gibbins’s and Svendsen’s unintentionally adaptive strategies produced a piece of theatre independent from, yet also intimately connected to Middleton and Rowley’s Changeling. Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen, then, become secondary authors in the process of adaptation, and therefore (in Barthes’ terms) their intention to remain ‘true’ to Middleton and Rowley’s play is irrelevant. What emerges is a chain of authorship and readership from Middleton and Rowley to Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen and, finally, to the audiences at the Young Vic in 2012. The adapters’ identities as readers is overwritten by their role as the authors of the adaptation, and the birth of the reader (audience) continuously brings about the death of the author (Barthes 148). Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen’s dual roles—as Barthesian readers and authors—are reflected in the structure of their Changeling, which was defined by multiplicity and palimpsestuousness.

‘Hunger and Pleasure’ (2.2.150) Perhaps the most visually memorable feature of this production was its use of food and drink as substitutes for bodily fluids, weapons, and/or sex toys. As Hill-Gibbins explains in an interview with Exeunt, he wanted to portray a society ‘full of sexuality rolling out of control’ without awkwardly miming ‘realistic’ intercourse; he hoped to show the play’s violence, too, without resort to realistic blood and gore (Tripney np). Picking up on thematic connections between sex, violence, hunger, and desire in the play, Hill-Gibbins asked the audience to imagine trifle as a weapon, chocolate sauce as sexual lubricant, tequila as urine, and strawberry sundae topping as blood. Food items throughout the production, however, always retained their original food-ness as well, functioning simultaneously as menu items in a wedding feast and opportunities for a

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playful stretching of reality. This unstable relationship between the obvious significations—trifle as dessert, tequila as booze—and potential significations embodies the postmodern aesthetic, setting up a comfortable, familiar world before thoroughly disrupting it. For the first several scenes, the wedding banquet was set up in the background, providing a relatively straightforward image of wealth and extravagance, a doting but domineering father shelling out for his little girl’s big day. The items chosen for inclusion in the feast, however, also betrayed the metatheatrical practicalities of a props budget and the necessities of mounting eight shows per week over the length of the professional run. Despite the presence of a three-tier wedding cake, most of the foodstuffs presented to the audience were self-contained, easy to prepare ahead but serve cold, and relatively inexpensive, though present in large quantities: a punch bowl, oranges, bunches of bananas, overflowing bowls of popcorn, champagne bottles. The exception to the rule came in the form of individual portions of strawberry trifle served in polystyrene bowls, accompanied by self-serve toppings; these called to mind a child’s birthday party as much as a society wedding. From their first appearance, then, the props offered duelling significations: the extravagance communicated by the context of a wealthy heiress’s wedding and the volume of food presented was belied by the connotations of the food items themselves. These food props were present, passively, throughout the opening scenes of the production as scenery. Although they had clearly been set out in anticipation of a wedding, their first active use came in the form of violence, as weapons in the murder of Alonzo. The murder was represented through a lengthy fight sequence choreographed by Alison de Burgh, which made use of a number of the available food props. Deflores attempted to drown Alonzo in the punch bowl; Alonzo fought back using the cutlery set out for the wedding breakfast. When Deflores again gained the upper hand, he reached for a banana, which he attempted to shove down the screaming Alonzo’s throat, shouting ‘I must silence you’ (3.1.26). Alonzo was not killed onstage: Deflores dragged him off to finish the job as Beatrice, her father Vermandero, and her would-be lover Alsemero entered for the next scene. Taking no notice of the disturbed scene, complete with over-turned popcorn bowl and upset place settings, Vermandero calmly poured himself a drink from the now-weaponized punch bowl. The audience laughed, uneasily; at one of the performances I attended, a soft ‘oh, no’ was audible from somewhere behind me.

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Although Vermandero was still free to treat the punch as punch, its punchness had been overwritten for the audience by its signification as a murder weapon. As the play progressed, the food on stage transformed into other signifiers with more frequency. Towards the end of the play, Alonzo’s would-be revenger brother Tomazo hurled a serving of trifle at Deflores, accusing him of Alonzo’s murder. Deflores responded by readying his own trifle attack before succumbing to his guilty conscience and refusing to return fire. The exchange was both funny and surprisingly menacing; it made use of the classic pie-in-face comedy gag while simultaneously rippling outward to embrace the trifle’s multiplying significations. Tomazo’s floppy, ineffective trifle-weapon emphasized his impotence as revenger while echoing Deflores’s use of food items to kill his brother Alonzo. The trifle and accompanying chocolate and strawberry sauces had also used by Diaphanta (standing in for Beatrice) and Alsemero in the wedding night sex scene, which cast the trifle as sexual lubricants and toys. Blindfolded, the pair smeared and sprayed each other liberally, sensually covering themselves and the white bed sheets in a sticky, sickly mess of strawberry topping, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce. Tomazo’s food-weapon of choice also foreshadowed the trifle-flinging rage that Tomazo and Vermandero would unleash on Beatrice and Deflores’s corpses in the final scene. These overlapping significations made literal the play’s thematic connections between gluttonous hunger and sexual desire, but they also highlighted the disturbing closeness between sex, violence, death, and shame in the Young Vic production: the same items used as sex toys were also employed as weapons and as tools of humiliation and defilement. In addition, both Defloreses— Daniel Cerqueira in the original production and Zubin Varla in the revival—licked their lips after Tomazo’s trifle-attack hit them in the face: food was always still food. The audience was therefore asked to see the same prop (trifle) as a weapon used by Deflores and Tomazo, as an erotic aid by Alsemero and Diaphanta, as a method of defiling the corpses of Beatrice and Deflores by Vermandero and Tomazo, and as a tasty treat, all within the space of half an hour of performance time. In this way, the production denied its audiences any recourse to one, fixed meaning or ‘truth’ in any broad sense: the trifle constantly shifted between its significations as dangerous and erotic, delicious and impotent, menacing and celebratory. It never carried any of these significations without being haunted by all of the others; it was always, inevitably, all of the above.

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This use of the trifle and punch echoes Geraldine Harris’s characterization of the postmodern as a relationship ‘between multiplicity and specificity’ (11). In generating meaning through a series of specific uses—uses that always multiplied but never entirely overwrote or transformed previous significations—the food props in the Young Vic Changeling also called attention to adaptation as both a ‘process of creation’ and a ‘process of reception’ (Hutcheon 8). The illusion of spontaneity and opportunism in the applications of trifle to violence and sex in the production, combined with the imaginative power required by both actors and audience in the constant re-purposing of props, foregrounded performance as performance, as make-believe; this, in turn, invoked the self-referentiality that is a staple of the postmodern aesthetic.

Casting Across the Plots This metatheatrical self-referencing was also employed in Hill-Gibbins’s use of multi-casting. Harris argues for a definition of postmodernism as ‘a notion of subjectivity which is constantly being produced and reproduced through competing discourses’ (11, 12). The Young Vic Changeling’s use of multi-casting can be said to operate within just such a postmodern framework: it created subjects in order to break them down and re-arrange them, resulting in a playful, unstable and distinctly non-naturalist approach to character. Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen not only cast across the two plots, with most actors taking on at least one role in each world, but they made no attempt to disguise this doubling (or tripling) in the play’s design. Indeed, the staging highlighted multi-roling at various points throughout the production, embodying Harris’s idea of the postmodern as concerned with ‘subjectivity […] produced and reproduced through competing discourses’ (12). Paul Taylor describes the effect of this approach to the plots’ notorious disjointedness: Hill-Gibbins hurls the two plots across each other’s paths in brilliantly telling ways and without any change of scenery. In the asylum, there are disconcertingly rattling boxes, cupboards, and trunks that seem to be crammed with desperate, protesting inmates; the people who emerge are highborn characters, waiting to take to stage and in an equivalent emotional turbulence. (2012 np)

The ‘highborn characters’ emerging from within the confines of the madhouse transitioned the scene to the castle by virtue of their presence

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onstage, rather than through anything approaching a set change. A character’s connection to the castle rather than the madhouse was signalled primarily through costume and manner: expensive-looking suits, day dresses, shiny shoes, and leather gloves signified the wealth and status of the castle against the clinical uniforms, latex gloves, and hospital gowns of the madhouse. Elements of the grotesque penetrated both of these overlapping worlds, accentuating the sense of spillage from one into the other created by the ‘rattling boxes’. Alex Beckett wore a partial fat suit as Lollio in the madhouse plot, for example, giving him an outsized stomach; this was removed when he played Jasperino in the castle plot. Similarly, Eleanor Matsuura padded her breasts and bum as Isabella in the madhouse, but not as Diaphanta in the castle. The primness of the castle and its inhabitants was also undermined throughout, however: Jessica Raine as Beatrice in the original production emerged from a madhouse cupboard with her dress and hair rumpled before snootily telling the audience that she would get Deflores sacked. As I note above, Howard Ward’s Vermandero obliviously poured himself a drink from the punch bowl used in the murder of his future son-in-law just moments before. These elements of the Bakhtinian grotesque, of bodies unable to control their own borders, frequently served to highlight the ‘jarring dissonance’ that Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen wanted to infuse the play with: ‘We tried’, Hill-Gibbins says, ‘to constantly evolve the style, to not have one convention or one idea’ (2013 np). In most cases, the multiple conventions and ideas sat uncomfortably, but productively beside each other in the production. The diversity of meanings and overlapping signifiers were not always productively or positively evocative, however. Included in the grotesqueness of the madhouse plot, for example, was the portrayal of Antonio by Henry Lloyd-Hughes in the original production and Nick Lee in the revival. Both presented Antonio as suffering from cerebral palsy or a similar neurological condition affecting motor function as well as a learning disability. This resulted in a problematic, even offensive portrayal of a disabled body. Wearing a crash helmet, confined to a wheelchair, and clearly unable to feed or clean himself, Antonio was played by able-bodied actors Lloyd-Hughes and Lee, both of whom doubled as Tomazo in the castle plot. This portrayal of Antonio was especially concerning for its equation of bodily disability with intellectual impairment, although the two are not linked scientifically. In addition, Antonio feigns his disability,

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using it as an excuse to enter the madhouse and seduce Isabella. This results in additional, complicating layers of meaning: Antonio presents his idea of a ‘madman’ and, however grotesque, that representation is clearly convincing to Alibius, Lollio, and Isabella, at least initially. Are we, the audience, then, meant to read Antonio as representative of a popular image of ‘madness’? Are we asked to separate ourselves from the mocking and infantilizing of Antonio? Are we complicit in his ridicule? Or are we allowed to laugh at him because, after all, he is only faking? While the questions prompted by the portrayal of Antonio arguably participate in the multivalent, postmodern aesthetic of the production, the carelessness with which the character was constructed undermined and distracted in an unproductive way. The production’s use of cross-casting between the plots climaxed in the wedding masque sequence, which deliberately played across a variety of possible significations in its costuming and staging. This sequence, not coincidentally, manipulated one of the few moments of connection between the castle and madhouse plots in the play: the dance of fools and madmen that is commissioned for a performance at Beatrice’s wedding. Although the dance itself never materializes in the play’s text, there is a dumbshow wedding that occurs several scenes later. Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen manipulated and rearranged a number of scenes in order to bring the wedding dumbshow and the ‘Madmen’s Morris’ together, resulting in a literal, extended collision of main and subplots. The mashup of grotesque entertainment from the madhouse and the more austere wedding dumbshow was created at the Young Vic with hip-hop-inspired choreography by Maxine Doyle set to a blend of Beyoncé’s 2008 hit ‘Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)’ and Mendelssohn’s wedding march. The double-signification of the music—traditional white wedding and Beyoncé-brand feminism, nineteenth-century aristocracy and twentyfirst-century celebrity—was echoed by the presence of the entire cast on stage, who were dressed in costumes that spanned the range of the two plots. Lloyd-Hughes and Lee changed from Antonio into Tomazo onstage during the course of the dance, leaving Tomazo’s military uniform coat half-buttoned such that Antonio’s hospital gown was partially visible underneath. Svendsen notes that the production’s multi-casting was deliberately manipulated in the wedding dance sequence in order to muddy the waters, to create uncertainty: she says that because the sequence begins in the madhouse, it can be interpreted as ‘the mad people dressed up in wedding gear doing a kind of mimicry of the wedding

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[…], but at the same time, they are also in the costumes that they would be in, in the castle plot, in the rest of the play’ (np). Loud, confusing, and protean, the sequence bombarded the audience with multiple, overlapping Bakhtinian significations, never allowing a comfortable sense of what, precisely, was being communicated through the dance. The sequence began with Alex Beckett as Lollio leading Antonio through a rehearsal of the entertainment commissioned for Beatrice’s wedding. Dressed in their madhouse character costumes, the two men practised a simple step-touch movement (with Antonio performing from a wheelchair) to the soundtrack of Lollio incessantly chanting ‘fa, la, la, la, la’ (4.3.81). When Alibius, the master of the madhouse, arrived to announce a full rehearsal with all of his patients, Lollio performed the role of choreographer, shouting ‘a-five, six, seven, eight!’. On his cue, the mashed-up recorded soundtrack came blasting in, along with the production’s entire cast in wedding clothes. Lloyd-Hughes’s and Lee’s onstage change from Antonio into Tomazo literalized the amphibious relationship between madhouse and castle. Beckett, as both Lollio (madhouse) and Jasperino (castle) simultaneously, continued in his role as dance master, which also took on the connotations of best man in the context of the wedding. Still dressed in his fat suit and lab coat—his Lollio costume—he was responsible for calling out both the next steps of the dance sequence and the movements of a wedding celebration: he cued Vermandero and Alsemero to give mimed speeches after everyone sat down to dinner, and instigated a conga line once the faked meal had finished. The dual roles of dance master and best man placed Beckett firmly in both of the play’s worlds at once, the fulcrum of the motion between madhouse and castle. The dance also capitalized on the protean stage space created within the production which, like the food props, functioned through multiple, overlapping signifiers. What Taylor describes as Hill-Gibbins’ technique of ‘hurl[ing] the plots across each other’s paths’ reaches its climax in this sequence, with both sets of characters simultaneously, visibly, unavoidably occupying the same physical space on stage, occupying the same bodies moving through that space. The space therefore became fragmented in the course of the frenzied dance despite its continuous occupation by the production’s entire cast. As a celebratory conga line danced laps around the playing space and the mashed-up music continued to blare, Beatrice and Deflores had sex on the banqueting table: the public celebration of the wedding and a covert sexual encounter occupied the same

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stage space, at the same moment in time. Alonzo’s ghost—played by a body which only moments before had been playing the madhouse master Alibius—menaced Deflores as the party carried on around them: a private attack of conscience inserted itself into a public moment. As the party exited the stage, Beatrice was left alone to stumble upon her new husband’s ‘closet’, an intimate and personal space, while still breathing heavily from the dancing and wearing her wedding dress; the party continued on the other side of a door, signalled by distant club music and flashing lights. This juxtaposition of public and private life was in sympathy with the production’s use of props, haunting the space—as the trifle and punch bowl were haunted—with its previous significations, never allowing any meaning to become dominant or singular.

Conclusions The multivalence that infused the Young Vic Changeling spanned all aspects of the production, resulting in a postmodern adaptation that was very much in conversation with Barthes’ conception of modern authorship. The ever-proliferating uses of food and drink and the resulting overlapping signifiers were echoed in the multi-casting across the two plots: like the trifle and chocolate sauce, each actor’s body signified multiple characters and both plots simultaneously. The instability and changeability communicated by deliberate over-signifying was also selfreferential, calling attention to the process of theatre- and meaning–making, presenting an illusion of spontaneity in its repurposing of ‘found’ objects (i.e. the food items) and a ‘limited’ number of performers. Thus, moments such as visible costume changes and murders-by-punch-bowl not only offered a playful approach to a classic play but equally forced the play’s themes into productive and often uncomfortable relationships: ritual, sex, death, and violence comingled throughout. Despite their protestations that the play’s text was at the centre of their interpretation, Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen created an eminently postmodern and undeniably adaptive Changeling.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author’. Image Music Text. Trans. S. Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977. 142–148. Print.

330  N.J. Williams Billington, Michael. Review of The Changeling, dir. by Declan Donnellan. Guardian 16 May 2006. Web. 6 Sept. 2015. Brown, Georgina. Review of The Changeling, dir. by Joe Hill-Gibbins. Mail on Sunday 12 Feb. 2012. Web. 5 Oct. 2015. Foucault, Michel. ‘What is an Author?’ Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post Structuralist Criticism. Ed. J. Harrari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. 141–159. Print. Harris, Geraldine. Staging Femininities: Performance and Performativity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Print. Hassan, Ihab. ‘The Question of Postmodernism’. Performing Arts Journal. 6.1 (1981): 30–37. Print. Hill-Gibbins, Joe. Personal Interview. 1 Feb. 2013. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2012. Print. Kaye, Nick. Postmodernism and Performance. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994. Print. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2009. Print. Malpas, Simon, ed. Postmodern Debates. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Print. Middleton, Thomas and William Rowley. The Changeling. Ed. Michael Neill. The New Mermaids. London: Methuen, 2006. Print. Neill, Michael. “Introduction.” The Changeling. Ed. Michael Neill. London: A&C Black, 2006. Vii–xlv. Print. Pringle, Stewart. Review of The Changeling, dir. by Joe Hill-Gibbins. Exeunt Jan. 2012. Web. 5 Oct. 2015. Scott, Michael. Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling: Penguin Critical Studies. London: Penguin, 1989. Print. Spencer, Charles. ‘A creepy, sexy Jacobean extravaganza every bit as nasty as today’s plays’. Review of The Changeling, dir. by Joe Hill-Gibbins. Daily Telegraph 6 Feb. 2012: 33. Web. 5 Oct. 2015. Svendsen, Zoë. Interview by Heather Neill. “Dramaturg Zoë Svendsen discusses the Young Vic production of The Changeling.” Theatre Voice. Theatre Voice, 2012. Web. 13 Dec. 2012. Taylor, Paul. Review of The Changeling, dir. by Joe Hill-Gibbins. Independent 6 Feb. 2012. Web. 5 Oct. 2015. The Changeling. Dir. Joe Hill-Gibbins. Perf. Daniel Cerqueira, Jessica Raine. The Young Vic, Jan. 2012. Play. ———. Dir. Joe Hill-Gibbins. Perf. Zubin Varla and Sinead Matthews. The Young Vic, Nov. 2012 (revival). Play. Tripney, Natasha. ‘Changing The Changeling’. Exeunt. 13 Nov. 2012. Web. 5 Oct. 2015. Trueman, Matt. Review of The Changeling, dir. by Joe Hill-Gibbins. Culture Wars 6 Feb. 2012. Web. 6 Oct. 2015.

CHAPTER 17

Ensaio.Hamlet: Adaptation as Rehearsal as Essay Pedro de Senna

Especular se o dia é dia, se a noite noite, se o tempo é tempo, Se o ensaio é ensaio e se a peça é peça É desperdiçar o dia, a noite, o tempo, o ensaio e a peça. (Polônio / Fernando Eiras) To expostulate if day is day, night night and time is time, If rehearsal is rehearsal and if play is play Were nothing but to waste day, night, time, rehearsal and play. (Polônio / Fernando Eiras)1

In 2004, Brazilian ensemble Companhia (Cia) dos Atores peered into Shakespeare’s Danish tragedy and brought to the public a production which is described in the company’s website as an ‘autopsy’ of the play. The choice of word is interesting, given the history of Brazilian literary and cultural criticism, one of whose most important tropes is the notion of anthropophagy—the act of eating up a foreign cultural artefact in order to half-digest it, and regurgitate it back to the world, somewhat

P. de Senna (*)  Middlesex University, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_17

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modified. There is, of course, a great deal of playful irreverence in this cannibalistic attitude. Paradoxically, there is also an acknowledgement that Brazilian culture takes much of its nourishment from abroad, and that what we offer in return might not be in any way a superior product. The fact that the company claim they are performing an autopsy of Hamlet suggests that their approach is perhaps a little more refined than a digestive process; that this may be a less messy, more systematic way of dismembering the play. What remains, though, is the underlying assumption that the original text is dead. Yet, and again paradoxically, this postmortem examination reveals that the play is very much alive; perhaps the appropriate term might have been a biopsy, or an exploratory surgery, exposing much of the play’s internal life. In Ensaio.Hamlet, Cia dos Atores’ exegesis of this most hallowed of theatre texts, the polysemy of the Portuguese word ensaio, meaning both ‘rehearsal’ and ‘essay’, is deliberately appropriated by the company, who use the rehearsal process as a means to examine the play, and adapt it into a staged essay, one that not only illuminates Hamlet itself, but an essay on the nature of theatre in general, and the company’s own working processes in particular. In the opening scene of the performance, the actors are milling around the space as the audience enter. They light candles, play with mirrors, set out objects in a circle. They talk to audience members, greeting them and talking about Shakespeare’s play. They take seats, change seats; pick out champagne glasses from a box, lay out a costume rack. The performance is still being prepared, and yet it has already started … Eventually, all the cast sit down on chairs, forming a circle, alongside the objects, toys, props laid out on the floor.2 They are ready, it seems—that magical moment, pregnant with anticipation, when a performance is about to begin. And yet: one of the actors (Cesar Augusto) stands up and picks up a jacket, which had been previously placed on the back of his chair; he wears it—he will play Claudius; another (Fernando Eiras), taps his own head, willing concentration—he will play Horatio; a third one (Marcelo Olinto), starts to recite Hamlet’s first soliloquy (Oh that this too too sullied flesh would melt…)3 to himself. Are they still preparing? This lack of a clear delineation of the borders of performance, this blurring of the boundaries between the world of the theatre and the world of the play is reflected throughout the show in the cast’s relationship with their roles which, just like the objects scattered around the stage, are ‘almost “found objects” of theatrical culture’ (Saadi 110). Neither are these roles fixed—at different points in the performance,

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actors will play different characters. Like everything else in this piece— time, place—identity is also fluid. And as found objects, the roles can be held, examined, passed on. This chapter argues that rehearsal processes, critical approaches, and adaptation are inextricably entangled in this performance; which, it posits, is exemplary of contemporary global theatre-making practices. A word of caution is needed here: what this chapter will not do is to orientalise, make exotic this Brazilian Hamlet. While acknowledging there is something particularly Brazilian in the way the text has been cannibalized, linguistic and ethnic difference and specificity are taken as a given, and do not form part of this discussion.4 Moreover, (and this may come as a surprise to some readers) we Brazilians consider ourselves as part of the West. Director Enrique Diaz makes this very clear, when he states that one of the objectives of the production was ‘to ask ourselves how to appropriate a heritage to which we have the right, to do what I want with it today’ (Belusi C14).5 In this way, the company’s process of adaptation is one that is informed by a sense of cultural ownership and entitlement, which is perhaps different to the more reverent positioning generally associated with Shakespearean productions in the Anglophone world. Here, the role of translation comes more prominently into play. As Alfredo Michel Modenessi suggests, For all the reverence that he may command anywhere, it is precisely outside the English-speaking world that Shakespeare thrives from being in the company of many ‘others’ who perform and transform his texts – not only writers, directors and players, but translators, dramaturgs and audiences. (104 [emphases in the original])

Translations of Shakespeare remove the ‘threat’ of Shakespearean language from a production. They are by necessity transculturations—with culture understood here as being a product of place and time—and tend to be overwhelmingly domesticizing, at least with regard to the language. What this adaptation has done, nonetheless, is a domesticizing that brings the play not only into the country of reception, but literally in-house, to the domos of the company. Moreover, not only the text, but the performance itself is made familiar and brought into the vocabulary of the Cia dos Atores, interjected with the company’s own memory, and that of individual performers. Discussing the role of memory, and present cultural memory in forming adaptations, Suzanne Diamond

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suggests that ‘adaptations, like other recollections, are ultimately just overtures, tentative gestures aimed at connecting now with then’ (108). In Ensaio.Hamlet the connection is threefold: between the company and the text, between the company and its own history, and between the company and its (often faithful, and therefore also carrying a history) audience. The action in the opening scene continues with Bel Garcia picking up a lamp, testing it, and lighting specific parts of her own body. She lights her footsteps, as she walks across the stage. Cesar Augusto screams, suddenly a focus of concentration and alertness in the room. The senses are awakened. The lamp, which had been following Garcia’s footsteps, finds another body, a man (Felipe Rocha); it silhouettes him, working its way up his body, until it finds his face. ‘Who’s there?’, he shouts, as Marcellus. Garcia, as Francisco, responds: ‘I’m the one who asks Halt! And say who you are’. We are transported to the ramparts of the castle at Elsinore. The scene (equivalent of Hamlet I, 1) is played out. Of course, this is, it should be clear by now, never a straightforward ‘playing out’ of the scene. Actors shift roles, positionings; all inhabit many places at once. There is something significant in the metatheatricality of this adaptation, within the wider context of adaptations of Shakespeare. ‘In prose fiction re-visions of Shakespearean plays […] which deploy first-person narration’, Julie Sanders suggests, ‘a conscious effort is made to give a voice, and in turn a set of comprehensible motives, to characters either marginalized on, or completely absent from, the Shakespearean stage’ (140). While Sanders is writing about novels, the postmodern stance she describes applies here too: however, the unreliability of narrative highlighted by the attention given to particular vantage points is extended to encompass the unreliability of performance itself. And as well as an unpacking of the drama, there is an unpicking of the threads that connect performer and character, company and text, performance and audience. Moreover, in the self-consciousness of Ensaio.Hamlet, voice and motives are given not to hitherto marginalized characters, but to the performers themselves, who also behave like both novelist and narrator, at once unreliable (by definition) and earnest (by necessity). Frances Babbage suggests that in contemporary performance, following the physical theatre tradition, ‘the actor/performer, as opposed to the character, will likely be the heart of an adaptation’ (14–15). This is only partially true in the case of the Cia dos Atores: at the heart of their adaptation of Hamlet is not the actor/performer, but their relationship

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with the characters; a practice we might call—after Nicolas Borriaud— ‘relational adaptation’. This is of course not unique to the performance in question: Ensaio.Hamlet may be seen as a case-study for relational adaptation as a process inherent to the act of rehearsing and staging contemporary global theatres, where complex webs of personal and cultural interrelations, and emotional, critical and intellectual responses come into play. The duality of meaning in the word ensaio, then, does not only apply to the signifier, but also to signified(s), and to this specific referent. Fátima Saadi suggests that in Ensaio.Hamlet: Artifice, theatrical fiction is laid bare, not only in the actor’s work but also in the use of the other scenic elements. Through this move, Hamlet is transformed into an essay/rehearsal, into an experiment which separates, spreads out the elements with which it works, thus underlying their existence, their concreteness…6 (108)

This advances an understanding of how the performance might work as ensaio: an opening up of the play, which becomes mutual for both performers and audience. It is as if Hamlet and the act of making theatre have become one, the adapted text and the process of adaptation imbricated in such a way that makes them functionally indistinguishable: both terms in the binomial Ensaio.Hamlet operate together, dissecting the company’s own history and identity. Moreover, the all-important dot in the middle of the title functions as a hinge, in a kind of see-saw: the Ensaio has an effect on Hamlet; Hamlet affects the Ensaio. Or, to put it another way: work done on a source text on the one hand; and the text itself on the other—together, both shed light on each other and on the individuals engaged in that work. This is certainly true of canonical texts, which carry that aura of authority conferred by history and by criticism—and yes, more often than not (and undoubtedly in the case of Hamlet), by quality, that elusive concept around which many debates have been raised. I would like to propose, however, the following logical trail: first, Sanders proposes that ‘adaptation becomes a veritable marker of canonical status; citation infers authority’ (9). Adaptation here becomes a canon-building exercise, as much as anything else. Second, Margherita Laera suggests that ‘the mechanisms of adaptation and those of theatricality have something fundamental in common’ (3). Any theatrical production will by

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necessity operate an intersemiotic translation, from page to stage. If we accept these two simple premises to be true, then the very act of staging confers canonicity upon a text. Still, history indeed confers not only authority, but an archaeological record, which can be read as palimpsest. After so many editions and cultural iterations and mediations, asks Margaret Jane Kidnie, ‘What is it that we call Hamlet?’ (Dancing 134). A text with so long and varied a production history as Hamlet carries with it the uncanny ghosts of productions past. And just as important as the production history is the reception history, and the expectations that any new version immediately raises in audiences and readers. Elsewhere, Kidnie suggests that: An encounter with an instance of dramatic production prompts one to either find a place for it within an already-existing conception of a dramatic work (or to make a place for it, if necessary, by adjusting one’s expectations of the work), or to identify it as a first encounter with what seems, in one’s own experience and according to one’s own historically and culturally contingent criteria, a new work. (Shakespeare 32 [emphasis in the original])

Any reading of the play—and a production is a reading—will excavate and reveal the many lives of the text, which constantly opens up and unfolds itself, kaleidoscope-like, reflecting and refracting the gaze of the reader/viewer. It is this refractory capacity of production work that allows for the duality contained in the word ensaio. John Gross suggests that by casting academic criticism aside, one can ‘make room for alternative approaches, for the more informal or discursive or—on occasion—more inspired traditions of talking about Shakespeare’ (x). Though Gross means writing practices when he refers to ‘talking about Shakespeare’, the same argument applies with regard to performance practice—and practice for performance, which is after all what a rehearsal is. A rehearsal is therefore also a form of criticism, a testing out of ideas related to the text. I am suggesting here, perhaps not controversially, that the much-bandied term practice-as-research is pleonastic—at least in relation to theatre and performance. Every artistic practice worthy of the name, every rehearsal, is also a piece of research. Contemporary performance in particular is especially critical. In this sense, the essay on Hamlet that the Cia dos Atores presents us with on stage is indeed ‘inspired’, and part of a long intertextual tradition. Writing about Robert Lepage’s Elsinore, for instance,

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Kidnie points out that ‘we were witness to, and vicariously took part in, one performer’s experiential encounter with “Hamlet” [both character and play]’ (Dancing 140). Thus, Ensaio.Hamlet is a piece of criticism that is also self-conscious: taking as starting points the company’s experience of, and attempts at, tackling the text, it openly discusses the difficulties involved in these processes. This gives us clues as to what the aesthetics of the performance may be, a piece of theatre in which the continuum that goes between performer and character is traversed before the audience. It is, moreover, a piece of presentist criticism—an acknowledgement that it is not the past that informs the present; rather, the present shapes our understanding of the past, and in fact constitutes it, in a relation that is at the very least, dialogic. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes propose that this critical stance, ‘[d]eliberately employing crucial aspects of the present as a trigger for its investigations, its centre of gravity will accordingly be “now”, rather than “then”’ (4). I argue that if a rehearsal is a form of criticism, it is most certainly presentist, in that it is embodied, living criticism. The see-saw of rehearsal and text is very much at work in this instance. There is no escape from the here and now in the materiality of the rehearsal room. In presentist criticism, proposes Hawkes, the present is ‘a factor actively to be sought out, grasped and perhaps, as a result, understood’ (3). In rehearsal, the artist is not only seeking the present, but also actively seeking presence. And more than that: a rehearsal, as the process of preparation for a performance, has the preoccupation of creating instances of criticism which are present, every time they are repeated. It is this search that the company exposes, when bringing their ensaio before the public. This is made clear in the interlude created by the company between acts one and two. In this scene, the house-lights go up, and the company begins to discuss some trivia about Shakespeare and the play; this turns into a choreographed movement with chairs, where the company travels around the stage, sitting, lying down, standing up, walking. It is as if they are searching for something—a configuration, a positioning in relation to the text; a moment of true presence. They play with a wind-up toy skull and observe it move. The performers’ movements continue, except for one of them, Fernando Eiras, who had thus far been playing Horatio. He addresses the audience: ‘it seems like we never arrive at Shakespeare. Not that we have to arrive at exactly one definitive place […]’. French critic Georges Banu writes of the rehearsal as the ‘crossing of a ford that separates the text

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and the scene’, one which engenders a ‘veritable oral literature, gallery of portraits and an inventory of gestures’ (126).7 The company here are physically articulating this crossing, another continuum through which they travel. As mentioned earlier, after history and criticism, the third element on the ‘tripod of canonicity’ (if I may call it so)—quality—is a very loaded term. It is the attribute that allows a work to endure, in a self-perpetuating process. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith puts it: ‘Nothing endures like endurance’ (50). I will not venture into the debate around its meanings, assumptions surrounding it, and the implications of such assumptions, all too complex and contested for the scope of this chapter.8 Except, to say that for me a great piece of theatre, written or staged, needs to do three things: it needs to (a) move—engage emotionally at some level, be it character, narrative, situation, or aesthetic; it should (b) entertain—through interest in the plot, the surface of the text, the performances or the spectacle; and (c) educate—it must teach something about the world, humanity, theatre itself. A good piece of theatre will do two out of the three; if it does only one, it does not interest me. Ensaio.Hamlet, in my eyes, does all three. Not all reviewers agree, though: the late Barbara Heliodora, one of Brazil’s most acclaimed theatre critics and renowned Shakespeare expert, suggested that ‘there isn’t a single moment that expresses, even if misguidedly, any insight into what the author created’. She continues: ‘there is always the dubious excuse of the “re-reading” but this also has to have some meaning’ (321–322).9 The insistence on gaining insight into the author’s work is of course reflective of an implicit source-text bias that much of adaptation studies, and indeed presentist criticism, has sought to dispel. Kidnie, for example, suggests that ‘textual-theatrical instances are productive of the work’ (Shakespeare 65 [emphasis in the original]). In any case, even if a sourcetext bias was assumed and embraced, Heliodora’s verdict is rash. Jeferson Lessa, another reviewer, avers that ‘Hamlet is there: deconstructed, yes, but there’. He explains: ‘Without wanting to be Hamlet, Ensaio.Hamlet discusses questions about the act of staging d’aprés Hamlet, in an intelligent, agile and extremely sophisticated interpretation’ (322–323).10 Of course, in a way, Heliodora is right. The company’s objective was never to gain insight into ‘what the author created’. Artistic director Enrique Diaz has stated that ‘The proposal is to truly reveal things about us, to be penetrated by this heritage’ (Belusi C14).11 Eiras’ address to the audience explicitly tells us that at the centre of the piece is the

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company, engaged in an act of reaching out towards a non-definitive bard. What follows the performer’s confession of the difficulty in dealing with the author’s work is something remarkable. The performance distances itself further from the text, from Shakespeare himself, and elaborates on the company’s relation with the Western canon. Eiras carries on speaking: With the great texts, it is like this, with Chekov (he stands and walks across the stage) – we were doing a run of Chekov’s Three Sisters in São Paulo, first Saturday of the run, twenty minutes into the show and nothing happened, nothing, nothing, nothing […] we felt like we were outside the performance […]. I played Baron Tuzenbach (puts his hand on his chest), in love with Irina, I would tell Irina – ‘Irina look what I brought you’, I’d go inside and pick up a spinning-top, I’d bring it out… and put the spinningtop centre-stage. (He goes to the circle of objects, gets a spinning-top, winds it up. […] The spinning-top makes a whistling noise, as it spins). Everybody would stop and listen to the sound of the spinning-top. (The whole cast stands around the spinning-top, watching it spin; it spins, and little by little begins to wobble.) It was a magical scene, I thought it could save the performance […] I went, picked-up the spinning top, nervously, I picked it up, entered the stage, the spinning top… ([…] Bel Garcia picks up another spinning top from the circle of objects […] and falls onto the floor with it)… fell from my hands, it shattered on the floor. (All stop and look at Garcia, lying there, with the spinning-top in her hands) That cast, who were nowhere, suddenly found themselves somewhere. A place of danger, but it was real, something real happened on stage. (He walks towards Garcia, picks up the spinning top from her hands, looks at it, says) That’s when the performance began.

And Act II, scene 1 of this very idiosyncratic Hamlet begins. Still, the interruption is apposite. The breaking of the spinning-top in Chekov provides the opportunity for a break in the action in Shakespeare. The wind-up skull with which the company had been playing, reminiscent of

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the iconic memento mori of Shakespeare’s play, is also a reminder to Eiras of that other toy that belongs in the company’s repertoire and history; a toy which, in turn, reminds him of the ephemeral and precarious nature of performance, a memento mori of theatre itself. The company’s journey to Shakespeare runs past Chekov. The audience are asked to negotiate the route of this journey with the performers, now in Russia, now in Denmark, always in the theatre, in Brazil (or wherever the show is being presented). In dealing with this most archetypal of texts, the Cia dos Atores address questions of universality, memory, and adaptability, taking the Elizabethan play and filtering it through contemporary Brazilian eyes—while making reference to the Western theatrical tradition to which both company and text belong. The relational nature of adaptation, then, is trans-historical and multi-faceted. Many sources of course highlight a tendency towards investigations of the relationship between performers and audiences in contemporary theatre. For example, Sarah Gorman writes of Richard Maxwell and his New York City Players: ‘His refusal to allow actors to forget the presence of the audience suggests that Maxwell intends to retain the motivation, or rationale, for theatre-going as part of the evening’s agenda’ (197). What differentiates the work of Cia dos Atores in Ensaio. Hamlet is that in their agenda is also an exploration of the rationale for theatre-making. In common with other contemporary companies is the fact that their aesthetic is marked by an emphasis on the poetics of theatre. So not only the rationale for theatre-making, but this making itself becomes part of the aesthetic experience. Jen Harvie suggests that this may be ‘[a]t least partly because the only shared international language it can confidently presume is the language of theatre’ (4). Receiving international acclaim and numerous awards, the production’s wearing of traces of its own creation on stage only reaffirms the company’s insertion into a global system of production and consumption of theatre. I have criticized this homogenizing ‘language of theatre’ mono-culture elsewhere, as an elite endeavour which tends to erase real difference in the guise of a superficial multi- or interculturalism (de Senna 204). Such criticism and my earlier assertion that I would not orientalise the company’s work notwithstanding, there is something inherently subversive in the hybrid mixture of reverence and irreverence with which Cia dos Atores approaches Hamlet. This is perhaps a characteristic common to Latin American practices, used to ‘incorporat[ing] global strategies in heterogenetic fashion’ (Modenessi 109). Modenessi opposes this heterogenetic approach to the

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homogenizing tendencies I have identified. The piece becomes not only metatheatrical but also postdramatic, in a way akin, but not identical to that identified by Lehmann (2006). Here, the postdramatic operates like the postcolonial: European drama, the metropolis, is commented on by performance coming from a former European colony. The fact that the production was then shown in Europe reinforces a sense of the uncanny— a mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Hawkes points out (11–12) that Freud’s blurring of the distinction between heimlich and unheimlich carries over to the idea presented by Foucault in ‘Orders of Discourse’: that ‘commentary’s only role is to say finally, what has silently been articulated deep down’ (Foucault 13 [emphasis in the original]). Crucially and paradoxically, though, it must ‘say, for the first time, what has already been said, and repeat tirelessly what was, nevertheless, never said’ (Foucault 13). The primary/secondary relation between texts is disrupted; the familiar exists within the unfamiliar, and vice-versa. The repetition (a word to which I will return), then, contains the creation, the copy contains the original. Therefore ‘[c]riticism has at least a prima-facie case also to be seen as primary. Or rather, the whole primary-secondary relationship begins to seem ungroundable: perhaps there is, in respect of the literature/criticism nexus, no primary, no resting place, no home?’ (Hawkes 12 [emphasis in the original]). This of course has important implications for the notion of staging as a form of criticism, the relationship between performance and drama, and for the study of adaptations in general. Back at the ramparts, in Act I, scene 1, this blurring is played out in very concrete terms. Felipe Rocha, as Bernardo, is describing the apparition of the ghost, ‘The bell then beating one’—Malu Galli places a large transparent plastic bag she had been handling over her body; she is playing the phantom of the dead king, and is lit by Bel Garcia’s lamp. Rocha now takes Marcellus’s lines and exhorts Horatio (Fernando Eiras) to confront the apparition. Horatio crawls towards a pile of books, and picks up the first one he can get his hands on. He opens it, brings it close to a candle and reads: What art thou that usurp’st this time of night, Together with that fair and warlike form In which the majesty of buried Denmark Did sometimes march?

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The presence of ‘the book’ in theatrical adaptations is a common trope. Here, though, the object seems to be performing a triple role: on a narrative level, it appears as kind of holy book containing words capable of connecting with the dead king; on a meta-narrative level, it marks the performance as an adaptation, in a way also performing a séance of sorts with the dead playwright; and on a meta-theatrical level, the book points to the fact that it is a rehearsal, lines are being read. The action continues and as Malu Galli/the ghost walks away, an agitated Felipe Rocha pulls the plastic bag out from over her head. The eerie music stops, lights go up, and all seem disappointed that the ghost story has been interrupted. Eiras walks back to the pile of books and places it down. ‘Well…’, he says. Rocha, plastic bag in hand, speaks: It happened exactly like this, exactly like this. Malu was here with this plastic bag, there was a group of people gathered there. Some music was playing, this lamp was on. These candles, these mirrors were there, exactly where they are now. I was speaking to this group of people … I was saying that the clock, exactly like now, struck one. The light fades again. The same music returns. Rocha puts the plastic bag over his own body, as Galli had done previously.

The scene proceeds with the cast rearranged. The planes of reality are blurred. Performers speak as characters, but at the same time they refer to fellow players by their names. It is as if the company themselves are being haunted. Of course, they are indeed rehearsing the apparition of the Ghost. The ghost scene is paradigmatic in that King Hamlet’s phantom does himself return, establishing a pattern of repetition within the narrative itself, which is then played with by the company. Once again, the drama and the performance meet in the uncanny metatheatricality of the ensaio. Not coincidentally, the French word for rehearsal is répétition. Through a linguistic and etymological web of associations, we see rehearsal as a piece of criticism, which is itself a form of repeating, one that is not secondary, but ‘whose aim is the generation of the new in terms of the only kind of newness we can recognise, because its source is the old’ (Hawkes 20). Every attempt at repetition is an exercise in difference and variation. It is, in other words, an adaptation. If, as pointed out earlier, the rehearsal is a form of criticism, it is also a way of testing the

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limits of a text. Contemporary rehearsal practices stretch, reduce, distil plays into new dramaturgies, while still remaining, essentially, the same. Director Ivo van Hove suggests his task is to ‘X-ray a text’ (54). This chapter has argued that any rehearsal is also an exercise in adaptation. Georges Banu suggests that ‘to rehearse [répéter] is to engage in the battle of the same and the different’ (127).12 This is a process of which theatre makers are more and more aware even if the production of difference in sameness has always been key to theatre practice. What contemporary practice uniquely exhibits—as exemplified by Cia dos Atores, but also van Hove’s Toneelgroep or the New York City Players of Richard Maxwell—in ‘a present day climate where theatrical and critical cultures intersect’ (Hodgdon 157) is that relational aspect which turns the very process of staging into a process of self-autopsy. In the Brazilian context, Silvana Garcia proposes that, in a way, theatre groups or companies in their concrete formations, facing all the vicissitudes of existence in an under-funded environment and having to create models and praxes in order to survive as entities, already are their own first product (220). I would argue that this is not only a Brazilian phenomenon, but a tendency that can be observed internationally, environmental differences notwithstanding. This process of self-definition and affirmation has a number of shared characteristics, including a shift towards devising, a process commonly associated with adaptation. Cia dos Atores oscillates between devising and the text in this piece. In Brazil, however, the term ‘devising’ finds no translation, and is seldom used: there is an understanding that devising is simply staging, or perhaps that staging always involves a degree of devising, adapting. But, beyond sameness and difference, there is another meaning implicit in Banu’s assertion, and that involves the role of memory. He explains: Through the linguistic declension of the term [répétition], we find the contradictory duality that founds the paradox of rehearsal: it is at first a creative practice and then only an act of reminiscence, a discovery and then a memory, a doing and a re-doing. A double interrogation animates it: how to find and how to fix? (Banu 128)13

In this respect, adaptation is also a form of memory; rehearsal, a form of historiography; memory, a repetition. In the case of Ensaio.Hamlet, this is a memory of Shakespeare, a history of the Cia dos Atores and

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its members, remembering. In the final scene of the production, the equivalent of Hamlet V, 2, this double nature is enacted. The world of the play (where characters live) and the world of the theatre (where the text exists) meet again. The performers play and act in that intermediary, liminal space—the rehearsal. Fernando Eiras and Felipe Rocha are sitting down. Eiras asks: ‘There was a duel, wasn’t there?’, which Rocha confirms: ‘Yes, in the end’. Eiras then asks again: ‘And I was called, wasn’t I?’. In the space of a line, he seems to have gone from commentator to character, with the flick of a pronoun. ‘You were’, says Rocha; is he replying to Hamlet or to Eiras? After a moment of silence during which Eiras lights up a cigarette, he states: ‘I’ll go’. The other actors pull up chairs and sit scattered around the space. Without standing up, they recite lines from the scene, interspersing the intimate moments between Hamlet and Horatio prior to the duel, when the former admits to being unnerved, with lines from the duel itself. The scene is thus not played, not read, but recited collectively. The continuum that goes between playing a character and reading a text is again explored, with this simple device. And yet, by the end, the audience are so invested in the moment, in the characters’ and the performers’ journeys, that we cannot help but be moved.14 In this adaptation as rehearsal as essay something new is being created, just as something old is being dismembered, and remembered.

Notes



1. I am grateful to Roberto Carlos Moretto (2009), who reproduced the performance text transcribed by Daniela Fortes in his MA dissertation. (My translation, always henceforth.) 2. The piece was conceived in the round, but also adjusted for different spaces and performed end-on, as I saw it in the Teatro do Jockey, Rio de Janeiro, in June 2004. 3. There is some controversy over this line in Shakespeare, with some scholars and editors opting for ‘solid flesh’ over ‘sullied flesh’; I am guided in my choice here by the Brazilian version, which used the word maculada in Portuguese. The text of the performance was based upon the fluent and poetic translation of Hamlet by Millôr Fernandes. 4. For a discussion of intercultural issues surrounding Shakespeare in Latin American contexts, see Rick J. Santos, who has suggested that Brazil is a ‘most fertile territory where numerous productions, adaptations, parodies and scholarship have bloomed’ (Santos 13).

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5. ‘[Trata-se de] nos indagar como se apropriar de uma herança a qual temos direito para fazer o que eu quiser com ela hoje’. 6. O artifício, a ficção teatral é posta a nu, não só no trabalho do ator mas também na utilização dos demais elementos cênicos. Por este gesto, Hamlet é transformado num ensaio, num experimento que separa, espaceja os elementos com os quais trabalha, sublinhando assim sua existência, sua concretude … 7. Original full quotation: ‘La répétition est un entre-deux, et lors de la traversée de ce gué qui sépare le texte et la scène les aventures souvent abondent, les personnalités se déclarent, les communautés se constituent ou explosent, bref la création s’accompagne d’effets de vie au cœur même du théâtre. C’est pourquoi la répétition engendre une véritable littérature orale, galerie de portraits et inventaire de gestes accomplis dans cette recherche à plusieurs qui précède l’arrivée du premier spectateur’. 8. Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Contingencies of Value offers a detailed examination of canonicity and the value-judgements associated with it. 9.  ‘Não há um único momento que se expresse, mesmo que enganada, qualquer penetração maior no sentido do que o autor criou. […] sempre existe a dúbia desculpa da ‘releitura’, porém também esta tem de ter algum sentido’. 10. ‘Hamlet está lá: desconstruído, sim, mas lá. […] Sem querer ser Hamlet, Ensaio.Hamlet discute questões sobre o ato de encenar a partir de Hamlet numa interpretação inteligente, ágil e extremamente sofisticada’. 11. ‘A proposta é realmente revelar as coisas sobre nós, sermos penetrados pela herança’. 12. ‘Répéter, c’est s’engager dans le combat du même et du différent’. 13. ‘A travers la déclinaison linguistique du terme, l’on retrouve la dualité contradictoire qui fonde le paradoxe de la répétition : elle est d’abord une pratique de création et ensuite seulement un acte de réminiscence, une découverte et après une mémoire, un faire et un re-faire. Une double interrogation l’anime : comment trouver et comment fixer?’ 14. On the night I saw the performance, a man sitting in front of me could not applaud in the end: face in his hands, he sobbed.

Works

cited

Babbage, Frances. “Heavy Bodies, Fragile Texts: Stage Adaptation and the Problem of Presence”. Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: textual infidelities. Ed. Rachel Carroll. London: Continuum, 2009. 11–22. Print. Banu, Georges. Les Répétitions: de Stanislavski a aujourd’hui. Paris: Actes Sud, 2005. Print.

346  P. de SENNA Belusi, Soraya. “Entre Tchecov e Shakespeare”. O Tempo. Belo Horizonte, 1st June 2007: C14. http://www.ciadosatores.com.br/site/wp-content/ uploads/2012/07/Enrique-BH.jpg. Web. 14 April 2015. Borriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 1998. Print. Cia dos Atores. “Projetos”. n.p. 2012. http://www.ciadosatores.com.br/projetos/ensaio-hamlet/. Web. 14 April 2015. de Senna, Pedro. “When Creation, Translation and Adaptation Meet: SignDance Collective’s New Gold”. Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film. Ed. Katja Krebs. London and New York. Routledge, 2013. 196–215. Print. Diamond, Suzanne. “Whose life is it, anyway? Adaptation, collective memory, and (auto)biographical processes”. Redefining Adaptation Studies. Ed. Dennis Cutchins, Laurence Raw, and James M. Welsh. Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2010. 95–110. Print. Foucault, Michel. “Orders of discourse”. Social Science Information. 10. 2 (1971): 7–30. Print. Garcia, Silvana. “Do coletivo ao colaborativo: a tradição do grupo no teatro brasileiro contemporâneo”. Na Companhia dos Atores: ensaios sobre os 18 anos da Cia dos Atores. Ed. Enrique Diaz, Marcelo Olinto, and Fabio Cordeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2006. 219–231. Print. Gorman, Sarah. “Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players – The End of Reality (2006) – Exploring acting”. Making contemporary theatre. Ed. Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. 180–201. Print. Grady, Hugh. “Hamlet and the present: Notes on the moving aesthetic ‘now’”. Presentist Shakespeares. Ed. Hugh Grady and Terrence Hawkes. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. 141–163. Print. Grady, Hugh and Terence Hawkes. “Introduction: Presenting presentism”. Presentist Shakespeares. Ed. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. 1–5. Print. Gross, John. Ed. After Shakespeare: writing inspired by the world’s greatest author. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print. Harvie, Jen. “Contemporary theatre in the making”. Making contemporary theatre. Ed. Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. 1–16. Print. Hawkes, Terence. Shakespeare in the Present. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Heliodora, Barbara. “Brincadeira não contribui para compreensão do texto”. Na Companhia dos Atores: ensaios sobre os 18 anos da Cia dos Atores. Ed. Enrique Diaz, Marcelo Olinto, and Fabio Cordeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2006. 320–322. Print. [originally published in O Globo, 15 April 2004].

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Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. Contingencies of Value: alternative perspectives for critical theory. Cambridge (MA) and London: Harvard University Press, 1988. Print. Hodgdon, Barbara. “Afterword”. World-wide Shakespeares: local appropriations in film and performance. Ed. Sonia Massai. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 157–160. Print. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. “Dancing with art: Robert Lepage’s Elsinore”. Worldwide Shakespeares: local appropriations in film and performance. Ed. Sonia Massai. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 133–140. Print. ———. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Print. Laera, Margherita. Theatre and Adaptation: return, rewrite, repeat. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic theatre. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Lessa, Jeferson. “Leitura iconoclasta resgata os ideais antropofágicos”. Na Companhia dos Atores: ensaios sobre os 18 anos da Cia dos Atores. Ed. Enrique Diaz, Marcelo Olinto, and Fabio Cordeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2006. 322–323. Print. [originally published in O Globo, 15 April 2004]. Modenessi, Alfredo Michel. “‘Meaning by Shakespeare’ south of the border”. World-wide Shakespeares: local appropriations in film and performance. Ed. Sonia Massai. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 104–111. Print. Moretto, Roberto Carlos. Ensaio.Hamlet: rupturas no gênero dramático e corpos em rede na cena de Enrique Diaz. MA Dissertation. São Paulo: USP, 2009. www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/27/27155/tde-07102009…/moretto. pdfWww.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/27/27155/tde-07102009…/ moretto.pdf. Web. 14 April 2015. Saadi, Fátima. “A natureza da Arte”. Na Companhia dos Atores: ensaios sobre os 18 anos da Cia dos Atores. Ed. Enrique Diaz, Marcelo Olinto, and Fabio Cordeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2006. 107–110. Print. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Santos, Rick. J. “Mestizo Shakespeares: A Study of Cultural Exchange”. Latin American Shakespeares. Ed. Bernice W. Kliman and Rick J. Santos. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. 11–20. Print. van Hove, Ivo. “Creating X-Rays of the text to dissect the present: Ivo van Hove of Toneelgroep Amsterdam in Conversation with Peter M. Boenisch”. Theatre and Adaptation: return, rewrite, repeat. Ed. Margherita in Laera. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 49–61. Print.

Index

A Abdullah II, King, 215 Abjection, 239 Abusaada, Omar, 221, 222 Actor’s Gang, The (Dream Play, Euphoria, Hysteria), 204 Adams, John (The Death of Klinghoffer), 58 Adaptation, 5–9, 11, 13, 15, 22, 25, 28, 33, 50, 51, 56, 57, 70, 73, 79, 80, 85–87, 97, 104, 121, 122, 124, 128, 133, 136, 137, 139, 143–147, 150–152, 154, 156–158, 161–163, 166–168, 170, 171, 175, 179, 195, 199, 214, 227, 231, 236, 240, 257, 263, 269, 276, 277, 287, 289, 295–298, 311–314, 318, 321, 322, 325, 329, 333–335, 338, 340, 342–344 Adaptation studies, 9, 62, 162, 296 Adapturgy, 122, 137–139 Adorno, Theodor, 281, 289 Aerosmith, 279 Afghanistan, 162, 163, 165–172 Agency, 78, 238, 301

al-Alqqad, Abbas Mahmud, 225 al-Assad, Bashar, 215 al-Assad, Hafez, 215, 219 alazzeh, Razan, 237 al-Kaseasbeh, Mutah, 216 Allen, Greg, 251, 252, 269, 271 Allen, Lori, 192, 226 Alpert, Herb and the Tijuana Brass Band, 279, 282 American repertory Theatre, 204 Antigone, 222 Anti-theatrical, 252, 256, 257 Aoun, Iman, 231, 237, 238, 242, 243 Apocalypse Exhibition (2000), 305 Appropriation, 80, 226, 277 Arabic (fusha, literary arabic ‘amiyaa, colloquial Arabic), 217, 218, 224, 225, 234 Arab World, 218 Artaud, Antonin, 128 Artistic intentions, 296, 314 Ashtar, 236 Ashtar Theatre, 2, 231, 232, 234, 236 Assemblage, 275, 287 Augusto, Cesar, 332, 334 Auschwitz, 145, 148, 151

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0

349

350  Index Austin, J.L., 301 Authority, 20, 26, 28, 76, 78, 162, 233, 240, 252, 257, 268, 335 B Babbage, Frances, 334 Baines, Roger, 300 Bakhtinian grotesque, 326, 328 Banu, Georges, 337, 343 Barber, C.L., 300 Barbie, 195, 204–206, 210 Barker, Stu, 10, 128 Barnette, Jane, 177 Barthes, Roland, 296, 319, 329 Barton, John, 313 Bay-Cheng, Sarah, 100, 108 Beardsley, Monroe, 296 Beatles, The, 280 Beckett, Samuel, 32, 200, 257, 264, 326, 328 Bedouin, 218 Beethoven, 102, 116 Benjamin, Walter, 162, 164, 165, 169, 170 Bergen Belsen, 144, 145, 149, 153, 154 Beyoncé, 327 Bigot, Georges, 283 Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 162, 163, 172 Birringer, Johannes, 70 Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, 290 Bloomgarten, Kermit, 146, 147 Boal, Augusto, 231 Boerman, Theu, 152 Bogart, Ann, 277, 289 Book, 20, 35, 36, 39, 82, 125, 138, 146, 154, 167, 170–172, 178–180, 182, 202, 242, 253, 263, 268, 304, 305, 342 Border Crossings, 231, 232, 234–236 Boucher, Étienne, 54

Böwe, Julie, 111, 114 Bowie, David, 179, 183, 186 Boyle, T.C., 168 Brantley, Ben, 114 Brater, Jessica Silsby, 326 Breath, 102, 124, 137, 329 Breur, Lee, 25, 326 Brisbin, David, 31, 32 British Sign Language, 199 Brovig-Hanssen, Ragnhild, 282, 287 Brown, Arvin, 181, 183, 258 Bryan, Karen M., 59 Buch, Achim, 83 Buhl, Brendan, 265 Bulbur, Nawwar, 224 C Cabbage Patch Doll, 261, 265, 266 Calvino, Italo, 22 Canon, 256, 293, 304, 317, 318, 335, 339 Castorf, Frank, 71 Cavendish, Dominic, 200 Cerqueira, Daniel, 324 Changeling, The, 317–322, 325 Chapman Brothers (Dino and Jake), 301, 304–306, 311, 313 Cheatham, Wallace, 58 Chekhov, Anton, 104, 276, 289 Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis, 290 Christensen, Inger, 111–113 Christmas Carol, A, 290 Cia dos Atores, 332–334, 336, 340, 343 Clarke, Paul, 102 Claycomb, Ryan, 172, 215, 227 Cleland, John, 175, 176, 182, 187 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 168 Collaboration, 5, 15, 16, 27, 30, 36, 38, 75, 78, 85, 98, 171, 208,

Index

209, 231, 232, 237, 240, 242, 243, 296 Collage, 35, 73, 276, 278, 281, 282, 317 Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, 319 Collective, 6, 11, 20, 21, 25, 27, 28, 32, 35, 45, 50, 86, 114, 125, 276, 283, 291, 344 Congruity/incongruity, 278, 282, 285 Connor, J.D., 162 Cornerstone Theatre Company, 277, 282, 284, 290 Coward, Noel, 10, 11, 63, 123, 136 Crane, Hart, 122, 123 Crawford, Cheryl, 146–148 Creed, Martin, 306 Crimp, Martin, 82 Cubism, 98 Culturally offensive, 168, 171 Cultural politics, 214 Curie, Marie, 27–30, 32–35, 45 Cyrus, Miley, 182 D D, Chuck, 279, 282 Danger Mouse (The Grey Album), 276, 280 Dari, 163, 165 Davis, Kirstie, 199 de Burgh, Alison, 323 De-historicization, 275, 287 Dempsey, Joe, 260, 261, 263, 264, 266 Descartes, René, 187 Devised adaptation, 6, 8, 26 Devising, 6, 8, 9, 11, 15, 17–22, 26, 28, 70, 74–76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84–87, 103, 277, 283, 343 Diachronic, 177, 267, 291, 308 Dialectic, 62, 176, 177, 296–298, 308, 313

  351

Diamond, Suzanne, 333 Diaz, Enrique, 333, 338 Dickens, Charles, 290 Diegesis, 252, 257 Dionne, Craig, 43, 226 Disability/ability, 32, 34, 56, 74, 76, 78, 98, 107, 145, 154, 203, 204, 206, 215, 226, 242, 243, 280, 313, 326 Disasters of war, 295, 296, 302, 311 Documentary theatre, 275, 276 Dolls, 59, 112, 137, 205–208 Donnelan, Declan, 72 Dramaturgy (new play dramaturgy, production dramaturgy), 73, 121, 122, 128, 137, 138, 200 Durlacher, Jessica, 144, 151–158 E Eales, Alex, 77 Eiras, Ferdinand, 332, 337, 338, 340–342, 344 Electronic Control Committee, 276, 279 Elevator Repair Service, 290 Eliot, T.S. (Four Quartets), 100 Empathy, 148, 227 Ender, Evelyn, 107 Ensaio.Hamlet, 332, 334–338, 340, 342, 343 Erased De Kooning Drawing, 304 Estrangement, 259, 261 Eucharist, 300, 301 European Commission, 236 Eurpides (Medea, Trojan Women, Helen), 276 Evans, Christine, 195, 196, 204–206, 208, 210 Evans, Dean, 260–263, 265, 266, 268 Exeunt, 322 Ex Machina, 49, 51–53, 55, 56, 63, 209

352  Index F Fairy tales, 6, 8, 11, 13 Falls, Robert, 267 Fanny Hill, 175–181, 185, 187, 189 Fedda, Yasmin, 221 Felipe, Liliane, 29, 36–39, 41, 42 Fibonacci sequence, 111 Fidelity, infidelity, 6, 7, 9, 63, 70, 80, 101, 143, 144, 148, 153, 156, 161, 162, 167–170, 172, 214, 267, 288, 296, 318, 321 Fidelity reflex, 162 Fifty-Nine Productions, 98 Fillion, Carl, 51 Fischlin, Daniel, 50 Foley, 69, 72, 77, 101–103, 111, 112 Foot fetish, 175, 176, 183, 185, 186 Forced Entertainment, 76, 175, 241 Foucault, Michel, 319, 341 Fragmentation, 102, 106, 110, 196, 200 Frank, Anne, 29, 144, 148, 151–153, 157, 158 Frank, Otto, 145–147 Frankfurt School, 80, 145, 281 Freres Corbusiers, Les, 290 Freshwater, Helen, 73 Friedman, Sharon, 107 Fry, Gareth, 101, 102 G Gallagher, Cheryl, 175, 177–179, 181–185 Galli, Malu, 341, 342 Garcia, Bel, 334, 339, 341 Garcia, Silvana, 343 Gawlich, Cathleen, 111 Gaza Monologues, The, 231 Georgetown, 222, 223 Gestic music, 177, 186

Ghosts/ghosting, 41, 45, 113, 124, 136, 157, 209, 232, 234, 260, 278, 314, 318, 329, 336, 341, 342 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 80 Global south, 214, 224 Globe Theatre, 6 Globe to Globe Festival, 231 Goldman, Derek, 222, 223 Goodman Theatre, 251, 267 Goodrich, Frances, 144, 147–153, 156, 157 Goold, Rupert, 295–298, 303, 304, 308–314 Gorman, Sarah, 340 Gothic Literature, 254 Govan, Emma, 9, 17 Goya, 295, 296, 302–306, 309–313, 320 Grady, Hugh, 337 Graeae Theatre Company, 197 Green, Germaine, 178 Greenfield, Merrie, 261, 262, 264, 265 Grose, Carl, 7, 10, 17, 21, 22 Gross, Robert F., 253, 255, 256 Gussow, Mel, 59 Guth, Lisa, 111 H Habeas corpus, 196, 200, 211 Handke, Peter, 70, 73, 77, 79, 84 Harris, Geraldine, 165, 167, 325 Hartinger, Dorothee, 84 Hartmann, Andreas, 77 Harvie, Jen, 78, 340 Haverty, Michael, 121 Hawkes, Terence, 224, 337, 341 Headlong, 295, 298, 312 Heddon, Dee, 75, 77, 82, 84

Index

  353

Heliodora, Barbara, 338 Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara, 338 Hille, Anastasia, 103, 110, 209, 222, 232, 233, 236–238 Hill-Gibbons, Joe, 318 Hip-hop, 276, 279, 286, 327 Hitler, Adolf, 145, 152 Homer, 237, 239 Human rights, 226 Human rights industry, 214, 226 Hussein, Sadaam, 217, 238

Khan, Hanif, 164 Kidnie, Margaret J., 267, 318, 321, 336, 338 King Lear, 25, 224, 225 Kite Runner, The, 161, 163, 165, 168–172 Knowles, Jack, 77 Krebs, Katya, 71 Kubeck, Elizabeth, 187 Kurup, Shishir, 284 Kyd, Thomas, 300

I Iconoclasm, 298, 300–304, 311 Intermediality, 70, 103, 115, 318, 344 International collaboration, 240 Intertemporal adaptation, intratemporal adaptation. See Laera, Margherita Intertextuality, 8, 10, 13, 23, 76 ISIS, 216, 223 It’s a Wonderful Life, 147 Itzhaki, Tali, 50

L Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, 222 Labour, 84, 86, 87, 105, 111, 114, 123 Laera, Margherita, 80, 86, 335 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 187 Lavender, Andy, 56, 78 Lehmann, Hans Thies, 50, 200, 341 Leong, Paige, 284 Ledger, Adam, 69 Leopold, Ronald, 153 Lepage, Robert, 50, 51, 53–58, 60–64, 314, 336 Lessa, Jeferson, 338 Levin, James, 57–59, 144, 147 Levin, Meyer, 145–149, 151–153, 156, 157 Little Angel Theatre, 19 LMDA (Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas), 121

J Jameson, Frederic (political unconscious, postmodernism), 200, 280, 281, 286, 287, 297 Jay-Z, The Black Album, 280 Jig, 131 K Kapadia, Parmita, 226 Kaplan, Mordecai, 148 Kekis, Olga, 211 Kennesaw State University, 121, 122 Kent, Alan, 5, 6, 16 Kessissoyou, Stefan, 77, 80 Kettle, Liz, 101, 103, 107, 109

M Mabou Mines Bèlen: A Book of Hours, 26–29, 36, 38, 39, 43–45 Dead End Kids, 26, 28–35, 42–45

354  Index Macbeth, 276–278, 282, 284–287, 290 MacHomer, 290 Macmillan, Duncan, 75, 79, 81 Manovich, Lev, 108 Marlowe, Christopher, 295, 296, 300–302, 304, 305, 310–314 Marquez, Gabrielle Garcia, 19, 20 Marx, Groucho, 253 Mash-up, 276–282, 284–291, 327 McBurney, Simon, 78 McLeish, Lily, 77, 78 Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, 276, 277, 282, 287 Mee, Charles L., 210 Melodrama, 202, 253–255, 258, 261, 268 Mermikides, Alex, 15, 18, 21, 22, 241 Metropolitan Opera, 49, 52, 57–59, 63 Middleton, Thomas, 317, 319, 321, 322 Miller, Arthur, 146, 165 Milling, Jane, 75, 77, 82, 84, 332 Milton, 297 Mimesis, 252, 257 Mirror, 19, 52, 53, 55, 109–111, 113, 114, 126, 133, 310, 312, 313, 332, 342 Mirror stage, 109, 110 Mitchell, Bill, 10, 19, 22, 69–75, 77 Mitchell, Katie A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, 70, 75, 77, 79, 83–85, 87 Attempts on her Life, 82 Fraulein Julie, 97, 110, 112, 114, 115 Night Train, 71, 72, 77, 82, 83 Some Trace of Her, 70, 73 Traveling on One Leg, 70, 72, 74, 75, 77–81, 84, 85 Waves, 69, 70, 72, 75, 80, 86, 97, 98, 100, 107, 109

Yellow Wallpaper, The, 70, 75, 80, 83, 85, 86 Mixed Blood, 290 Modenessi, Michel, 333, 340 Modernism, 253, 257, 268, 269 Modernist temporality, 100, 107 Moeller, Philip, 265 Momart Fire, 310, 311 Morris, Tom, 22 Morris, William, 103 Mortimer, Vicky, 102 Motherhood, 201, 203 Mrozek, Slavomir The Emigrants, 213, 214, 216, 219, 221, 224 Müller, Herta, 70, 74, 80 Mulvey, Laura, 109, 110 Murphy, Anna Maria, 10, 19, 21 Myths, 6, 8, 13, 17 N National Theatre, 6, 86, 101 Naturalism, 98, 101, 102, 104, 113 Nazis, 57, 145, 158 Necromancy, 300, 305, 309 Neumann, Fred, 33 NGOs, 214, 226 Nicholson, Jack, 303 Northampton Theatre Royal, 295 Novel, 69–71, 73, 74, 80, 81, 85, 97–100, 102, 103, 106, 114, 122, 123, 130, 139, 163, 166, 167, 169, 171, 172, 175, 211, 257, 318 Numinous, 124, 136, 139 O Oddey, Allison, 74 Olinto, Marcelo, 332 Omran, Samar, 213, 214, 216, 220 Oral storytelling, 6, 8

Index

Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), 276, 278, 285 O’Reilly, Kaite, 46, 195–197, 199, 206, 209, 211 Otto, Rudolph, 124, 145–147, 157 Owens, Erick, 58–62, 65 P Palestine, 58, 226, 232, 236, 237, 239–242 Palestine-Israel Conflict, 232, 236, 240 Palestinian Theatre, 231, 241, 243, 244 Palimpsest, 13, 15, 195, 196, 211, 336 Pao, Angela C., 59 Paracelsus, 30, 46 Paradise Lost, 297 Parker, Faniel, 286 Pastiche, 26, 35, 44, 200, 276, 280, 281, 287 Pavis, Patrice, 71, 73, 86, 143 Performative, 85, 87, 261, 301 Performative object, 179 Phédre, 104, 105 Phelan, Peggy, 108, 140 Picasso, Pablo, 282 Pimentel, Luz Aurora, 37 Pirandello, Luigi, 263, 295 Pires, Pedro, 54 Pollesch, René, 72 Popular culture, 11, 179, 224 Popular music, 276, 279, 282 Populism, 291 Pornography, 177, 180, 185, 189 Porous, 38 Possner, Dassia, 125 Postcolonial, 341 Postdramatic, 50, 200, 341 Postmodern, 76, 104, 106, 196, 198, 200, 210, 229, 275–277, 280,

  355

287, 317–319, 321–323, 325, 327, 329, 334 Postmodern impulse, 275 Power, Ben, 295, 297, 298, 310, 312, 313 Print, 180, 257 Prospero World Charitable Trust, 221 Public Enemy By the Time I Get to Arizona, 279 Rebel without a Pause, 279 Puppetry, 19, 125, 137 Q Queer, 185, 189, 255, 256, 271, 287 Quintero, Josè, 253 R R&D (Research and Development), 18 Racine, 104–106 Radosavljevic, Duska, 8, 9 Raine, Jessica, 326 Rap, 176, 177, 185, 279 Rauch, Bill, 275–277, 291, 292 Rectification, 295, 302–304, 313 Refugee, 171, 209, 213–221, 223– 225, 227, 237 Refugee chic, 225 Remix, 123 Repetition, 13, 27, 53, 108, 111, 138, 167, 177, 183, 269, 292, 341–343 Retellings, 5–11, 13–15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 168, 170, 296 Rice, Emma, 5–9, 11, 13–15, 17, 19, 21–23 Richardson, Tony, 320 Ridden, Geoffrey M., 224, 229 Rifai, Omar, 216, 228 Rivera, Geraldo, 264 Robbins, Tim, 244, 283

356  Index Rocha, Felipe, 334, 341, 342, 344 Royal Academy, 302, 305 Royal Courts, 320 Royal Cultural Center in Amman, 213, 216 Run D.M.C., 279 S Saadi, Fatima, 332, 335 San Jose Repertory Theatre, 171 San Jose State University, 171 Sanders, Julie, 13, 140, 143, 153, 162, 277, 334, 335 Sasanov, Catherine, 29, 36–39, 42, 44 Saylor, Eric, 59 Scenography, 49–53, 55, 57, 63, 64, 85 Schaubühne, 70, 80, 97, 115–117 Score, 35, 39, 52, 53, 55, 59, 63, 64, 84, 85, 101, 102, 107, 125 Screen, 11, 51, 54, 71, 73, 75, 78, 81, 85, 86, 103–105, 108–112, 114, 115, 127, 128, 137, 141, 152, 170, 199, 232, 261, 271 Seddon, Tess, 175, 177, 178, 186 Sensation Exhibition, 302 Severn, John R., 287 Sex work, 176, 186, 189 Shared language, 240, 241, 243 Shearer, Norma, 253 Shepherd, Mike, 6, 11, 15–20, 22 Sher, Jeremy, 259, 264, 265 Shining, The, 303 Six Characters in Search of an Author, 295 Smart, Jackie, 18, 21, 22 Smith, Roberta, 55, 61 Sony Acid Software, 280 Source text, 6–11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 23, 56, 57, 62, 126, 143, 150, 153,

158, 161, 162, 168, 172, 276, 287, 289, 296, 321, 335 Spangler, Matthew, 162–164, 167, 168, 170, 171 Spies, Johann, 313 Spirit of the piece, 124, 126, 133, 137, 139 Stam, Robert, 162 Stanislavski, 82 Stein, Gertrude, 108 Storytelling, 11, 19, 20, 27, 79, 125, 141 Strange Interlude, 252–259, 265, 267–271 Strindberg, August, 97, 112–115, 117 Sumud, 237, 240 Sunni, 217 Surrogation, 124, 140 Svendsen, Zoë, 318–322, 325–327 Syria, 213–217, 223, 225, 226, 228 Syria: The Trojan Women, 195, 197, 214, 221, 224, 226, 228 Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, 220 T Tabla rhythm, 163 Tarkovsky, Andrey, 113, 114, 117 Taymor, Julie, 50 Technology, 52, 54–56, 63, 64, 71, 87, 98, 103–107, 152, 281 Tectonic Theatre Group Laramie Project, The, 276 Terfel, Brynn, 61 Theater Amsterdam, 152 Theatre O, 73 Theatre of the Oppressed, 231 Theatre Studies, 5, 15 TheatreState, 175–177, 181, 182 Thin Man, The, 147 This Flesh is Mine, 231, 232, 234–236, 238, 240, 241, 243

Index

  357

Threading, 74, 77, 78, 85 Time (historical time, narrative time, real time), 6, 8, 20, 44, 57, 85, 87, 100, 107, 114, 165, 167 Tompkins, Joanne, 162 Toneelgroep, 343 Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, 252 Translation, 20, 37, 38, 80, 143, 152, 161, 162, 199, 276, 333, 343 Trauma, 123, 125, 177, 182, 189, 207, 254 Trauma of war, 226 Trojan Women, The, 196–201, 204, 210, 214, 222–224, 226 Troy, 196, 198, 205, 208, 209, 222, 233, 237, 308 Turner, Lyndsey, 75, 321 Turner Prize, The, 306 Tyler, Steven, 279

Walling, Michael, 233, 234, 236, 237, 242 Ward, Howard, 326 War in Syria, 213, 219, 224 War on terror, 168, 171 Weapons of mass destruction, 238 Weiss, Peter, 29 West, Cheryl, 177, 289 Wieninger, Julie, 77, 82, 83 Wilder, Thornton, 276, 289 Wilson, Melanie, 77 Wimsatt, W.K., 296 Wolff, Tamsen, 254 Woolf, Virginia, 69, 98–102, 106, 108–110 Woolland, Brian, 231 Wooster Group Route 1 & 9, 276, 277, 286, 289 To You, the Birdie, 104, 106 Worthen, W.B., 257

U Uncanny, 124–126, 137, 187, 341, 342 Universal, 144, 147, 149, 275, 287

Y Yale Repertory Theatre, 278 Ying Yang Twins, 184, 185 Young, Tracy, 248, 275, 276, 283 Young Vic, The, 318–322, 324, 325, 327, 329

V Valk, Kate, 105 Varla, Zubin, 324 Viewpoints, 36, 283 Voltaire, 179 Von Hove, Ivo, 72, 343 W Wagner, Richard Siegfried, 49, 52–55, 61–64 The Ring, 51–53, 57, 59, 63

Z Zionism, 239 Zoukak Theatre, 235, 236