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- Volume 9, Issue 1, 2016
Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2016
Volume 9, Issue 1, 2016
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Martin Crimp’s pulverized cities: Dislocation, places and theatre spaces
More LessAbstractThis article considers how Martin Crimp’s plays imagine and create space starting with his cities, and moving into his houses, as they appear in his playtexts and in production. Considering both original plays such as Attempts on Her Life (1997), The City (2008), Fewer Emergencies (2002/2005) and In the Republic of Happiness (2012) and his contemporary adaptation Cruel and Tender (2004) (after Sophocles’ Trachiniae), the article traces Crimp’s translations, transpositions, allusions and dislocations of space and particularly the circulation of the image of a city under siege. Reading these pulverized cities in tandem with some of the ideas about the ‘inferno’ from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities ([1972/1974] 1997), the article suggests that the creation of contested imaginary space opens up questions and possibilities for audiences of his plays.
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Capturing Crimp’s soundscape
More LessAbstractIn this age of post-dramaticity that does away with such definitional concepts as conflict or fiction on a mimetic stage, Martin Crimp relocates ‘drama’ (action, conflict) within language itself. The translator’s challenge consists in fleshing out the materiality of sound and in capturing the dramaticity of the form as it is reinvented in musicality and in the underground activity of an often gendered lexis. Lacan’s concept of ‘moterialism’ as well as Roland Barthes’s ‘signifiance’ of language will be helpful concepts both for a theoretical investigation and for addressing the practical translation challenges. French director Marc Paquien’s metaphorical use of Chaillot’s monumental staircase and Hubert Colas’s expressionistic white balloons in their productions of Fewer Emergencies will help us visualize what is at stake in Crimp’s language and confirm the impression of contained semantic plenitude I could sense and analyse both as Crimp’s translator and as an academic.
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Adapting Greek tragedy during the War on Terror: Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender
By Emma ColeAbstractWhen contemporary playwrights adapt ancient tragedy they often distance themselves from their source, claiming that their adaptations are stand-alone plays that do not evince a complex relationship with the classical material. Martin Crimp differs remarkably from this, and is on record stating that Cruel and Tender, his adaptation of Sophocles’ Trachiniae, not only recalls the original’s structure, but also engages with its metrical patterns. In this article I build upon Crimp’s invitation to consider the two plays in dialogue by exploring Crimp’s interpretation of Sophocles’ Herakles figure, and the representation of this character in Luc Bondy’s 2004 production of the play. I argue that Crimp’s adaptation sheds light upon the performance dynamics of Sophocles’ lyrics and can help clarify debates over the text. In addition, I posit that Cruel and Tender can contribute to scholarship on the connection between combat trauma and Greek tragedy. By examining two of the ways that analysing Cruel and Tender can transform our understanding of Trachiniae, I demonstrate how practitioner readings of the classics can provide insight into debates over dramaturgical uncertainties in ancient tragedy, and the means through which these can be clarified in performance.
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Martin Crimp’s translations of Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love and The False Servant: Capturing the essence of marivaudage in English
More LessAbstractThis article examines how Martin Crimp manages to capture Marivaux’s art of dialogue in his translations into English of La Fausse Suivante and Le Triomphe de l’amour. It is focused on the function of repetition, identified as a central device in the construction of the Marivaudian dialogue and its handling by Crimp in English. In maintaining a dense network of repetitions, Crimp attempts to recreate the rhythm and tempo characteristic of marivaudage, while reinforcing the dramatic impact of the dialogue. He also aims to make the often opaque meaning of the original more directly accessible, partly by resorting to a more concrete and factual vocabulary, partly by disentangling the syntactic complexities characteristic of Marivaux’s style. Reading Crimp’s translations, one may even feel that the basic mechanisms at work in marivaudage become more easily identifiable.
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The space and culture of translation: Ferdinand Bruckner’s Pains of Youth by Martin Crimp and Katie Mitchell
More LessAbstractThis article focuses on Martin Crimp’s collaborations with Katie Mitchell in the context of productions of plays that involve a process of translation and whose source language is German. Specifically, the article concentrates on the productions of Pains of Youth by Ferdinand Bruckner at the National Theatre in 2009 and of The Jewish Wife by Bertolt Brecht at the Young Vic in 2007. The article offers a distinction when it comes to the terms adaptation, translation and version, before arguing that even in cases where Crimp has not produced a translation as such, but, rather, a version – as in the examples of these two texts – there is a substantial amount of translation involved. This translation is spatial, cultural, corporeal and indeed verbal, rendering the source text into a product that is responsive to a contemporary audience. Beginning with a consideration of The Jewish Wife, the article then goes on to examine in detail the methods through which Crimp and Mitchell delivered a modern staging of Pains of Youth that was entirely attuned to its modern-day context while remaining sensitive to its original cultural environment.
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The sweetheart factor: Tracing translation in Martin Crimp’s writing for theatre
More LessAbstractMartin Crimp’s activity as a playwright includes the translation and adaptation of the theatrical works of other writers. This article considers how Crimp’s theoretical and practical engagement with translation is manifested in his writing for the stage. Crimp’s voice on and in translation is analysed: first, from the perspective of translation theory, in particular as it relates to Crimp’s discussions on translation and adaptation; and second, in a study of Crimp’s use of the word ‘sweetheart’ in his various writings, including his translations and adaptations of works by other playwrights. I conclude that Crimp’s authorial presence exists throughout his work, whether self-authored, translated or adapted, while simultaneously operating to recognize the plurality of voices within a translated text.
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Reviews
Authors: Maddalena Pennacchia and Benjamin PooreAbstractRECLAIMING ROMEO AND JULIET: ITALIAN TRANSLATIONS FOR PAGE, STAGE AND SCREEN, VINCENZA MINUTELLA (2013) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 264 pp., ISBN: 9789042037342, p/bk, £49.41
ADAPTATION, INTERMEDIALITY AND THE BRITISH CELEBRITY BIOPIC, MÁRTA MINIER AND MADDALENA PENNACCHIA (EDS) (2014) UK: Ashgate, 234 pp., ISBN: 9781409461265, h/bk, £95.00
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Editorial
Authors: Richard Hand and Katja Krebs
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