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- Volume 5, Issue 2, 2012
Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2012
Volume 5, Issue 2, 2012
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Amos Poe’s neo-noir stage
More LessAt the time of its release Frogs for Snakes (1999), written and directed by Amos Poe, was criticized for its alleged formalism and gratuitous violence and some facile digs at Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Redressing these predominantly negative assessments, the present article views Poe’s overtly theatrical crime movie as a neo-noir parody which joins a considerable part of David Mamet’s dramatic and cinematographic output to classics like All About Eve, Guys and Dolls, The Apartment, All My Sons and On the Waterfront. Either these provided plot situations, characterizations and genre features or else the involvement of their creators in the HUAC – from Mankiewicz and Wilder through Miller, Kazan, Rossen and Schulberg – extend the intertextual network of Frogs for Snakes from its inset production of American Buffalo into a critique of the human expendability behind the American way of conducting business which the noir genre frequently equates with crime and shady dealings. The reception of Frogs for Sa es thus repeated that of American Buffalo in that its middle-class audience failed to see the point of the crooks’ ineffective negotiations, erupting in the junkshop’s demolition and Bobby’s beating, yet falling short of any actual heist. More importantly, the noir references in Frogs for Snakes, prolonging those in Poe’s earlier output, bring out the genre’s dramaturgical influence on Mamet’s drama prior to the release of his first consummate noir exercise, House of Games (1987). Conversely, the social awareness underlying the noir genre and its Depression era predecessors challenges the common critique about American Buffalo’s inconsequentiality and neo-noir’s superficiality. This critique was also levelled against the erotic thrillers of Brian De Palma, who directed Mamet’s screen adaptation of the noir TV series, The Untouchables (1986), and whose Dressed to Kill and Body Double are alluded to at the start of Frogs for Snakes.
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‘ Tis now the very witching time of night’: Halloween horror and the memento mori in Hamlet (2000)
More LessHamlet (2000) removes Hamlet’s discourse with the gravedigger and therefore his confrontation with death through Yorick’s skull. This scene in Shakespeare’s text represents the memento mori, and its removal disrupts the concept of mortality central to Hamlet. This article focuses on its dis- and replacement in Hamlet (2000). The amputated death’s head memento mori is revealed as having been replaced by Halloween imagery, emblematic mise-en-scène manipulations and horror signifiers throughout the adapted text. Appropriations and subversions of Shakespearean, early modern and postmodern emblems of mortality are examined. Late postmodern anxieties over disconnectedness, technological dehumanization and consumerism are explored in relation to the recoding of the memento mori via Halloween in this text.
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‘ Everyone in the Room has a Connection to the Story’: Fairytale adaptations in devised theatre
More LessAdapting well-known source texts for live performance lies at the heart of much devised theatre practice and fairytales have proved a rich source of inspiration in this field. This article argues that the fairytale genre, with its myriad of shared cultural symbols and vivid personal resonances lends itself particularly well to devised performance intended to be popular, accessible and celebratory, whilst also facilitating exploration of thought provoking social themes and cultural memories. Drawing on Jauss’ theories of reception and on studies of literary fairytales, this article examines Kneehigh Theatre’s version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and Cartoon de Salvo’s production of ‘The Ratcatcher of Hamelin’ to show how the subject matter that these companies have frequently chosen to adapt draws the audience into the event through the sense of a shared ‘horizon of experience’. In these devised adaptations both companies actively enhance the shared cultural memories surrounding their material; their oetics of performance and the intertextual richness of fairytales allows them to affect the aesthetics of reception and to encourage an experience of theatre as social collaboration between performers and spectators. Analysis of these productions also reveals how these companies use adaptations of popular stories to question aspects of contemporary society – specifically issues surrounding the tensions between individuality and social cohesion and the communal good versus capitalist gains – by bringing the audience’s expectations of the story into play for comparison. This article suggests that adapting well-known stories has been paramount to Kneehigh Theatre and Cartoon De Salvo’s development of their performance style and has contributed to each company’s success in forming a strong sense of connection with their audiences.
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A melodious anti-melodrama–Underscoring, song and parody in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
More LessCharles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839) is arguably the author’s most melodramatic novel, as Dickens adopts the grandiloquence and histrionic hyperbole of Victorian melodrama. The narrator repeatedly defines the principal conflict between Nicholas and Ralph in melodramatic terms, and both of these characters (along with the helpless and noble-hearted heroines, Kate Nickleby and Madeline Bray) possess traits that were commonly found in the characters that populated the Victorian stage. Nevertheless, Dickens also satirizes the conventions of melodrama through his humorous depiction of the Crummles Theatre Company; Mr Crummles’s wry observations about how to manipulate audience sympathies are humorously applicable to Dickens’s narrator, and thus to Dickens himself. This dialectic between the genuinely melodramatic elements of the text and the pastiche of melodrama sets up the tensions that would define the most famous and acclaimed adaptation of Dickens’s novel: The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1980). This epic adaptation dramatizes the complete Dickensian text (including the narrator’s narrative prose), but simultaneously eschews the conventions of Victorian melodrama in favour of modern and postmodern performance techniques. The musical score to the RSC adaptation epitomizes this contrast, for composer Stephen Oliver’s score embraces the conventions of Victorian theatre music while simultaneously drawing attention to the absurdity of many of these conventions; although the primary purpose of Oliver’s music is to provide melodramatic underscoring that reinforces the emotion of each scene, the composer likewise incorporates diegetic interludes and randomly placed songs that disrupt the continuity of the Dickensian narrative and draw the audience’s attention to the ‘falseness’ of what is transpiring onstage. The sense of pastiche and Brechtian parody conveyed through songs such as ‘Mrs. Grudden’s Goodbye’ and ‘The Patriotic Song’ further links the adaptation to isDickensian source, as these pastiches, like the pastiches in Dickens’s own text, are directly connected to the Crummles family.
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Hypertextual adaptation: Humanistic enquiry through transfocalization in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
More LessThis article considers Tom Stoppard’s use of hypertextual adaptation and appropriation in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) from the perspective of the change in the narrative focus (transfocalization) of the source. The analysis argues that critical commentaries to date have concentrated overmuch on the hypotext (Shakespeare’s Hamlet) without realizing the significance of Stoppard’s transfocalizing hypertext and its engagement with the identity of previously marginalized characters. In reappraising the decentralized target text, this article examines the ways in which Stoppard offers an alternative reading, as he adapts the source text and in the process performs the role of the writer as an intellectual, lending a voice to the previously absent, silenced, textually disregarded or unvoiced needs of the oppressed. It is argued here that transfocalization, along with complex interweaving of texts and ideas, provides the playwright with added opportunity for creative reworking of the crucial themes in Shakespeare’s original, resulting in broadly humanistic and existential commentary on the nature of human life and its quest for meaningfulness.
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REVIEWS
Authors: James Mavor, Maddalena Pennacchia and Laurence RawSCRIPTWRITING FOR THE SCREEN, CHARLIE MORITZ (2008) Oxon: Routledge, 220 pp., ISBN 13: 978-0-415-46517-5, p/bk, £18.99
THE ENCHANTED SCREEN. THE UNKNOWN HISTORY OF FAIRY-TALE FILMS, JACK ZIPES (2011) New York: Routledge, 435 pp., ISBN978-0-415-99061-5, p/bk, $49.95
THE ADAPTAION INDUSTRY: THE CULTURAL ECONOMY OF CONTEMPORARY LITERARY ADAPTATION, SIMONE MURRAY (2012) New York and London: Routledge, 253 pp., ISBN 978-0-415-99903-8, £80.00
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Editorial
Authors: Richard Hand and Katja Krebs
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