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- Volume 9, Issue 2, 2016
Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2016
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2016
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How to do things with birds: The Janus effect in theatrical adaptation
More LessAbstractThis article offers a model for understanding the complexities of how dramaturgy intervenes in the transformative process of adapting a text for the stage. Because it combines three key media for adaptation studies (film, literature and theatre), the primary example for this discussion is the film Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), directed and co-written by Alejandro G. Iñárritu. My analysis of Birdman and the stage adaptation featured within it (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver) takes inspiration from the Roman god Janus, whose faces look ahead and behind, associating this ancient god with doorways (januae), archways (jani) and beginnings (January). As this article demonstrates, the Janus effect is the transformation that successful dramaturgy makes within the process and product of adaptation for the stage. Recognizing this effect helps us unfurl the multiple layers of interstitial research and creative decisionmaking that adaptations require, especially when crafted for live performance.
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Everything goes back to the beginning: Television adaptation and remaking Nordic noir
More LessAbstractAs television drama undergoes a renaissance across Europe and the United States, this article focuses on the remakes of ‘Nordic noir’ crime serials. The genre has its origins in contemporary literary fiction, and became a cinematic cause célèbre with the Swedish adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels, and the controversial US remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. While adaptation scholars have long discredited comparative approaches based on the source/target text binary organized along value-judgement lines, in terms of television remakes, the opposite is fast becoming the case; comparisons between different versions of the same narrative become a playful and almost vital aspect of contemporary adaptation. While some theorists have argued that remakes often attempt to efface previous versions, in television, the opposite can be true. In examining the remakes of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Oplev, 2009), Forbrydelsen (2007–2012), Broen/Bron (2011–) and Broadchurch, (2013–) this article proposes that a new type of ‘synchronous’ or ‘active’ adaptation invites some audiences to engage in a far more playful exchange of textual moments, augmented and overseen by social media. In this way, adaptations can act as ‘logic-gates’ upon each other, and television remakes are now reflecting this.
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Rediscovering The Roses of Eyam: A forgotten television play
By Ben LambAbstractIn 1973 playwright and television dramatist Don Taylor rewrote and directed his play The Roses of Eyam for UK television. The original play, which was staged at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter in 1970, has been somewhat disregarded in Theatre Studies criticism despite its worldwide popularity in educational circles. Similarly, the subsequent television play has been relatively overlooked in historical studies of British television despite the fact it was one of the most ambitious dramas of its time. This article examines Don Taylor’s 1973 televisual adaptation in relation to his original production through archival research of production documents, interviews with producer David Rose, and a number of textual analyses. Analysing the process of adaptation the play had to undergo to fit with the conventions of 1970s studio productions will reassess established truisms present within adaptation scholarship regarding the visual language of studio-based television drama.
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Paternal responsibility and bad conscience in adaptations of The Shining
By Joy McEnteeAbstractStephen King and Stanley Kubrick are both important contributors to adaptation as an industry, so their contest over The Shining has the quality of a clash of the titans. This article discusses King’s commentary on Kubrick’s The Shining, as well as his two significant attempts at reappropriating the material: the miniseries Stephen King’s The Shining and the sequel novel Doctor Sleep. It interrogates the gender politics of each iteration, and pays particular attention to the moral status of the patriarch in order to test Greg Jenkins’s assertion that Kubrick’s tendency as an adapter was to ‘[imbue] his films with a morality that is more conventional than the [precursor] novels’ (original emphasis). It concludes that Kubrick’s vision of the patriarch is, finally, less morally conventional and certainly less sentimental than King’s, and possibly more horrifying.
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Review
By Laurence RawAbstractDASHIELL HAMMETT AND THE MOVIES, WILLIAM H. MOONEY (2014) New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 213 pp., ISBN: 9780813562620, p/bk, $26.95
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Practitioners’ Perspectives
Authors: Tom Ue and Christopher ShinnAbstractThe following interview was completed by e-mail on 26 November 2015. It focuses on Christopher Shinn’s Teddy Ferrara (2015), a play both informed by and in response to a number of recent suicides, including that of Tyler Clementi. This conversation explores Shinn’s creative processes for the play, which began its theatrical life in the Goodman Theatre in Chicago before being brought to the Donmar Warehouse in London where it had its London premiere. It goes on to examine Shinn’s views about the adolescent experience, desire, and LGBTQ issues, and it suggests some avenues for more positive ways to engage in discussions despite our differences.
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Editorial
Authors: Richard Hand and Katja Krebs
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