Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- PART I NOSTALGIA, HERITAGE AND THE TOURIST GAZE
- 1 Adapting Pagnol and Provence
- 2 ‘A Tourist in Your Own Youth’: Spatialised Nostalgia in T2: Trainspotting
- 3 ‘200 Miles Outside London’: The Tourist Gaze of Far from the Madding Crowd
- PART II RADICAL CONTINGENCIES: NEGLECTED FIGURES AND TEXTS
- 4 Reframing Performance: The British New Wave on Stage and Screen
- 5 Why We Do Not Adapt Jean Rhys
- PART III RE-ENVISIONING THE NATIONAL IMAGINARY
- 6 ‘To see oursels as ithers see us’: Textual, Individual and National Other-selves in Under the Skin
- 7 Back to the Future: Recalcitrance and Fidelity in Julieta
- PART IV THE LOCAL, THE GLOBAL AND THE COSMOPOLITAN
- 8 El Patrón Del Mal: A National Adaptation and Narcos Precedent
- 9 Constructing Nationhood in a Transnational Context: BBC’s 2016 War and Peace
- 10 The Beautiful Lie: Radical Recalibration and Nationhood
- PART V REMAKING, TRANSLATING: DIALOGUES ACROSS BORDERS
- 11 In Another Time and Place: Translating Gothic Romance in The Handmaiden
- 12 Chains of Adaptation: From D’entre les morts to Vertigo, La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys
- 13 A ‘Double Take’ on the Nation(al) in the Dutch-Flemish Monolingual Film Remake
- Index
4 - Reframing Performance: The British New Wave on Stage and Screen
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- PART I NOSTALGIA, HERITAGE AND THE TOURIST GAZE
- 1 Adapting Pagnol and Provence
- 2 ‘A Tourist in Your Own Youth’: Spatialised Nostalgia in T2: Trainspotting
- 3 ‘200 Miles Outside London’: The Tourist Gaze of Far from the Madding Crowd
- PART II RADICAL CONTINGENCIES: NEGLECTED FIGURES AND TEXTS
- 4 Reframing Performance: The British New Wave on Stage and Screen
- 5 Why We Do Not Adapt Jean Rhys
- PART III RE-ENVISIONING THE NATIONAL IMAGINARY
- 6 ‘To see oursels as ithers see us’: Textual, Individual and National Other-selves in Under the Skin
- 7 Back to the Future: Recalcitrance and Fidelity in Julieta
- PART IV THE LOCAL, THE GLOBAL AND THE COSMOPOLITAN
- 8 El Patrón Del Mal: A National Adaptation and Narcos Precedent
- 9 Constructing Nationhood in a Transnational Context: BBC’s 2016 War and Peace
- 10 The Beautiful Lie: Radical Recalibration and Nationhood
- PART V REMAKING, TRANSLATING: DIALOGUES ACROSS BORDERS
- 11 In Another Time and Place: Translating Gothic Romance in The Handmaiden
- 12 Chains of Adaptation: From D’entre les morts to Vertigo, La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys
- 13 A ‘Double Take’ on the Nation(al) in the Dutch-Flemish Monolingual Film Remake
- Index
Summary
This chapter examines the adaptation of two stage plays to the screen during the ‘British New Wave’ period of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It locates these adaptations in relation to a specific national context, namely the symbiotic relationship between stage and screen in England. This began in the first decade of cinema when adaptations of theatre plays were seen as a means of raising the cultural status of film. The nearness of production centres and the exchange of personnel then helped to create a climate in which the exchange of practices and ideas was facilitated (Brown 1986). However this shared history is contentious as British cinema has been criticised for its overdependence on theatrical or literary source material and therefore the influence of the theatre has often been seen to be detrimental (Elsaesser 1972: Armes 1978). Criticism was particularly directed at stage-to-screen adaptations because of their shared identity as performance media. The ‘theatrical’ was understood to be in implicit opposition to the ‘cinematic’.
In film criticism, the term theatrical is nearly always a term of abuse. The need of film theorists to slough off the associations with the theatre has been an essential aspect of some versions of cinema's history. (Lacey 2003: 159)
This chapter, on the other hand understands the stage-to-screen adaptation in more productive terms, arguing that the hybridity of these textual products had a specifically national dimension in the way they integrated theatrical and cinematic elements. As David Forrest argues, the theatrical antecedents of the British New Wave films distinguished them from other national cinematic movements of the time:
The New Wave aspired to retain and reform the indigenous cultural elements which define the British cinema (a realist aesthetic and theatrical style) confirming the art cinema textual product of the New Wave as uniquely British. (Forrest 2013: 78)
There is much to be gained from thinking about these films as stage adaptations and this challenges histories of the period, which can neglect the adaptive status of these films. The period in question has been looked at in detail by theatre scholars and by film scholars but has generated debates specific to these disciplines rather than cross-disciplinary investigations (Higson 1984: Hill 1986: Rebellato 1999).
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- Information
- Intercultural Screen AdaptationBritish and Global Case Studies, pp. 67 - 83Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020