Film-Theatre as an Intermedial Occurrence of Theatre: Recycling Ionesco’s Bald Soprano

Abstract

Can the term and the category of adaptation adequately emphasize the relationship in which theatre and film engage during the audiovisual recording of live performances? Can renaming and positioning such films within a conceptual framework fitting their unique aesthetic qualities legitimate their status as interdependent art forms? For his 1991 adaptation of The Bald Soprano, Jean-Luc Lagarce supplants the British bourgeois interior suggested in Ionesco’s stage directions for a ‘décor kitsch’. To further the senseless world evoked in the play, Lagarce also adds a soundtrack with fake laughter inspired by sitcoms. Then, when Vincent Bataillon films Lagarce’s production in 2007, he relays the textual and scenic readings of the absurd on the screen with cinematic devices. Thus, while presenting his own conception of the ‘absurd’, Bataillon underlines a dialogic relation operating between the textual, scenic and filmic forms, thereby confirming the interdependent nature of ‘film-theatre’.