Fluid Adaptive Revision and Twin-Track Authorship: Andrew Bovell’s Lantana Series from Stage to Screen

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Andrew Bovell’s Lantana series, arguing that his adaptive transformation of his own texts offers a notable exposition of auto-adaptation as an organic process. The ten-year creative and selective journey, in which the Australian playwright explores the themes of loss, trust, betrayal, entanglement, and emotional disconnection, began with the 1992 one-act play Like Whiskey on the Breath of a Drunk You Love and culminated in the 2001 award-winning film Lantana, offering an insight into fluid revision and twin-track authorship. Bovell’s screenplay retells and reimagines the events and themes of its four predecessors, crafting his ideas on the precarity of human relationships and the nature of truth into a tight, reflexive structure, through fragmentation and musical orchestration. In conclusion, the Lantana series exhibits auto-adaptation as a continuous process of growth, in which the pre-texts function as independent works of art and as resources for further reimagining and adaptive revision.