From Page to Stage: Locating the Spirit of Branar’s How to Catch a Star

Abstract

Oliver Jeffers’ best-selling picturebook How to Catch a Star has been the subject of several recent theatre adaptations for children. This paper provides a detailed case study of the 2017 stage adaptation created by the Irish-language, theatre company, Branar Teatar do Phaisti; an adaptation which has been highly praised for the manner in which it captures ‘the spirit’ of Jeffers’ original text. The paper asks what we mean when we speak of the ‘spirit’ of a picturebook, given that this elusive element which has been broadly equated in adaptation theory with the ‘story’ (Hutcheon in A theory of adaptation, Routledge, New York, 2006; McFarlane in Novel to film: an introduction to the theory of adaptation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996) can not be located solely within the verbal narrative of picturebooks but rather resides in a complex interplay of words and pictures and that the full meaning of these narratives is only actualized when the reader engages in a performative relationship with the book. The adaptation of children’s picturebooks from page to stage has to date been largely overlooked by contemporary scholarship both within the field of children’s literature and the field of adaptation studies. The recent proliferation of theatrical adaptations of picturebooks shows, however, that this is a dynamic and emerging area, and by viewing the highly creative and innovative strategies that Branar employed in their production of Jeffers’ classic within both the context of both contemporary picturebook scholarship and modern theatre criticism this paper aims to establish some criteria for the academic study of page to stage adaptation of children’s picturebooks.