Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre by Kailin Wright

Abstract

Reviewed by: Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre by Kailin Wright Sarah Banting (bio) Kailin Wright. Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2020. Pp. 253. CAD $34.95. In Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre, Kailin Wright defines “political adaptation”—the resistant re-presentation of canonical works—and showcases both its limitations and potential by examining a sequence of case studies from recent Canadian theatre. Wright joins a tradition of scholars, including Linda Hutcheon, who advocate for the creative and critical value of adaptation, and she claims special attention for political adaptation. This “inherently subversive form” (Wright 15) pointedly renovates its source texts in hopes that they can never be seen the same way again. Political adaptations, Wright argues, cannot simply be analyzed for their relative fidelity to sources; they must also be assessed for how faithfully they support—or, better, how unfaithfully they depart from—the sources’ politics. Political adaptation is not a uniquely Canadian mode, and interestingly, “popular spectacles” (34) everywhere are increasingly political in nature: Wright points to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton as an American example. Indeed, pointing to the current international popularity of political adaptation across a variety of media, Wright suggests that “the dispublic”—her term for the particular audience addressed by political adaptation—“is [widely] replacing the public as the new omni-present audience” (137). But Wright also argues for the special resonance of political adaptation in postcolonial Canada, where “politics and culture are [always] a performed adaptation” of other national influences (11). [End Page 185] The case studies Wright chooses illustrate the sort of topics that especially interest contemporary scholars: postcolonial, feminist, anti-racist, and Indigenous critiques of dominant Canadian, or broadly Western, cultures and colonial nations. They move from exploring the limitations of political adaptation to its potential for transforming not only the source texts but the entire cultural framework in which they are understood. Additionally, they allow Wright to document how recent theatre productions use “eight predominant strategies” to critique source texts, including using “multiple sources”; “inverted staging and cross-casting”; “self-reflexive discursive form, structure, and register”; and “collective creation and versioning” (23). Wright first examines Sinking Neptune, Optative Theatrical Laboratories’ critical re-performance of a masque which, first performed in 1606 for Mi’kmaq residents and French colonists on the coast of what is now called Nova Scotia, was designed to welcome colonial officials and establish the peaceful subservience of the Mi’kmaq. The adaptation’s politics, Wright explains, were antithetical to those of the source play, which the adaptors accused of celebrating “cultural genocide” (Optative Theatrical Laboratories qtd. in Wright 46). And its production strategy, which emphasized collective creation, opposed the source play’s “singular authoritative voice” (Wright 55). But because it nonetheless reproduced the entire source text, Sinking Neptune illustrates for Wright “an essential paradox of political adaptation” (58): adaptation summons the source to the stage, even when re-orienting the source’s politics. Wright’s subsequent two chapters take up neatly paired sets: two Canadian political adaptations of Shakespeare (Margaret Clarke’s Gertrude and Ophelia and Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet) and two of ancient Greek myths (Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Erin Shields’ If We Were Birds). Respectively, in Wright’s view, these plays re-orient audience investment to the women characters in Hamlet; reveal the impact on Black self-identity of Othello’s relationship with Desdemona; and restore voice and community to the handmaids murdered by Odysseus and to the women isolated and mutilated in a myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In these two chapters, Wright offers thorough and finely observed readings of each play. She also establishes how political adaptations work, via one of her key theoretical ideas: that political adaptation can be understood through the dynamics of identity-formation. Specifically, political adaptations disidentify with source texts; characters disidentify with source roles; and audiences unite as a dispublic in relation to the source text. In these articulations, the prefix “dis-” signifies the paradoxical attachment to and rejection of source materials that characterize political adaptation. Hence, Wright [End Page 186] contends that Clarke’s and Sears’ plays neither blindly identify with the patriarchy and racism of Shakepeare’s plays nor strictly counter...