Theatrical Adaptation Research Articles

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

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.

Conrad’s Artistic Returns: Perspectives on a Bulgarian Debut in Staging Heart of Darkness

Since 1989 (the fall of Communism) the performing arts in Bulgaria have suffered a long process of transition dominated by a certain dialectic tension between the necessity to meet economic needs and the desire to open new venues for dramatic art. Against this background and contributing its own perceptive “reading” of Heart of Darkness to Conrad’s Bulgarian reception, on the eve of the vigorous celebration of his 160th anniversary in 2017, stage director Valeria Valcheva’s theatrical adaptation represents a remarkable debut rendition of Conrad’s fiction. The aim of this article is to explore how her idiosyncratic, creative, poetically recognizable approach lends a new form to Conrad’s recurrent relocation in modern and contemporary Bulgarian art. * The present article complements, expands and rethinks the authors’ latest study of the Bulgarian dramatization of Heart of Darkness, published in Bulgarian in Proglas journal, aiming to contribute to the discussions of Conrad’s reception in a wider academic space. See Margreta Grigorova and Petya Tsoneva, “ ‘Sartseto na mraka’—idei i resheniya na parvata balgarska postanovka” [Heart of Darkness on the Bulgarian Stage: Creative Perspectives and Techniques], Proglas 28, no. 1 (2019), pp. 35-46.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Bruce R. Burningham As I write these words, the world is still gripped by the COVID pandemic, and we have spent the better part of the past year hunkered down, "zooming" along, and rethinking all the things we used to take for granted. With the increasingly wider availability of COVID vaccines, we are starting to see a return to normalcy, but what "normal" might ultimately look like down the road is still up for debate. Still, the world of Cervantes scholarship proceeds apace. This Spring 2021 issue of Cervantes begins with three studies of the impact of Don Quixote on an increasingly globalized world, one that arguably began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thomas Rendall's "Life is a Dream: Don Quijote and Honglou Meng" examines the way in which Cao Xueqin's eighteenth-century, five-volume Chinese novel repeats many of the discursive gestures made famous by Cervantes, including the use of metafiction and what Rendall calls the iconoclastic questioning of received ideas. Rendall's study of Honglou Meng is followed by David Reher's study of Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil and his 2019 film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. "On the Shoulders of Giants: Social Fear and Male Self-Sufficiency in Cervantes and Gilliam" focuses specifically on the motif of giants in both Cervantes's and Gilliam's work, and argues that, while Cervantes's giants metaphorically demonstrate an anxiety of the unchanging—and unchangeable—abuses of the protagonist's social class, Gilliam's giants offer a less pessimistic approach to social change. Reher's work is then followed by Rosilie Hernández's examination of "desengaño" as it evolves in three interrelated works: Cervantes's novel Don Quixote, and Dale Wasserman's teleplay I, Don Quixote and subsequent musical Man of La Mancha. Following these first three articles, we present two more that also focus on Don Quixote but from within a decidedly seventeenth [End Page 7] century Spanish context. Luis López González's "Deadly Gaze and Divine Object: Marcela's Representation in Don Quijote" re-examines Cervantes's famously "proto-feminist" shepherdess (who is featured on the cover of this issue) and argues that Marcela is also constructed within a dialectical tradition of courtly love that sees women at one and the same time as both divine and dangerous. López González's piece is followed by Javier Lorenzo's "Sonnets over Forts: Rethinking Lyric Insertions in the Captive's Tale," which specifically links the narrative of this episode to two sonnets (also found in the novel) that treat the loss of La Goleta to the Ottoman Turks in 1574. The Spring 2021 issue of Cervantes then turns its attention to two pieces that examine Cervantes's other work. Felipe Ruan's "Crafting Factual Narratives: A Genealogy of Miguel de Cervantes's Información de Argel" analyzes the Información in order to explore the relationship between "documentary" texts and fiction, while Robin Kello's interview of LA-based playwright Julie Taiwo Oni explores her twenty-first-century theatrical adaptation of El retablo de las maravillas into The Woodingle Puppet Show. This issue concludes with three book reviews: José Montero Reguera on Antonio García Berrio's Virtus: El Q UIJOTE de 1615; William Clamurro on Clea Gerber's La genealogía en cuestión: Cuerpos, textos y reproducción en el Q UIJOTE de Cervantes; and Aliza Levenson and Ana Laguna on Luis Avilés's Avatares de lo invisible: Espacio y subjetividad en los siglos de oro. Thanks, as always, to our Associate Editors and other peer reviewers for all their hard work, to Ana Laguna for curating the book reviews, to María Dolores Morillo for helping me proofread the entire issue, and to John Beusterien for helping me manage the submissions process. [End Page 8] Copyright © 2021 Cervantes Society of America

Recepción e interpretación del Quijote by Emilio Martínez Mata Pablo José Carvajal PedrazalRecreaciones teatrales del Quijote: perspectivas teóricas, lingüísticas y culturales by Emilio Martínez Mata María Fernández Ferreiro Emmanuel MarignoThe Comical History of Don Quixote, Part I by Thomas d'UfreyLuca BarattaAaron M. Kahn Vicente Chacón

 Reviews was instrumental in establishing over three decades ago. Gerli here demonstrates the influence of the Libro on the serranas in the Cancionero de Estúñiga, arguing that Carvajal’s poems represent a burlesque travesty (p. ). He sees rewriting, glossing, and reinterpretation as central to understanding how later generations of poets read the Libro (p. ). Again, this chapter is about more than the Libro as it makes the question of interpretation by the readers valid for all literature. e Libro’s illustrative legacy is another of its echoes through the ages captured by Gerli in ‘Envisioning the Libro del Arcipreste in the Cancionero de Palacio’. He traces its visuality and how that affects medieval artistic imagination in Cancionero de Palacio with its marginalia and illustrated invenciones. Again, the illustrations tell a story about medieval readers, with ramifications beyond the corpus of this chapter. e Libro as a performative text is another study with general application. Gerli acknowledges that performance of written texts was the norm in the period and notes its reference to sounds, instruments, and invocations to the auditory. e Libro’s orality has been studied by a few scholars, although the nature of the text’s audience has not been. Some examine musical instruments in the Libro, drawing attention to the similarity between the process of interpreting music and delivery of the Libro, which, like a musical performance, may vary depending on the individual interpreter. Gerli argues that the Gayoso manuscript has a greater indication of oral performance, while the other manuscripts (S and T) seem intended for silent reading (p. ). Again, this chapter has wider implications for medievalists and Gerli calls on them to test his theory. is book is recommended to scholars and students of fourteenth-century literature , particularly, but not exclusively, those wishing to deepen their understanding of the Libro’s complexities. Gerli’s own contribution to developing understanding of the Libro, its readership, and its author will surely serve generations of medievalists. U  N L K. T Recepción e interpretación del Quijote. By E M M and P J C P. Madrid: Visor. .  pp. €. ISBN –– ––. Recreaciones teatrales del Quijote: perspectivas teóricas, lingüísticas y culturales. By E M M, M F F, and E M. Madrid: Visor. .  pp. €. ISBN ––––. e Comical History of Don Quixote, Part I. By T ’U. Ed. by L B; Spanish trans. by A M. K and V C. Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina. . lx+ pp. €. ISBN –– ––. It probably never occurred to Cervantes that he was opening Pandora’s Box by writing the Quixote and that its offshoots—not always first-rate, it has to be said— MLR, .,   would resonate through Western culture over the coming centuries. From  right up until the present day, Don Quixote has been resuscitated time and again in the most diverse fashions: sometimes as a model for storytelling, elsewhere as raw material for a genuinely quixotic literature or even as the prompt and raison d’être for everything encompassed by what is described academically as ‘Cervantine’. e three books under review here look towards this extensive field, and do so in a highly coherent fashion. is is in no small part due to the fact that two experienced and accomplished Cervantes scholars—Emilio Martínez Mata and Agapita Jurado Santos—are, one way or another, involved in all three publications, and secondly, because they constitute a trilogy, which begins with a panoramic overview of the reception, interpretations, and recreations of the Quixote in Europe from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries; continues with a study of theatrical adaptations; and concludes with a critical edition of a specific rewriting: e Comical History of Don Quixote by omas d’Ufrey, one of the foremost English dramatists of the Restoration period. Recepción e interpretación del Quijote opens with an essay by Gonzalo Díaz Migoyo that effectively functions as a preface for the edited volume as a whole, as he presents the Quixote as a book constituted by successive readings of its characters . It is certainly true that these readings have continued beyond the fiction itself and have only increased over the course of four centuries. Following...

Od Trylogii do Chłopów. Strategie reżyserskie współczesnych inscenizatorów „wielkiej powieści”

The great Polish novel is a staging task willingly undertaken by directors. The term ‘great novel’ means a novel in the epic type. The essence of its theatrical potential is already determined by its volume – it is undoubtedly a tempting challenge for the director. Equally inspiring are the basic features of an epic itself – a wide, panoramic spectrum of the community, embedded in the discourse of breakthrough, solstice of ideas, values, and identity identifications. The text discusses five source clues leading to the stage adaptations of the ‘great novel’ – the idea of post-dramatic nature, the issue of theatrical adaptation of a literary work, the issue of the so-called ‘indecency’, the formula of engaged theater and the problem of confrontation between reading the novel with the perceptual order of theatrical staging. The second part of the text presents the producer’s strategies used in two, especially important novels staged in recent years – the Trilogy, directed by Jan Klata and Peasant Farmers directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski.

O prozie Brunona Schulza w teatrze: problemy adaptacji

Due to the many unsuccessful theatrical adaptations of Bruno Schulz’s short stories, it is customary to say that his prose is ‘non-stage’. The reason for the failures of these adaptations lies not in the literary original, but in the specific methods of staging. Directors and adapters often repeat similar mistakes. Not all theatrical realizations based on work of Schulz are bad, there are also highly rated ones. There are two ways the adapter could take to show this prose in the theatre: capture the ‘spirit of the original’ or use the text as an inspiration.

ТЕАТРАЛЬНАЯ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИЯ КЛАССИКИ КАК КУЛЬТУРНЫЙ ОПЫТ ПОСТСОВЕТСКОЙ ЭПОХИ

The article analyzes the post-soviet artistic practice of working with theatrical interpretations of the russian classical plays «The Forest» by A. N. Ostrovsky and «The Seagull» by A. P. Chekhov. The productions of the Yaroslavl Volkov Drama Theatre were chosen as novel empirical material. The main objective of the study is to identify the features that characterize modern understanding of the classics, emphasizing the socio-moral and socio-cultural range of problems in the works. The main methods of the research are, above all, cultural and historical, resorting to which the authors present the peculiarities of interpreting russian classical drama in its social, moral and psychological aspects. Equally important is the aesthetic method with emphasis on artistic descriptive analysis of specific works of art, which is necessary for examining the paradoxical theatrical productions staged in the recent post-soviet period. Alongside with presenting the results of the research the authors give references to the leading authors using these methods. The article presents both literary and theatrical versions of the classical plays, as well as the opinions of contemporary critics about the productions. This allows us to give a thorough characterization of the views on the classics. The article shows two tendencies of working with classical literature in the post-soviet period. The first one, represented in Ostrovsky productions, is related to the actualization of the social and moral problems in the play. Through acting and scenography, the emphasis is made on the character of the landlady, on the comic aspects and moral criticism in the play. The second tendency presented in Chekhov productions has to do with the postmodern re-interpretation of classical characters as psychologically and aesthetically negative people. The authors consider the works analyzed in the article and the artistic, social and moral tendencies expressed in them to be representative of post-soviet culture.

The Moor’s Political Colour: Race and Othello in Poland

This paper provides a brief outline of the reception history of Othello in Poland, focusing on the way the character of the Moor of Venice is constructed on the page, in the first-published nineteenth-century translation by Józef Paszkowski, and on the stage, in two twentieth-century theatrical adaptations that provide contrasting images of Othello: 1981/1984 televised Othello, dir. Andrzej Chrzanowski and the 2011 production of African Tales Based on Shakespeare, in which Othello’s part is played by Adam Ferency (dir. Krzysztof Warlikowski). The paper details the political and social contexts of each of these stage adaptations, as both of them employ brownface and blackface to visualise Othello’s “political colour.” The function of blackface and brownface is radically different in these two productions: in the 1981/1984 Othello brownface works to underline Othello’s overall sense of alienation, while strengthening the existing stereotypes surrounding black as a skin colour, while the 2011 staging makes the use of blackface as an artificial trick of the actor’s trade, potentially unmasking the constructedness of racial prejudices, while confronting the audience with their own pernicious racial stereotypes.

(Re)visions télévisuelles de la colonisation du Nord – série médiatique d’Un homme et son péché de Claude-Henri Grignon

Claude-Henri Grignon’s novel Un homme et son péché presents the life of French Canadian colonial settlers of the Laurentides region at the end of XIXth century. It depicts a realistic image of the colonisation period of Quebec history. The novel is at the origin of a media series that englobes a radio adaptation, three filmic adaptations, theater adaptations, a comic, and two television series. The aim of this article is to discuss the vision of colonisation by analysing two television series based on Un homme et son péché: Les Belles Histoires des pays d’en haut broadcast from 1956 to 1970 and Les Pays d’en haut broadcast from 2016 to 2019 on ICI Radio-Canada Télé 1. The analysis will try to trace modifications inherent to the process of adaptation on different levels (protagonists, representation of space, ideological discourse) and their influence on the vision of the colonisation period.

Vampiros en Madrid. Juan Carretero y las adaptaciones de The Vampyre

A partir de la publicación del relato «The Vampyre» de John William Polidori en The New Monthly Magazine, y como consecuencia de su atribución a Lord Byron, se llevaron a cabo numerosas adaptaciones teatrales del mismo. Primero en París, después en Londres y finalmente en Madrid, el público de la época visualizó por primera vez al vampiro encarnado. El presente artículo trata de destacar el papel del teatro en la formación pionera de la imagen del vampiro decimonónico, y recoger cómo llegó al teatro de la Cruz en 1821, donde el actor Juan Carretero se convirtió en el primer vampiro que se pudo ver en Madrid.

Ẹnu dùn ń rò’fọ́…: Theatre design, audience cognition and dramatic adaptation of Fagunwa’s texts

The stage performance of Langbodo, a play, which Nigerian dramatist Wale Ogunyemi adapted from Soyinka’s The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, which, in turn, is a translation of D. O. Fagunwa’s prose, Ògbójú Ọdẹ Nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀. 'The bold hunter in the daemon-infested forest', exposed the limitation of the text as a bearer of meaning in the theatrical adaptation context. The limitation is analysed in this work to justify the centrality of adaptation in bridging the text-design-audience semiotic gap. This study examines the technical challenges of theatre design in D. O. Fagunwa’s works resulting from their adaptation as drama. The Yoruba apothegmatic idiom, Ẹnu ‘dùn ń rò’fọ́, agada ọwọ́ ṣeé ṣán’ko (which means, literally, that ‘vegetable soup can be prepared orally if a mere hand suffices for a cutlass’), a traditional derision for the inadequacies of the text, and the Barthesian notion of intertextuality serve as a dual theoretical structure in this study. A combination of methodologies including participant observation and ethnographic approach suffice for the retrieval and analysis of performance materials, respectively. Therefore, the study contends that the process of stage adaptation in Wale Ogunyemi’s play, Langbodo, used the technical contributions of theatre design, as a catalyst for connecting Fagunwa’s ideas to the final audience.

‘I was your slave’: Revisioning kinship in Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré’s Desdemona

This article offers a critical reading of Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré. By drawing on early modern race studies and Marshall Sahlin’s notion of ‘mutuality of being’, the article discusses Morrison’s lyrical prose as well as Traoré’s songs and performance to show how they merge and amplify one another in Sellars’ meditative staging to jointly rearticulate early modern notions of race, kinship and family embedded in Othello. By questioning what lies dormant, unseen and unheard in the Shakespearean tragedy, Desdemona supplements it with what Imtiaz Habib has termed ‘imprints of the invisible’ and invites its readers and audiences to ponder the onset of European colonialism, the slave trade, colour-based racism and their global aftermath, positing theatre as a metaphor for other civic, shared spaces where honest conversations about race, gender and class inequalities can open up a path to healing and reconciliation.

Singing back to the Bard: A conversation on Desdemona with Rokia Traoré

Rokia Traoré is a Malian singer, guitarist and composer, known worldwide for her artistic syncretism and political activism. Her distinctive style blends elements of traditional Malian music with blues, folk and rock to address contemporary geopolitical and humanitarian issues. She is the artistic director of Fondation Passerelle, a non-profit organization she founded in 2006 to support young African singers and musicians by offering them high-quality professional training and work opportunities in the music industry. In this interview, she discusses her experience as songwriter and performer in Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, sharing some intimate memories and elaborating freely on the role of performers and the importance of focused listening in live stage productions.

Channelling the dead: A conversation on Desdemona with Tina Benko

Tina Benko is an American stage, screen and television actress who has steadily trodden the Broadway boards for twenty years while starring in films and TV series and teaching acting and movement in New York City. An intensely focused and versatile performer, Benko has played in a broad variety of genres, ranging from screwball and Shakespearean comedies to realistic Russian, Scandinavian and American plays. In this interview, she discusses the factors that attracted her to drama and theatre, her acting training and approach to character-building, and theatre as a space for healing and reconciliation as she experienced it while working in Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré.

Progression and Return in Västanå Theatre’s Retelling of the Edda (2019)

In 2019, Västanå Theatre staged Jon Fosse’s Edda, a theatrical adaptation of myths from the Poetic Edda. This essay focuses on a number of formal devices used to adapt the Norse myths at Västanå, the dumb show convention perhaps offering the most stylized form of expression of these. The essay shows how the production helped the audience negotiate between a linear and a circular understanding of time, through formal and structural means: staging, selection and ordering of episodes signalled a strong initial focus on the inevitability of Ragnarök, while circularity and return were highlighted through the ending in which the world was reborn, but also through other features that stressed repetition and retelling. The essay argues that the dumb show convention could be taken as emblematic of the production’s negotiation between the two timelines, but it also shows how the device helped adapt female characters into more powerful agents, how it added hope in the form of young love, and how it functioned to draw attention to narration, words, and poetry.

Catherine Rees.Adaptation and Nation: Theatrical Contexts for Contemporary English and Irish Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017, ix + 185 pp., £79.99 (hardback), £63.99 (PDF ebook). Frances Babbage.Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre: Performing Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2018, 280 pp., £67.50 (hardback), £64.80 (PDF ebook). Kara Reilly, ed.Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018, xxix + 357 pp., £80.00 (hardback), £63.99 (PDF

Catherine Rees.<i>Adaptation and Nation: Theatrical Contexts for Contemporary English and Irish Drama</i>. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017, ix + 185 pp., £79.99 (hardback), £63.99 (PDF ebook). Frances Babbage.<i>Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre: Performing Literature</i>. London: Bloomsbury, 2018, 280 pp., £67.50 (hardback), £64.80 (PDF ebook). Kara Reilly, ed.<i>Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre</i>. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018, xxix + 357 pp., £80.00 (hardback), £63.99 (PDF

Mark Twain in Context

Mark Twain in Context

Letter from the Editor

Letter from the Editor

Iphigenia's sacrifice: generational historicity as a structure of feeling in times of austerity

AbstractIphi, an unemployed actor in austerity‐ridden Greece, imagines a theatre adaptation of a classic tragedy, Iphigenia at Aulis, in which the heroine is sacrificed on the altar of austerity by politicians. While writing her playscript, Iphi has a dream: she is taken to the sacrificial altar, not by politicians, but by her own parents, the generation who lived through the affluent years before austerity. Iphi's generational‐analogical thinking introduces a politically inspiring historicity, which offers insights into the accountability of austerity. It also allows us to reassess the notion of generations as a local category and an anthropological analytical construct. The article indicates the emergence of an as yet not fully articulated generational awareness – a new structure of feeling – about austerity, which is outlined here as it develops in an incipient form. I argue that the emerging generational historicity communicates a critical message, but also hides from view less visible inequalities.

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

Oliver Jeffers’ best-selling picturebook How to Catch a Star (2004) 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 that has been highly praised for the manner in which it captures ‘the spirit’ of Jeffers’ original text. This paper asks what we mean when we speak of the ‘spirit’ of a picturebook, given that this elusive element, that has broadly been equated in adaptation theory with the ‘story’ (Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2006) cannot 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 largely been overlooked by contemporary scholarship within both 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. By viewing the highly creative and innovative strategies that Branar employed in their production of Jeffers’ classic within 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.