Theatrical Adaptation Research Articles

Leon Schiller’s Theatrical Adaptation of Victory in Lwów

Leon Schiller’s Theatrical Adaptation of Victory in Lwów

Avatars contemporains du conteur dans Le Petit Chaperon Uf de Jean-Claude Grumberg

Avatars of the Storyteller in Le Petit Chaperon Uf by Jean-Claude Grumberg. Since the 17th century, when the story became part of the written literature thanks to Charles Perrault, the fairy-tale Le Petit Chaperon rouge represents an inexhaustible source of inspiration for all art creators. Over time, the renewal stakes of this canonical history changed and, during the 21st century, the heroine of the marvelous universe enters the theatre stage and inscribes the recreative approach of the tale in a contemporary art that puts together aesthetics and ethics. One of the authors who successfully managed to reconcile ancient and contemporary culture by transforming the canonical scheme of this tale is Jean-Claude Grumberg. Being a contemporary writer who finds the creative substance of his work in his childhood memories and in the painful experience of the deportation of the Jews, Grumberg wrote in 2005 the play Le Petit Chaperon Uf in order to tell the Shoah differently and to propose alternatives to a possible recurrence of evil. In his process of cultural and generic adaptation of the tale, the storyteller has an essential role. Our study aims to answer to two questions: ''why the storyteller is metamorphosing?'' and ''who is his avatar?'' in the play Le Petit Chaperon Uf. Playing an essential role in the process of transmitting the tale over time, nowadays, he becomes part of the performance and his voice merges with the voice of other participants in the action. The wolf-storyteller and the heroine-storyteller try, each in turn, to tell the tale in order to impose their own version of the great [His]Story of humanity: the terrifying and monstrous, for the Nazi-wolf, and that of peace, for the little girl forced to wear the yellow hood. Keywords: fairy-tale, theatrical adaptation, hybridization, rewriting, contemporary literature.

Children’s Theater Production Workshop: Diversifying the Classics and LA Librería

Abstract: UCLA’s Diversifying the Classics project (DTC) recently partnered with LA Librería, a bookstore that promotes children’s literature in Spanish and holds cultural events, to present a theatrical adaptation for children of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna. As readers will no doubt remember, Lope’s play presents a community of villagers who band together to overthrow their tyrannical overlord, Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, in the town of Fuente Ovejuna, near Córdoba, in 1476. For this workshop, various activities were offered in preparation for the play itself: rehearsing lines, decorating the stage, and the well of Fuente Ovejuna; painting T-shirts and cardboard daggers; and learning to sing ¡O Peor!, an original song composed for the play. This article will explain how the authors communicated with their partner organization, the planning and execution of the workshop itself, and the overall responses from both the participants and audience members.

Αρμόδιος και Αριστογείτων

Harmodius and Aristogeiton. An Adapted Tyrannicide in the Greek Pre-revolutionary Theater The tragedy Αρμόδιος και Αριστογείτων (Harmodius and Aristogeiton) is the most radical theatrical play performed by Greek amateur actors in Odessa in the years 1814-1820, since its subject is the tyrannicide as a legitimate resistance of citizens to power, when it arbitrarily abolishes natural law. The tragedy, first staged in 1819, was until now considered to be an original work of Georgios Lassanis (1793-1870), but my article proves that in fact it is a theatrical adaptation of a part of the novel Aristides und Themistocles (1792), written by the German scholar Ignaz Aurelius Feßler (1765-1839), a member of the Illuminati Order. A comparison of the novel with the ancient sources for the two tyrannicides shows that the changes made by the enthusiastic Kantian Feßler (mainly the concealment of the homoerotic character of the relationship between the two heroes) aimed to adapt the historical material to Kant’s conception that morality is based on the autonomy of the will. Lassanis kept the changes of Feßler and added some new inventions which emphasize even more the autonomy of the will as a condition of morality. The close relationship of Lassanis’ dramaturgy with his engagement as a member of the Filiki Etaireia becomes obvious not only in the choice of the subject of death for the homeland and democracy but is also manifest in his (pen-)name «Lyssanias». Lassanis’ nom de guerre is not a phonic variant of his name (as it has commonly been assumed until now) but rather refers to the verse of Aristophanes «Λυσανίαι πατρῴων μεγάλων κακῶν»; it therefore denotes one who liberates the homeland from sorrow and pain.

Tragedy of Monsters: Vampire Fears, Melodrama, and the Modern Horror

The contemporary understanding of the vampire trope is not solely a literary construct but also the outcome of its theatrical adaptations, often following closely after the publication of the seminal works that shaped the myth. Despite the occasional reading of vampires as tragic figures, works featuring these creatures have yet to be staged as tragedies, translating instead to melodramas and musicals. This article examines theatrical renditions of John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and The Vampire Lestat (1985), demonstrating that although these literary works offer varying interpretations of the vampire trope, they consistently diverge from the tragic form once thet are adapted for the stage. At the same time, vampires represent a world of post-tragic plots, where tragedy is impossible since they live too long after the tragic event had already occurred. Our theory is that the staging of vampire narratives coincides with historical contexts in which audiences experience disillusionment with tragedy’s promise of catharsis, opting instead to look to other dramatic formulas for a reflection of their times. While tragedies often depict the protagonist’s downfall due to an internal fatal flaw, vampire melodramas and musicals, in most cases, explore the collective trauma caused by external flaws, thus resonating more with the social and cultural milieu of their times.

We Can’t Change the World, but We Can Change the Subject. James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake on the Polish Stage

This article examines how theatrical adaptations of James Joyce’s novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, during the 1970s became integral to the avant-garde movement in Poland. Other adaptations would evolve in the post-transition period from the 1990s to the present day, which not only explored the themes presented in Joyce’s works but also hinted at the universality of personal crises, national grievances, and the yearning for a sense of home and homeland.

‘Virtuous Attachment’ and three dramatizations of James’s The Ambassadors

Henry James’s The Ambassadors is considered by many James scholars his most complex novel and his central character, Lambert Strether, a man whose decisions are not always easy to explain to either the reading audience or the other characters in the text. Adapting this work to other media formats presented challenges that, this article argues, were not fully met. One of the major problems faced by the two television versions and one theatrical version of this work is their failure to address what James calls a ‘virtuous attachment’, a term understood by Strether to define the relationship between young New Englander Chad Newsome and his French ‘companion’, Madame de Vionnet. This article examines this issue as well as the particular demands that television and stage adaptations of literary works must address and that these ambitious and distinctive approaches to The Ambassadors faced, including adapting the work into a big Broadway musical.

Thomas D’Urfey’s Adaptation of Cervantes’s Quixote: The Comical History of Don Quixote

Abstract The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694) is one of the first dramatizations of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel in English, written in three parts. Starting with the episode of Cardenio and Luscinda in the first part, Thomas D’Urfey takes liberties with the characters and twists the plot, mixing chapters and embellishing it with songs by composer Henry Purcell and music by other contemporary artists. However, this dramatist presents us with a noble and quite sensible Don Quixote, as opposed to a histrionic Sancho, thus inverting the essence of the original characters in Cervantes’s novel.This article will analyze – from the perspective of studies on theatrical adaptation, such as Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) and Jane Barnette’s ADAPTURGY: The Dramaturg’s Art and Theatrical Adaptation (2018) – Thomas D’Urfey’s The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694) as an adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Quixote. The author will explore the different episodes that D’Urfey chose to rewrite in the three parts of his play, analyzing the differences and similitudes between the original stories in the novel and their adapted version in the play, in order to prove that, on the one hand, Cervantes’s novel was already widely known by English audiences when D’Urfey’s plays were premiered, on the other, that he adapted the existing material to suit the preferences of English seventeenth-century audiences and, finally, that he created a parody in which Don Quixote is actually a nobler character than that of the preceding seventeenth-century adaptations.1

Stone as Witness

The depiction of stones that speak has long been used as a literary and philosophical device to reflect upon the limitations of human language (i.e., language as a petrification of thought and action). Jacques Rancière has described stone’s capacity to bear witness as a form of “mute speech,” noting how “any stone can also be language,” as a part of the “testimony that mute things bear to mankind’s activity.” In exploring the character of this form of testimony, and asking how we hear it, this article examines the function of the Stone Guest in the legend of Don Juan, across Molière’s and Pushkin’s theatrical versions, a short film version by Marina Fomenko, and Mozart and Da Ponte’s operatic version, so revered by Kierkegaard and others. The character of the Stone Guest is often seen as casting judgement against the aesthetic mode of life, yet the power of the character lies not in his ghostly humanity or sense of retribution, but in his stoniness – his capacity to bear witness, just as a stone monument bears witness or commemorates a past trauma. In a number of versions of the Don Juan story, the Stone Guest is announced by approaching footsteps or knocking. This acousmatic device mirrors the uncanny separation of sound and source in opera – the way in which music mediates between the conflicting imperatives of language and the corporeal or material aspects of the singing voice, lending opera its vaunted mechanical qualities. Using stones that speak as a heuristic, the article draws together ideas about the limitations of language and the mechanical qualities of opera in order to excavate the auditory affordances of the stone’s form of testimony, in all its inorganic liveliness.

Dramaturgical boundary crossings in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat as a text for theatrical adaptation

ABSTRACT This article argues that William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat is an already intensely theatrical text, prior to any form of dramatic adaptation. This proposition, and an exploration of how these concerns are subtly and playfully taken up by Babbage, Stenner and O'Connor's 2018 stage adaptation, is the focus of the essay. I anchor my discussion in the logic and discourses of dramaturgical practice and analysis to offer a reading that addresses the role of artifice, spectatorship, materiality, embodiment, textuality and narrative in the work and its interest in the makerly processes through which animal and human identities are constructed, assigned and negotiated. I propose that Beware the Cat, in both textual and live form, explores and negotiates three kinds of dramaturgical boundary crossings – between text and performance, between matter and meaning, and between performer and spectator. Overall, I propose that the titular ‘beware’ acts as a form of dramaturgical instruction for working with the text in a live context. I argue that, because Baldwin’s original work is so strikingly theatrical in its themes and structure, it offers a set of principles for the process of the work’s theatrical adaptation as much as it invites a reworking of its content for another form.

Introduction: ‘Baldewins Straunge Faschions’

ABSTRACT This introduction gives a brief overview of William Baldwin’s life and work, locating him in the context of mid-Tudor London and particularly describing the effects of religious upheaval on the publishing world in which he was immersed. We situate his novel, Beware the Cat (c. 1552), in the history of prose fiction in English before describing the theatrical adaptation of the text that generated the research behind this special edition. Finally, we consider the practice-based methodology that informs the project as a whole, before summarising the contributions that follow.

Collaborating with Shakespeare: Recent Rewritings of ROMEO AND JULIET on the Romanian Stage

The paper investigates the factors contributing to the recent surge in popularity of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet on the Romanian stage. One possible explanation lies in the play's adaptability and relevance to present-day concerns coupled with the opportunities for creative reimagining offered by its canonical Romanian translation. The article posits that directors and playwrights have engaged in a fruitful "collaboration with the dead" (Leitch 19), breathing new life into the classic text by means of different forms of rewriting. Specifically, the paper discusses two recent versions of Romeo and Juliet staged in Bucharest, at Teatrul Mic in 2018 and at Teatrul Odeon in 2021, and focuses on the process of rewriting Shakespeare’s text in the form of a theatre adaptation and of a radical appropriation.

"Fear and pity: about the tragedy’s resurrection in the post-pandemic era"

"The present article aims to discuss two theatre adaptations of the ancient tragedy as they were interpreted by the British director and playwright Robert Icke: Oresteia and Oedipus. Introduced in the Romanian theatre landscape by Andrei Șerban, who staged Oedipus at the Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj, Icke proves to be one of the most interesting recent dramaturgical discoveries. I have chosen to discuss the two plays in relation with the practitioners’ option to rethink the tragedy for nowadays audiences. In the context of pandemic and of the war so close to the Romanian borders, the tragedy finds inevitable connections with the contemporary spectators. It ends up being perceived on a deeper emotional level, rather than an intellectual one. This leads us to conclude that we are witnessing a new stage of the rebirth of the tragedy as a genre, from an aesthetic and cultural point of view."

Pierre Du Ryer, Théâtre complet. Sous la direction d’Hélène Baby. Tome ii, édition d’Hélène Baby, Catherine Dumas, Perry Gethner et Sandrine Berrégard

This collection of five plays by seventeenth-century playwright Pierre Du Ryer is the second in a three-volume collection (the first and third focused on his tragedies). This volume, however, presents four tragicomedies — Lisandre et Caliste, Clarigène (both edited by Hélène Baby), Alcimédon (edited by Catherine Dumas), and Cléomédon (edited by Perry Gethner) — and his only comedy, Les Vendanges de Suresnes (edited by Sandrine Berrégard). Du Ryer was much admired in his time but subsequently rather forgotten and principally known only as author of a few tragedies. This volume thus aims to extend readers’ knowledge of his works and uncover plays hitherto unedited since the seventeenth century. As is standard for Classiques Garnier texts, the plays are rendered accessible to modern readers with modernized spellings and a harmonized presentation of the acts, scenes, and stage directions. Each play is preceded by a detailed introduction exploring its major features and examining a range of themes within the genre. For Lisandre et Caliste, Baby presents an engaging discussion of the way the play takes the novel by Vital d’Audiguier and adapts it for the stage, and explores the varied time and space depicted across the scenes. This contrasts with Du Ryer’s increased adherence to unities in Cléomédon (as described in Gethner’s later introduction). Baby’s detailed account of the set, staging, and scenes of combat in Lisandre et Caliste brings the play further to life and the reader is also provided with nuanced understanding of key elements of the ‘spectacle tragi-comique’, including reversals, comedic tropes, and the particular universal moral order of the genre. Frequent devices such as surprise and false appearances are examined in Dumas’s introduction to Alcimédon. The theme of deception is investigated in Baby’s introduction to Clarigène through analysis of ‘le déguisement inconscient’ and ‘le déguisement conscient’. The introduction to Cléomédon (a theatrical adaptation of the famous novel L’Astrée, by Honoré d’Urfé) explores baroque themes of tragicomedies, with a fascinating section on delusion and madness and how this relates to Cléomédon’s grandiose perception of himself. Alongside an exploration of such key themes, Gethner also presents the play’s reception history and places this in the context of a range of other plays of the period. The final work in the collection, Les Vendanges de Suresnes, is introduced by anchoring it within the pastoral tradition, but Berrégard shows how the action is rooted in ‘un cadre urbain traditionnel’ and is illustrative of ‘une dramaturgie du quotidien’ (p. 525). Berrégard is attentive to the rich intertextual and metatheatrical references within the comedy and provocatively asks, ‘l’activité viticole ne serait-elle pas aussi une métaphore de la construction dramatique, avec la maîtrise des techniques propres à cet art qu’elle-même suppose?’ (p. 538). Overall, the book is well structured, since the different introductions are not repetitive but are clearly in dialogue with one another. The volume presents a comprehensive picture both of the theatrical landscape and of Du Ryer’s artistry.

Invasion, Replacement and Colonial Anxiety in The War of the Worlds

British novelist Herbert George Wells’ 1897 science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds is a story about an invasion of the planet Earth by extraterrestrial beings. The novel is Wells’ reaction to his firsthand witnessing of the horrors of British colonialism. Seeing what travesties humans were capable of inflicting on other humans, the story is a projection of colonial anxiety. On 30 October 1938, American theatre director and filmmaker Orson Welles, along with adapter Howard Koch and the actors of the Mercury Theatre, performed H. G. Wells’ nineteenth-century science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds as a radio play. Infamous in its reception, the 1938 broadcast was an early example of so-called ‘fake news’. On 9–13 March 2022 the University of Missouri Department of Theatre (USA) staged a theatrical version of The War of the Worlds, using the script from the 1938 radio play. I had the privilege of directing the show alongside a culturally diverse production team and cast. The concept behind the MU production was to utilize decolonial strategies of production in order to cut through ‘fakeness’, and explicate connections between the story and colonial anxieties. We attempted to expose the means of the production of the false narrative through the utilization of anti-racist and anti-sexist directing strategies, and Brechtian theatrical techniques. This essay is an exploration of how our production elucidated the themes of invasion and replacement in the original novel, the radio broadcast and the contemporary version. This analysis reveals the multitude ways in which fantasies of an alien invasion is rooted in the same colonial anxieties that are driving a widespread state of cultural unrest today, and suggests some strategies for making theatre that attempts to ease some of these anxieties. Directors who produce theatre must constantly read ‘against the grain’ of colonial anxieties.

A Burglar of the Better Sort: Poems, Dramatic Works, Theoretical Writings

A Burglar of the Better Sort: Poems, Dramatic Works, Theoretical Writings

Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin

Reviewed by: Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin Suzanne Eade Roberts Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction. Ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin. Arras: Artois Presses Université. 2021. 306 pp. €19. ISBN 978–2–84832–517–0. This stimulating collection of articles, edited by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin, encourages a re-evaluation of Nabokov as a translator, translation scholar, and object of translation. Moving beyond what tends to be known about his self-translations and the high proportion of footnotes to text in his version of Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin, it includes a new appraisal of Nabokov's literalist approach to translation, analysis of his collaborative translations, and discussion of the challenges of translating Nabokov. The volume, which contains slightly more articles in French than in English, is the latest to appear in the 'Traductologie' series of Artois Presses Université, which regularly publishes Francophone scholarship in Translation Studies, as well as translations into French. Thus, a major benefit of this book is how it presents both Anglophone and Francophone scholarly writing. The Nabokov researchers represented here are based primarily in the USA, the UK, France, and Canada. Moreover, the contributors encompass the disciplines of Translation Studies, Linguistics, English and Slavic Literature, as well as Comparative Literature. The Introduction fascinatingly reveals the hazards of this eclectic approach: in Nabokov's œuvre, it is not always easy to distinguish between a translation, an original, a self-translation, or a collaborative translation, or to harmonize the dates of first publication. Stanislav Shvabrin's enjoyable article begins by reminding us that 'the backlash against [Nabokov's] translation theory and praxis rivals the endurance of Lolita's [End Page 274] grip on its readers' (p. 87). He offers a more nuanced picture of Nabokov's literalism, drawing on Bakhtin to reassess Nabokov's translations, even youthful ones, as 'dialogic encounters' in which he can try out different approaches to literary translation. These experiments vary 'from wilful adaptation to most exacting literalism and everything else in between' (p. 96). Christine Raquet's essay draws attention to the numerous ways both of reading a text and of translating it, even though 'le tempérament littéraire autocratique de Nabokov avait souvent du mal à accepter [les choix d'un autre traducteur]' (p. 23). His collaborations became power struggles in which any other translator was expected to capitulate. In contrast, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney identifies recurrent ideas of ineffability and untranslatability in Nabokov's work, relating them to his synaesthesia. Julie Loison-Charles's contribution examines the treatment of the many foreign words used by Nabokov in Ada and the varying ways in which this multilingualism is conveyed by the novel's French and Russian translations. Similarly, Marta Arnal Gas focuses on how Nabokov's jeux linguistiques are translated into Spanish and Catalan. Russianists, meanwhile, will be interested in Lyudmila Razumova's comparison of the reception of samizdat (Soviet-era), perestroika-era, and post-perestroika translations into Russian of Pale Fire and her conclusions about the changing market for translation in Russophone nations. In terms of comparing Francophone and Anglophone Translation Studies, it may be a coincidence that two French scholars, Isabelle Paulin and Stanislas Gauthier, draw productively on the work of French translation theorist Antoine Berman in their respective analyses of the nature of Nabokov's translations or the reception of translations of Nabokov. The final section of this volume focuses on intersemiotic translation. It includes Yannicke Chupin's enlightening interview with Émilie Moreau, exploring the latter's choice to incorporate shadow play and masks into her theatre adaptation of Lolita. The appendix includes a convenient index of Nabokov's original work and his translations. This volume constitutes both a significant contribution to the different facets of Nabokov's work and an accessible examination of the challenges of translating Nabokov into several European languages. There is much to interest both Translation Studies scholars and Nabokov specialists. Suzanne Eade Roberts University of Bristol Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

«LYSISTRATA’S PHENOMENON»: NEW SENSES OF THE ANCIENT PLOT IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIO–POLITICAL CRISES OF THE 21ST CENTURY

The Peloponnesian war and the crisis of the police system of the end of the 5th – beginning of the 4th century BC became the historical context and stage chronotope for Aristophanes’ comedies. The article explores the peculiarities of the formation of modern «Lysistrata» receptions, in particular in cinematography and journalism. The premises of the «Lysistrata’s phenomenon» emergence and their interconnections with the reinterpretation of the ancient heritage are examined. In the 21st century «Lysistrata» serves as the source for the formation of the new mythologems. In the first years of New Millennium the plot of the Aristophanes’ comedy was considered as purely comic, fantastic, or even absurd. We consider the year 2003rd and the global culture initiative «Lysistrata project» to be the starting point for the «Lysistrata’s phenomenon». After «Lysistrata project» and, especially, events in Liberia global media cultivated neo-mythological concept of Lysistrata as the embodiment of political sex-strikes. Such simplification led to changes in artistic reception of the play, which could be traced in the theatre adaptation of the first decade of the 21st century. Spike Lee’s «Chi-raq» brought back complexity and multiple dimensions of Aristophanes’ play – juxtaposition of modern Chicago and ancient Athens opened plenty of senses and allows new optics for modern classic’s reception and for classical text itself. The Old Greek comedy «Lysistrata» became the optimal artistic focal point for the comprehension of the problems of war, peace, political order, race, and gender conflicts. The «Lysistrata’s phenomenon» demands further discussion based on multidisciplinary approach.

Acts of Unsettling: An Immersive Adaptation of Berger and Mohr’s A Seventh Man

This article examines Michael Pinchbeck and Ollie Smith’s theatrical adaptation of A Seventh Man, the 1975 book by John Berger and photographer Jean Mohr studying the experience of migrant workers in Europe. Pinchbeck and Smith’s 2020 adaptation uses immersive performance strategies in dialogue with a multi-voiced, cross-disciplinary publication that itself aims to produce an immersive or ‘animated’ reader engagement. In this article, Babbage and Pinchbeck present source text and performance as examples of practice-as-research, referencing Nelson’s paradigm that establishes different modes of knowledge and points of connection- and dissension-between them. They discuss the book’s cross-disciplinarity and the attempt to reflect this in a new creative context that is spatiotemporal, embodied, social, visual, verbal and aural. The article’s theoretical context draws on writing by Barthes, Berger, Said and Sontag, applying Barthes’ notion of the studium and the punctum to reflect on the dramaturgical rendering of the source text’s ‘interruptive shocks’. Babbage and Pinchbeck argue that, in book and performance, the juxtaposition of different formal languages elicits an encounter with the material that is productively ‘unsettling’.

The Technique of Verbalizing: Anatoly Vasiliev and His Theater of Dissonant Dialogues

AbstractThis article examines the aesthetics of an important contemporary Russian theater director, Anatoly Vasiliev, who founded the School of Dramatic Art (SDA) in Moscow. Besides his most well‐known stagings of Viktor Slavkin’s Cerceau and Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author at the Taganka Theater in the 1980s, Vasiliev’s adaptations of novels and epic poetry have remained in his repertoire for several years at a time. Anatoly Vasiliev’s style of adaptations of classic literature re‐activates the classic texts in exciting, vibrant new ways. My essay provides a detailed account of both the literary inspiration and theoretical approaches of Vasiliev’s aesthetic practice in the context of one case study, Vasiliev’s performance From Onegin’s Journey (1996 and ongoing). Thus, my article addresses problems of representation of the novel‐in‐verse on stage, and the relations between literary studies and Performance Studies. In addition to discussing the form of Pushkin’s novel in verse, my paper makes many references to important literary theory by Mikhail Bakhtin. There is a particular device that Vasiliev has coined as his method of adaptation, and its inspiration can be traced to the ideas of the Russian Formalist school and Mikhail Bakhtin. In discussing the influence of Bakhtin’s theory of the novel on Vasiliev’s method of theatrical adaptation, I also bring attention to understudied writings by Mikhail Bakhtin on the author’s perspective on the character’s role, audience reception in performance space, and theater in the 1920’s and 1930’s.