Stage-Play and Screen-Play

The intermediality of theatre and cinema

Michael Ingham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317555209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Dialogue between film and theatre studies is frequently hampered by the lack of a shared vocabulary. Stage-Play and Screen-Play sets out to remedy this, mapping out an intermedial space in which both film and theatre might be examined.

Each chapter's evaluation of the processes and products of stage-to-screen and screen-to-stage transfer is grounded in relevant, applied contexts. Michael Ingham draws upon the growing field of adaptation studies to present case studies ranging from Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan and RSC Live's simulcast of Richard II to F.W. Murnau's silent Tartüff, Peter Bogdanovich's film adaptation of Michael Frayn's Noises Off, and Akiro Kurosawa's Ran, highlighting the multiple interfaces between media.

Offering a fresh insight into the ways in which film and theatre communicate dramatic performances, this volume is a must-read for students and scholars of stage and screen.

Chapter 1
Introduction

All the screen’s a stage – the critical–theoretical background to the present study

This book adopts a crossover approach to the adaptation studies and intermediality studies debate, as it relates to the stage–screen relationship, and seeks to reconcile the two in a process of dialectical synthesis. Current theorising on the relationship between theatre and film engages with an older, recurrent debate about the interrelationship between the two performance media. Walter Benjamin in his influential 1935 essay ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’/ ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Reproducibility)’ made a strong case for considering the respective media as incompatible with one another: ‘Any thorough study proves that there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is … like the film, founded in mechanical reproduction.’¹ Conversely, in her 1966 article in The Drama Review entitled ‘Film and Theatre’ Susan Sontag argued for a better understanding of the potential for reciprocity between them. Engaging with the previously accepted critical truism that film and theatre are ‘distinct and even antithetical’² art-forms, Sontag scrutinised and deconstructed what she saw as doctrinaire binary arguments advanced by critics of an earlier generation. Her critique heralded future directions in the type of intermedial experimentation that has become familiar in the theatre works of Robert Wilson and Robert Lepage and many others.

It also recognised the early contributions of innovative theatre artists like Vsevolod Meyerhold, with his ‘cinefied’ theatre, and fellow-Russian visual artist Wassily Kandinsky, with his mixed-media concept of ‘Bühnenkomposition’ (stage composition) – an early type of sound and installation art that blended visual art, music and performance, and inspired mixed-media artists of later generations. While Kandinsky was unable to realise his bold plan for a synergetic, inter-arts concept, Meyerhold and other stage practitioners of the period, notably Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, did succeed to a significant extent in blending stage and screen aesthetics and methodologies; after these initiatives there was a long hiatus, as the pressures of sociopolitical and institutional orthodoxy from the 1930s to the 1950s inhibited further theatrical experimentation, during which there was a general return to more conservative approaches. Writing her article at a time when experimentation in the arts, including intermediality between theatre and cinema, was experiencing a renaissance, Sontag provided a timely reminder of both the genealogy and future potential of creative encounters between the two media.

Her contention found support among a number of less doctrinaire commentators, including Eric Bentley, doyen of 20th-century dramatic theory and criticism. Comparing stage and screen varieties of dramatic realism, Bentley maintains that stage and screen illusion is more a matter of degree than of radical difference, and offers a salutary reminder that drama engages with audiences across a range of media without losing its fundamental dramatic properties: ‘The truth is that dramatic art is possible on both stage and screen. On both it could fulfil its function of presenting an account of human experience deeply and truly.’³ While the audience–performer interrelationship is intrinsic to any definition of theatricality, when stage drama is transferred to the medium of cinema the dramatic art is necessarily transformed in the process. The sense of theatricality is refracted in its electronic mediation, and although it is still experienced as a performance event, there can be no direct interaction between audience and performers. Even broadcast live theatre-in-cinema, while simulating the live event in a virtual context, is distanced,⁴ and actual presence limited to the theatre audience only, which inevitably changes the way the event’s theatricality is experienced by the cinema audience.

One of the aims of the present study is to assess empirically to what extent Sontag’s and Bentley’s arguments and intuitions that stage drama’s and screen drama’s respective aesthetics are not mutually exclusive are supported by specific examples of intermedial practice in theatre and cinema. In her critical method Sontag does not gloss over the considerable problem for filmmakers posed by the encroachment of the theatrical: ‘The interpolation of film into the theatre experience may be enlarging from the point of view of theatre. But in terms of what film is capable of, it seems a reductive, monotonous use of film.’⁵ However, in concluding the essay she addresses this obvious dilemma, and goes beyond the purity of the single art form with the following trenchant observation:

For some time, all useful ideas in art have been extremely sophisticated. Like the idea that everything is what it is, and not another thing. A painting is a painting, sculpture is sculpture. A poem is a poem, not prose, etc. And the complementary idea: a painting can be ‘literary’ or sculptural, a poem can be prose, theatre can emulate and incorporate cinema, cinema can be theatrical.⁶

One characteristic feature of Sontag’s genre-bending essay is that she refers to theatre as a generic term when for much of the piece she restricts herself to citing specific film adaptations of dramatic literature. Her interchangeable usage of the words ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’ reveals a common tendency among critics, academics, and even practitioners, to elide the distinction. Traditionally, drama has been taken to mean the dramatic text itself and theatre to denote the outlet for performance and interpretation of a particular text, not necessarily a fixed or definitive one. In other words, drama has tended to be construed as more authoritative and permanent, and theatre as more provisional and impermanent. As is customarily reiterated when marking this distinction, the argument is based on classical Greek etymological roots: drama is connected with ‘doing’, whereas the word ‘theatre’ is derived from ‘seeing’. Mark Fortier has pointed out that ‘theatre, of necessity involves both doing and seeing, practice and contemplation. Moreover the word theory comes from the same root as theatre’.⁷ Fortier’s argument – namely, that theatre’s mix of non-verbal signs with language as an overall ‘master pattern’ makes the theatre also literary – is cogent, although it is also open to challenges from critical discourses that dispute the assumed pre-eminence of the symbolic order.

Much contemporary ‘post-dramatic theatre’ – i.e. performances based on non-literary dramatic scripts or source texts – has more in common with forms of popular live entertainment such as circuses, chat/quiz shows, and prioritises the interaction of performers and audience. As Hans-Thies Lehmann has shown in his study Postdramatic Theatre,⁸ there has been a marked movement away from what Fortier calls ‘the hegemony of language and letters’⁹ in the theatre, eschewing the authority of the pre-existing dramatic text in favour of other types of inspiration. These range from director- and ensemble-devised theatre shows to news media stories and, as will be discussed in a later chapter, film narratives. We also need to remember that the umbrella term ‘theatre’ embraces forms as divergent as variety and music-hall, puppeteering, street theatre, cabaret, ballet, opera and contemporary dance, which includes abstract dance styles having no basis in literature.

Conversely, film as a form of dramatic art has always shared a great deal of common ground with dramatic theatre, and their close connections in the infancy of cinematic art, as the following chapter will elaborate, set a pattern for regarding drama itself as a shared term and practice. The cognate skills of many stage and screen dramatists and actors have facilitated a fairly fluid boundary, one that the most successful actors, actresses, writers and directors cross at will. No such ‘open border’ exists between discrete theatrical practices and professions, and polymath artists such as Jonathan Miller and Robert Wilson are relatively rare. Thus, while the terms ‘theatre’ and ‘cinema’ in themselves seem to emphasise natural divisions between the respective media, the shared designation of drama suggests common pursuits. Raymond Williams in Drama in Performance made it his express aim to investigate ‘literary text and theatrical representation, not as separate entities, but as the unity which they are intended to become’.¹⁰ He referred to the confusion that has commonly arisen in both theoretical and practical thinking about the necessary interrelationship between dramatic text and dramatic performance.

One of the shrewdest and most prolific commentators of the postwar era on both live and electronic dramatic performance, Williams saw that film as a medium could fit into the framework he was trying to develop which sub sumed both the dramatic text and performative iterations of it. In his 1958 essay ‘Film and the Dramatic Tradition’ he contended that the feature film and the stage play have much more in common than was admitted by those who preferred to accentuate differences rather than commonalities:

Thus, while it is necessary to distinguish the medium of film from the mediums of the average contemporary play or novel, it does not follow that the film has no relation, as an art, to drama; nor indeed, since in one important sense drama is a literary form, that the film has not an important relation to literature as a whole.¹¹

Williams goes on, having explored surface differences between the two media, to put forward the proposition ‘that film, in its main uses, is a form of drama in its traditional sense’¹² and later in the piece advances his influential concept of ‘structure of feeling’ to integrate the dramatic and formal conventions for performing a dramatic work within a particular socio-historical context. He argues that both a film drama and a stage drama – and, by extension, stage drama on film, although this is not specified – can be conceived as a total performance based on the elements of speech, movement and design, even if the conventions are constantly being challenged and modified. One of his conclusions in the essay is that ‘if the new conventions can be gained, it will be the communicated experience that finally matters, for us [artists and critics] and for the audience’.¹³

Arguing the case for what they term ‘mediativity’, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion maintain that there is a close interaction between form and mediating material, with certain media predisposed to expressing the content of a given form more effectively than other media. They note that:

The potential of a medium derives from a double interaction: not only the interaction that allows a coded opening of an internal space where different materials of expression can be combined, but also the interaction that is produced by the encounter … of these first means of expression with the technical apparatuses designed to relay and amplify them … Mediativity would refer then to a medium’s intrinsic capacity to represent – and to communicate that representation.¹⁴

The stage seems best disposed to mediating the material of theatre, since the dramatic artifice and illusion especially of stylised elements of theatrical representation, naturally belongs there. But it is significant that the authors use the words ‘double interaction’, ‘encounter’, ‘different’ and ‘combined’.

As opposed to the protean idea, preceding language and form, that gives birth to the original work, and that interacts with the language and form of that particular genre or medium, the stage production is already fully formed and perfectly fitted to its material; its encounter with cinema produces what the authors refer to as a ‘chemical reaction’¹⁵ akin to the interaction of the original creative idea and the medium to which it is predisposed. They suggest that the work’s compatibility with a specific medium makes it ‘preprogrammed’¹⁶ for re-presentation and re-coding in a particular medium. In this regard the deepening of perception that Benjamin in his essay attributed particularly to the film medium correlates perfectly with the nurturing of collective and individual consciousness in the spectator that commentators on stage drama have valued from Aristotle onwards. Moreover, both theatre auditorium and cinema auditorium are eminently suited to the enactment of dramatic spectacle in front of an intellectually and emotionally engaged audience.

Evidently, then, the stage play is compatible with, and even predisposed to, the kind of cinematic re-presentation afforded by cinematic transmission perhaps on account of the established reciprocity between the two forms. Much depends, as Gaudreault and Marion argue, on the spirit of medium (médiagénie) of the original work and its susceptibility to adaptation. If there is an intrinsic reciprocity between performance experiences in the theatre and in cinema, whether synchronous or asynchronous, predicated on a mélange of codes, which intercalates theatre into a cinema experience or vice versa, it will be seen that the codes can be compatible. It follows that, in order to retain the ‘mediativity’ of the two art-forms both independently and cooperatively, the mixing of cinema and theatre codes of expression is the responsibility of artists, and not just technicians.

Nevertheless, as stage and screen director Miller has pointed out in his book, Subsequent Performances, reflecting on his own productions, the fundamental distinctions between the two media cannot be ignored:

The screen is an extremely awkward interface between the viewer and the spectacle on screen from which he [sic] is conspicuously absent. While a theatre audience is part of the performance, in a television or cinema production the audience is strangely annihilated by being reduced to a pair of eyes … A movie screen has no features, it is simply where the picture stops and darkness takes over … In the theatre the spectator is part of an embodied audience whose attention can movie from one part of the stage to another while remaining aware of the panoramic spectacle … In film our gaze is usurped by the eye of the camera and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: All the screen’s a stage – the critical–theoretical background to the present study
• 2 Stage drama and silent film: ‘Inexplicable dumb-shows’?
• 3 From ‘cinefied’ theatre to ‘theatred’ film
• 4 Simulcast and captured live versions of stage dramas: ‘A monster of the multitude’?
• 5 Filmed theatre: ‘Cinema can be theatrical’
• 6 The play-within-the film
• 7 Cinematic transformations: ‘The truth of cinematography’
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index