Authorship in stage adaptations of ‘inherited tales’: A survey approach

For a range of reasons, there is a dearth of empirical work on stage adaptations of ‘inherited tales’, both individually and in general; this is in contrast to work on film adaptations. This article starts by exploring epistemological and methodological reasons for this, and then proposes an alternative: analysis of bodies of texts about stage adaptations. To exemplify this, I report a survey in which I explore representations of authorship in stage adaptations in ‘Theatre’ entries in the 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme. In this large body of short texts, while authors of ‘sourcetexts’ are referred to occasionally, and titles of the sourcetexts frequently, in many cases there is no direct acknowledgement that the production is an adaptation of an ‘inherited tale’, and hence no direct mention of an ‘original’ author or title. I look at contextualized reasons for this in terms of creative and marketing considerations and of the wider ‘event’ itself (in particular, fringe productions at festivals), and at implications for understandings of ‘authorship’ in theatre.