Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 1, Issue 3, 2009

The essay considers the work of the playwright Cherre Moraga. It traces similarities and differences between The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, Moraga's 2001 play, and the Euripidean work. It also considers a 2005 production by the Drama Department at Stanford University which was part of the Rite to Remember: Performance and Xicana/Indigena Thought or R2R Project. This was a yearlong programme that focused on indigenous thought and non-European approaches to performance hosted by the Drama Department during 2005. The essay explores how Moraga combines indigenous performance practices with elements of European theatrical traditions in order to rewrite the ancient Greek myth for present-day audiences. I argue that this is achieved through the creation of a uniquely borderland performance space within which she can restage and symbolically invert dominant, patriarchal and heterosexist dramatic traditions.

This contribution examines some of the challenges arising from adaptation as intergeneric transfer (from novel to playtext), and interrogates aspects of intersemiotic translation from playtext to performance. Drawing on the international interest in Embers, the paper juxtaposes the source text, the 1942 novel by the Hungarian writer Sndor Mrai, with references to its versions in fictional and dramatic format in various languages: with a special emphasis on Christopher Hampton's stage adaptation, Michael Blakemore's 2006 West End production and (to a lesser extent) Lou Stein's radio drama. The article primarily concentrates on the editing Hampton carries out in his adaptation process, and considers play and performance against the backdrop of the current British theatrical system.

This article argues that an approach to understanding adaptations in terms of genre offers a perspective at least as productive as considerations of the verbal and visual languages of prose and cinema. Examining three recent Austen adaptations Sense and Sensibility (Lee 1995), Emma (McGrath 1996), and Pride and Prejudice (Wright 2005), but also addressing other film and television versions it demonstrates that efforts to make the new texts conform to prevailing expectations for romantic comedy, explain key changes. In tandem with these alterations, and also a component of the adaptive sweetening process, various interventions allow the derived texts to present an altered ideological temperament to their originals. This encompasses the films' handling of class and issues of sexual politics, and is manifested in the systematic excision and reduction of original elements, as well as in schemes of addition and amplification.

The article has two purposes: (1) to provide a theoretical framework for dealing with a specific aspect of adaptation: the use of face photography in general, and close-ups of the face in particular, to depict an inner world which literature describes by using words; (2) to examine the applicability of this framework by analyzing face photography in two films: The Summer of Aviya and The Island on Bird Street. Based on works from various disciplines (semiotics, cinema studies, philosophy), the article suggests that face photography does not just replace literary devices, rather, it brings its own meaning into the adapted works. The films under consideration have been selected not only because face photography is significant in both of them, but also because they deal with a highly charged topic the Holocaust and use face photography to evoke moral dilemmas related to it. The way the films handle these dilemmas is especially important because both of them are directed toward children and may affect the way their young viewers perceive and judge people's behaviour during and after the Holocaust.

In this article, which is accompanied by a DVD included in this issue, Ludivine Allegue and Yvon Bonenfant draw the reader inside the creative process underpinning an engagement with collaboration. The article explores the creation of the installation B(earth) (20078) by Bonenfant and Allegue. It attempts to represent the encounter between specific disciplines, personalities, theoretical backgrounds and ways of thinking about creative process from each of their perspectives as well as from a combined perspective. In so doing, and through focusing on encounter, the article posits other ways of thinking about processes of adaptation and translation. Translations between artists, between corporealities and between ways of thinking about creative impulse are foregrounded as the writing style voyages from academic reflection to poetic reflection and explores territories in between these. The DVD allows the reader to get a taste of the installation itself and its component parts: painting, light, video and extended voice practice.

Arab Shakespeare: Critical Survey, Margaret Litvin ed. (2007), 19:3 Berghahn Journals, Oxford/New York, 153 pp., ISSN: 0011-1570 (Price: by subscription)

Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama, Christine Geraghty (2008) Maryfield: Rowman and Littlefield, 223 pp., ISBN 978-0-7425-3820-7, Paperback 17.99 ISBN 0742538206, Hardback, 47.00

Alan Bennett: The Television Series, Kara McKechnie (2007) Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 216 pp., ISBN 978 0 7190 6806 5, Paperback, 14.99 ISBN 978 0 7190 6805 8 Hardback, 50.00

David Cronenberg, Author or Film-Maker?, Mark Browning (2007) Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 206 pp., ISBN 978-7-84150-173-4, Paperback, 11.95