Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2017

Recent adaptations of Macbeth (Kurzel, 2015) and Cymbeline (Almereyda, 2015) highlight the continued relevance of the concept of authenticity. Taking Theodor Adorno’s concept of the authentic as our starting point, we argue that while Macbeth and its publicity materials suggest that the film can be read without interpretation as an ‘authentic’ expression of Scottish history, Cymbeline represents a more difficult and less ideologically loaded engagement with authenticity and Shakespeare adaptation.

This article examines Débò Olúwatûmínú's Ìyálóde of Ẹtì (An Original Adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi By John Webster), produced by Utopia Theatre in Leeds, Sheffield and Doncaster in autumn 2016. Olúwatûmínú's play takes the story of The Duchess of Malfi and transposes it to nineteenth-century Yorùbáland. This inevitably leads to major changes to names and situations, yet there are some even more striking similarities and continuities. The essay compares Ìyálóde of Ẹtì with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart ([1958] 1996) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun ([2006] 2014) to argue that the interest in twinning found in both these three texts and The Duchess of Malfi itself is played out in the relationship between adaptation and original: Ìyálóde of Ẹtì may take its inspiration from Webster, but it, like its heroine, is itself, and even if it knows that the precolonial Yorùbáland it shows us is trembling on the edge of extinction, it also shows us that the customs and stories of that land still have vibrancy and force. Ìyálóde of Ẹtì may be Kehinde to The Duchess of Malfi’s Taiwo, but it is a second-born with power, and it is Ìyálóde of Ẹtì still.

Shakespeare Unlocked is a BBC season broadcast on television and radio from March to June 2012. It included BBC television’s first adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in seven years (the second tetralogy, packaged as The Hollow Crown); documentaries showing Royal Shakespeare Company actors and directors working on plays to ‘unlock’ their meaning, on Elizabethan and Jacobean history, Italy in Shakespeare and Shakespeare in India; and a dedicated episode of the quiz show QI. On Radios 3 and 4 there were further play adaptations; a series of essays on Shakespeare and Love; a documentary rooted in twenty early modern objects; and interviews with diverse figures from public life about their most memorable Shakespeare encounters. The season was timed to complement the Cultural Olympiad, part of London’s 2012 Olympic offerings. This article considers Shakespeare Unlocked as a Shakespeare festival, in terms of the season’s design and marketing as well as in its reception by professional critics and audiences on Twitter. It also evidences the way in which Shakespeare Unlocked constitutes the first BBC Shakespeare season to be made and received on social media.

This article argues that Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000), although not a commercial or a critical success when released, continues to raise issues pertinent to contemporary adaptation studies. By investigating how Shakespeare’s ‘academe’ is represented through the idiom of a different kind of ‘Academy’, that of the Hollywood musical of the 1930s/1940s, we can uncover tensions created by the opposition of high and low culture, and the intermingling of the cinematic and the theatrical. In this film adaptation of a play, the relationship between the cinematic and theatrical is further complicated through the model of the early Hollywood musical, which itself seeks, through its inbuilt conventions, to maintain a connection with live theatre and its community. Although Branagh’s adaptation may be deemed a failed experiment, it is representative, in its exploitation of the interaction between the cinematic and theatrical, of a continuing, complex conversation between the genres, exemplified by the use of cinematic techniques in the theatre, and the broadcasting of live theatre into cinemas.

This article sets out to explore how the world-as-stage metaphor and metatheatrical elements are employed in Home Box Office’s (HBO) 2016 television series Westworld and Shakespeare’s plays. In Shakespeare, the world-as-stage metaphor is pervasively used to unsettle the audience’s conceptions of reality and personal identity. Westworld similarly employs the metaphor to question identity and agency. By adapting many of the metatheatrical devices and motifs used by Shakespeare to a science fiction setting and to humanoid androids, Westworld explores new facets of ancient questions on role-play, reality, fiction, freedom and determinism. Whereas in Shakespeare metatheatre is confined to the stage, the world in Westworld has literally become a stage and the audience members have turned into players. Incorporating ideas drawn from cognitive linguistics, the history of theatre, neuropsychology, philosophy of mind, current debates about free will and determinism and early modern protestant theology, this article seeks to demonstrate how in both Westworld and Shakespeare’s plays, theatre and reality ultimately become one because they run against the same final boundary: death.

TEACHING ADAPTATIONS, DEBORAH CARTMELL AND IMELDA WHELEHAN (EDS) (2014) London: Palgrave Macmillan (Teaching the New English series), 195 pp., ISBN: 9781137311153, p/bk, £14.99

REMAKES AND REMAKING: CONCEPTS, MEDIA, PRACTICES, RÜDIGER HEINZE AND LUCIA KRÄMER (EDS) (2015) Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 184 pp., ISBN: 9783837628944, p/bk, 29.00