Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 13, Issue 3, 2020

The stage performance of Langbodo, a play, which Nigerian dramatist Wale Ogunyemi adapted from Soyinka’s The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, which, in turn, is a translation of D. O. Fagunwa’s prose, Ògbójú Ọdẹ Nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀. 'The bold hunter in the daemon-infested forest', exposed the limitation of the text as a bearer of meaning in the theatrical adaptation context. The limitation is analysed in this work to justify the centrality of adaptation in bridging the text-design-audience semiotic gap. This study examines the technical challenges of theatre design in D. O. Fagunwa’s works resulting from their adaptation as drama. The Yoruba apothegmatic idiom, Ẹnu ‘dùn ń rò’fọ́, agada ọwọ́ ṣeé ṣán’ko (which means, literally, that ‘vegetable soup can be prepared orally if a mere hand suffices for a cutlass’), a traditional derision for the inadequacies of the text, and the Barthesian notion of intertextuality serve as a dual theoretical structure in this study. A combination of methodologies including participant observation and ethnographic approach suffice for the retrieval and analysis of performance materials, respectively. Therefore, the study contends that the process of stage adaptation in Wale Ogunyemi’s play, Langbodo, used the technical contributions of theatre design, as a catalyst for connecting Fagunwa’s ideas to the final audience.

Among the numerous film adaptations of Anna Karenina, the 1935 version produced by David O. Selznick for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer remains one of the most acclaimed and celebrated – undoubtedly owing to its high production values and the performance and ‘star presence’ of the legendary Greta Garbo. However, the film has also been criticized for distorting and simplifying Tolstoy’s literary classic. In this article, I focus on the process of transposing Anna Karenina into the Hollywood screen version, locating causes of the adaptation process in extra-textual factors. Specifically, I address the economic and industry discourse represented by the MGM studio and its house style; the censorship discourse represented by the Production Code Administration, Hollywood’s self-regulatory body headed by Joseph Breen; and the star discourse represented by Garbo. In the process, I identify and describe the industrial, economic and cultural determinants which brought about MGM’s version of Anna Karenina. At the same time, by perceiving Selznick, Breen and Garbo as co-authors of the film, I redefine and complicate the issue of authorship.

This article investigates the Chinese director Li Shaohong’s film Bloody Morning (1992), which was adapted from Gabriel García Márquez’s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), and the Chinese philosophical and cultural tradition that shaped this case of adaptation. By incorporating the Colombian story, Li Shaohong expressed her concern about China’s backwards rural areas. Her adaptation localizes and incorporates the foreignness of the source text to meet the ideological and aesthetic horizons of expectation and the common concerns of her Chinese audience. This article argues that the director’s domestication has its philosophical and cultural roots in China’s history of war against foreign aggression, although the Chinese film has nothing to do with war against foreign powers.

This article offers a critical reading of Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré. By drawing on early modern race studies and Marshall Sahlin’s notion of ‘mutuality of being’, the article discusses Morrison’s lyrical prose as well as Traoré’s songs and performance to show how they merge and amplify one another in Sellars’ meditative staging to jointly rearticulate early modern notions of race, kinship and family embedded in Othello. By questioning what lies dormant, unseen and unheard in the Shakespearean tragedy, Desdemona supplements it with what Imtiaz Habib has termed ‘imprints of the invisible’ and invites its readers and audiences to ponder the onset of European colonialism, the slave trade, colour-based racism and their global aftermath, positing theatre as a metaphor for other civic, shared spaces where honest conversations about race, gender and class inequalities can open up a path to healing and reconciliation.

When first released in 1975, Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, directed by the already-notorious Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, aroused instant controversy. As a framework for its plot, Salò took the infamous 500-page novel by the Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom. In de Sade’s novel, four libertines, President de Curval, the Duc de Blangis, Durcet and the Bishop of X, sign a contract whose main clause is commitment to breaking as many taboos as they can possibly think of. With sixteen youths, eight girls and eight boys, servants, guards and four procurers and ex-prostitutes, the libertines isolate themselves in a remote chateau to re-enact their every fantasy. Filming Salò, Pasolini’s goal was to remain faithful to Sade’s novel. The characters, events and structure of the story remain the same. The more controversial aspect of the film, however, was Pasolini’s idea of relocating Sade’s novel into the actual historical context of the fascist Republic of Salò. For Pasolini, the gesture of moving Sade to Salò was to draw an actual analogy between the fascism and sadism. For some critics, the parallel between fascism and sadism was unfortunate exactly because it presented fascism, a real and palpable phenomenon, as an abstraction (the way that Sade’s world functions).

This article deals with the adaptation of a written text – the diary of 13-year-old Éva Heyman who died in the Holocaust – into a series of Instagram stories, joined to create a 50-minute film. We employ translation studies and the concept of ‘indirect translation’ to investigate this unique case in which a genre characterized by its ephemerality is used to commemorate and perpetuate the past. The project, which caused a furore because Instagram was considered inappropriate for dealing with such a grave subject, was motivated by the desire to transmit the diary to contemporary audiences and retain its relevance for them. We have found that the diary served as a general framework, but its contents and the character of Éva that emerges from it were overshadowed by two factors: turning Éva into a contemporary youngster, so as to attract today’s youth; and relying on Hollywood traditions of filming the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Tina Benko is an American stage, screen and television actress who has steadily trodden the Broadway boards for twenty years while starring in films and TV series and teaching acting and movement in New York City. An intensely focused and versatile performer, Benko has played in a broad variety of genres, ranging from screwball and Shakespearean comedies to realistic Russian, Scandinavian and American plays. In this interview, she discusses the factors that attracted her to drama and theatre, her acting training and approach to character-building, and theatre as a space for healing and reconciliation as she experienced it while working in Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré.

For the past 40 years, Peter Sellars has been one of the most innovative, eclectic and prolific directors in Western theatre. A deeply cultivated and politically committed practitioner whose vision and craft span a multitude of widely divergent theatrical traditions, genres and styles, Sellars has established his international reputation as a polymath in the performing arts. With more than 100 productions to his name, including community-based, transnational and transcontinental work, Sellars is known worldwide for his contemporary interpretations of canonical plays and operas that combine radical imagery, technical virtuosity, structural rigour, intellectual depth, social critique and moral intent. In this interview, he shares details about his collaboration with African American writer Toni Morrison and Malian musician Rokia Traoré in the creation of Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello, talking about theatre as ritual, directorial choices, acting as channelling and intertextuality.

Rokia Traoré is a Malian singer, guitarist and composer, known worldwide for her artistic syncretism and political activism. Her distinctive style blends elements of traditional Malian music with blues, folk and rock to address contemporary geopolitical and humanitarian issues. She is the artistic director of Fondation Passerelle, a non-profit organization she founded in 2006 to support young African singers and musicians by offering them high-quality professional training and work opportunities in the music industry. In this interview, she discusses her experience as songwriter and performer in Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, sharing some intimate memories and elaborating freely on the role of performers and the importance of focused listening in live stage productions.

Review of: The History of American Literature on Film, Thomas Leitch (2019)

New York and London: Bloomsbury, 448 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-6289-2373-5, h/bk, £ 120.00