Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Looking Back, Stepping Forward: JAFP at 15, Mar 2022

This article links scholarship on intertextuality and dialogism applied in the field of adaptation studies with theories of Verfremdungseffekt and semiotics applied in performance and theatre studies via the concept of ‘oscillation’. In its manifestation of the dialogue between ‘same’ and ‘different’, the process and product of adaptation are potentially revelatory in function, and when adapting for the stage this revelatory function makes the act of adaptation gestic in attitude, creating the possibility of activating an interpretive stance in the audience and the potential to effect social change beyond the theatre. These gestic oscillations are explored here via a case study of the Sally Cookson and Jane Eyre Company’s Jane Eyre (2016). The article reads this production as offering a hopeful experience through gestic approaches and utopian moments that promised an intersectional feminist awareness of how gender and race are socially constructed, but ultimately did not go far enough in ‘augmenting’ the adapted text to deliver on this promise.

In 2012, Barrie Kosky opened his first season as head of the Komische Oper Berlin by staging adaptations of three Monteverdi operas. Alongside using more familiar forms of adaptation, Kosky commissioned Elena Kats-Chernin to adapt the scores, focusing on instrumentation. While opera-to-opera adaptation is comparatively rare today, it has a long and rich history. The article first proposes three categories of reasons for opera-to-opera adaptation in the past. It then sets Kosky and Kats-Chernin’s Monteverdi productions in the context of this largely forgotten history, arguing that a historical awareness allows the Monteverdi Trilogie to be understood in terms of continuity rather than rupture, and clarifies some of Kosky and Kats-Chernin’s approaches in terms of a vigorous but respectful engagement with opera and its place in the modern city, in terms of recuperating aspects of operatic reception now frequently lost, and in prompting a reconsideration of localization and community inclusion. The article argues that the combination of Kats-Chernin’s adaptation for a variety of western and non-western, classical and non-classical instruments, and the visibility of the instrumentalists, including migrant musicians, that Kosky’s staging enabled set the tone for Kosky’s tenure at the Komische Oper, especially in terms of community and inclusion.

Ben Hur Live was a live, arena-based version of the story from Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur (1880), best known via the 1959 film version directed by William Wyler, that premiered at London’s O2 Arena in 2009. Meant as the start of a world tour, the show was a financial flop and its run was cut short. I argue that this show was in fact an early example of a small genre of oversized productions – Arena Spectaculars – that bring together live versions of screen material in a specifically post-cinematic way. Since Ben Hur Live’s financial failure there have been financially successful shows such as Batman Live and Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular; their very titles showing their contingent and intertextual nature. Although seemingly niche, aberrant or even ridiculous, the arena spectacular can actually illuminate many things about the contemporary consumption of texts in a post-cinematic, networked and franchised economy of images.

An examination of the relationship between theatre and film that focuses on the work of figures associated with the post-war British theatre but whose film work was often understood in terms of horror. In particular, it examines the ways in which their work was understood as shocking audiences through a confrontation with repressed materials and as narratively staging conflicts between protagonists that represent conflicting ideas. In other words, these stories were often understood as staging battles between characters that sought to assert domination and control over their adversaries, battles that often featured psychological cruelty and destructiveness.

Journey to the West as one of the ‘four great Chinese classic novels’ has had an extraordinary influence across history and around the world. Journey to the West depicts how a Tang Dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang and his three disciples went through 81 trials to obtain the Buddhist texts (Sutras) from the Western Heaven (ancient India). Despite the novel itself being a product of a long history of adaptation, this article aims to offer an overview of the modern and contemporary cross-media adaptations of both the novel and the tale Journey to the West, with examples of literature (including web fictions), stage performances, films, TV series, manga and animation, video games and music. These adaptations not only happen in the Chinese-speaking world but also on an Asian and global level. Through introducing the extensive and diverse cases that inform an idea of ‘IP (intellectual property)’ as favoured in the Chinese cultural market, this article aims to point out the cultural and capital flow within this one single series of adaptations. In place of a relationship between source and adaptation, the contemporary context supports the idea of a wider context in which a source may be seen to validate a range of new and highly commercialized genres. It is developed from a presentation in the 2019 JAFP symposium Looking Back, Stepping Forward.

This article investigates the aesthetic of the twentieth-century Metropolitan Police box and its ongoing association with the TARDIS time machine from the BBC’s television science-fiction show, Doctor Who. Doctor Who fans explore the police box aesthetic through its multiple identities, where it is celebrated, investigated and recreated. This article draws on Catherine Johnson’s theories of pseudo-diegesis and extra-diegesis to demonstrate how such fan interests have a visible effect on Doctor Who’s ongoing production decision-making. In doing so, this article argues for greater attention on non-human social actors within adaptation, and how consumer interest, enacted in multiple ways, has potential power in the shaping and reshaping, of the diegetic worlds of ongoing serializations.

The Transformers franchise is one of the highest-grossing intellectual properties of all time, mostly because of the successful marketing and advertising strategy called toyesis (Jason Bainbridge’s term). Toyesis is a kind of symbiosis between toy market and cultural products, such as cartoons and comics, in which the latter creates an urge of having a new toy, sales of which in turn help finance the whole system. A series of legal decisions and regulations in the 1980s United States made an uncontrolled toy advertising in TV shows possible, and the Transformers franchise (and its owner, the Hasbro company) exploited it without hesitation. But to do so, their contractors (writers, animation studios, etc.) encountered an issue regarding how one can adapt a toy into a cartoon. The article focuses on the strategies of remediation, reconfiguration and incorporation of a toy material into storytelling media, especially into a cartoon. Using Marsha Kinder’s concept of entertainment system, it also examines which strategies reinforced the advertising potential of this material, often without children realizing that they, in fact, watch a sophisticated commercial.