Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Radio Adaptations, Aug 2024

Radio drama presents unique challenges for narrative construction, particularly with regard to the incorporation of a narrator. The illusion of immediacy in radio drama often makes it difficult to identify a narrator, disrupting the traditional narrative structure found in novels. This article explores two American radio adaptations of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, with a particular focus on the use of narrative techniques that move beyond the possibilities of the original novel’s textual medium. This comparison emphasizes the unique narrative structures present in the radio adaptations and deepens our understanding of the distinct affordances as well as limitations of the audio medium in realizing Wells’s visionary tale. The analysis considers the concepts of narrator, focalizer and mediator and their application in radio drama. By exploring the distinctive characteristics of auditory signification and multimodal strategies utilized in audio drama, a deeper comprehension of narrative theory can be achieved.

George Tabori (1914–2007), a Hungarian-born British playwright of Jewish decent, is closely associated with German Holocaust theatre. Less well-known is his prolific career in German radio drama. This contribution traces the trajectory of Tabori’s short story ‘Weissmann und Rotgesicht’ and its adaptation for German radio in 1978. The overall theme of its narrative can be identified as the issue of competing minoritized groups (Jews and Indigenous Americans), their respective identity politics and mechanisms of ‘othering’. My analysis first asks how the short story presents these questions, as it was written in a North American context primarily shaped by the popular cultural format of the western movie. Secondly, I ask how the topic is culturally and medially transferred to the radio play form, considering the production’s West German context of the late 1970s. My interest is guided by the question whether and how we can read this 1978 radio play as an intervention in the debate on the representation of the ‘Indian’ in popular German culture and its simultaneous erasure, several decades after the Holocaust, of the Jew.

Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall (1957) has been adapted for different media. In order to understand the challenges it poses for any form of visual representation, this article will first show how the radio play exploits the acousmatic nature of the medium and its so-called ‘blindness’. In a next step, it will discuss how the various stage performances of All That Fall have dealt with these difficulties, in light of the author’s reservations about the matter and the restrictions imposed by his estate. However, Beckett did allow French film and television versions to be made during his lifetime – respectively by Alain Resnais and Michel Mitrani, the latter for Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (RTF). This raises questions not only about how authors and cultural contexts impact the adaptation process, but also about the aesthetic differences and historical relations between theatre and technological media, which the article will additionally probe.

Four hundred years ago, boy actors played the female characters on the British stage, but when UK radio was established a century ago, it was often the other way around: women played the boys. This continued almost until the turn of the millennium but has been a largely hidden history, with many of the actresses billed in such a way as to not reveal their gender. This article argues that these vocal performances are a specific adaptation technique and particularly focuses on its use in BBC Radio adaptations of Shakespeare plays. By examining contemporary accounts and existing audio recordings, it establishes what these women sounded like and the reaction of critics to their portrayals. It also compares these female performances in boys’ roles with productions where genuine children were used, exploring why producers frequently chose adult women over young boys to play these parts and why the public appears to have accepted their voices in these roles. This unacknowledged tradition of acting has taken place for generations in an organization where cross-gender casting in adult Shakespearean roles is very rare. This article reclaims these roles for the women who played them.

Despite its status as a cult novel, adaptations of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) have been rare. This is not surprising, considering that the book’s unusual form is intrinsically connected to its equally unusual content. The novel’s story concerns a film about a house whose dimensions defy the laws of physics. The novel continually highlights the impossibility of its own filmic adaptation. Many of the main characters underline that the film medium inherently falls short of representing the unnatural space that is at the heart of the story. One successful adaptation is Das Haus (2010), a German radio play version of the novel that presents the story of House of Leaves in three different productions that were broadcast on three stations simultaneously. Listeners were invited to switch between the channels to find their own way through the story. This article focuses on the topic of space as it relates to sound in both the novel and the radio play adaptation, demonstrating how Das Haus relies on medium-specific elements to represent the unnatural narrative space of the story.

Made for BBC Radio 3, The Midnight Cry of the Deathbird (2012) is an adaptation of F. W. Murnau’s German expressionist silent film Nosferatu (1922), which serves as both a target text (of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, 1897) and a source text (of The Midnight Cry). Thus, complex layers of adaptation and audience expectations are evoked through medium-specific qualities, such as the ability of radio to represent the immaterial or disembodied and multiple spaces at the same time, including a between-world along inside/outside worlds. Radio can exist almost entirely in the mind, effortlessly navigating between outer and inner dimensions. This article explores questions of narration, embodiment/non-corporeality and inner space. Using Scott McCloud’s concept of radio as a ‘mono-sensory medium’, it centres primarily on the characters of the Nosferatu (a bodiless essence of contagion) and Roger, a friendly Everyman who serves as the listener’s radio guide.