Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2025

Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s black comedy series, Inside No. 9 (2014–24), has adapted Shakespeare’s tragic and comic works. Examining the role of the early modern playwright in the series opens a conversation about the nature of adaptation, specifically televisual adaptation. A key characteristic of adaptation, equivocation, is prominent in the show’s adaptations of Shakespeare, ‘The Understudy’ (2014) and ‘Zanzibar’ (2017). Analysing equivocation in these episodes and in ‘The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge’ (2015), which extends the show’s interest in seventeenth-century England and, like Macbeth, is an adaptation of history, leads to a consideration of how feelings of uncertainty are common among audiences of adaptation. This phenomenon is especially acute among the televisual audience, whose potential for engagement through streaming services, like BBC iPlayer or BritBox, magnifies adaptations’ defining qualities, most notably their palimpsestuous nature, reliance upon repetition and simultaneous presentation of similarity and difference. Together, these characteristics give audiences the feeling of being equivocated with, something which is both thrilling and unsettling much like the series Inside No. 9 itself.

This article explores a genealogy of men associated with Jekyll/Hyde in the first 50 years of the story’s existence. This leads from the creator, Robert Louis Stevenson to theatre actor Richard Mansfield and then to three film stars who took on the role in Hollywood: John Barrymore, Fredric March and Spencer Tracy. I argue that each of these men has to build on the legend of the one that preceded them, thereby expressing a changing sense of human identity. From Stevenson’s original concept of character as ‘not one but two’ to a final understanding, in the 1942 version of ‘not two but one’, through a focus on contemporary responses and the films and advertising strategies, I explore this shift in perception.

Satyajit Ray’s works, including films and short stories, often convey ideological perspectives concerning colonialism and different contemporary issues on socialism and nationhood. A few of his films and short stories can be studied to shed light upon Ray’s anti-colonial attitude. From a close reading of Ray’s three short stories, ‘Neel Atanka’ (‘The Indigo Horror’, 1968), ‘First Class Kamra’ (‘First-Class Compartment’, 1981) and ‘Robertsoner Ruby’ (‘Robertson’s Ruby’, 1992), the article observes Ray’s anti-colonial approach that emphasizes two aspects: the traumatic colonial past of the central characters and their present-day anti-colonial retribution. This article studies Ray’s film The Postmaster (1961) to demonstrate Ray’s approach to anti-colonialism in his early adaptations of Tagore’s text. Therefore, theorizing Ray’s idea of anti-colonialism through a reading of his stories, this article argues that Ray’s adaptation brings to light the postmaster’s disturbing colonial past through his accounts of engagements in the indigo farming scheme and in also giving Ratan a false promise of education, as also mentioned in Tagore’s story. Consequently, in Ray’s adaptation, the colonial self of the postmaster returns and receives his inevitable anti-colonial retribution by exposing himself to fear and a feeling of grief. The article also investigates Ray’s experiment with the film form in adapting a short story.

This article analyses the site-specific project Myth and Dreams by Indian artist Mithu Sen, prepared for the Municipal Gallery in Poznań, Poland in 2018. The exhibition was a very special transcultural, empathetic and transmedia adaptation of one episode of the popular Polish TV series M jak miłość (‘L Is for Love’) (2000–present). The article focuses primarily on the issue of the transcultural and creative adaptation of the Polish series by an Indian visual artist, going in the direction of deconstructing cultural myths. The methodological toolbox primarily includes therefore, methods relating to Roland Barthes’s semiotics, as well as cultural studies, with the notion of transculturalism and illegibility as a consciously applied artistic strategy. The text also refers to the methods used to analyse television series in relation to social practices. After Linda Hutcheon, adaptation is perceived in two ways: as a product and as a process. Not only will narrative strategies be considered, but also the mediums in which they are presented. The study argues that Mithu Sen’s radical transcultural adaptation of a television series – made without any knowledge of the Polish language – is an effective tool for deciphering myths associated with cultural stereotypes and established social practices. It works as a subversive adaptation.

Scholarship on Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (1996), according to the scholar Gina Wisker, has principally taken two directions: ‘historical […] contextualiz[ations of] the representation and treatment of women’ and ‘problematiz[ations of the] ways in which people and historical records are obsessed with the impossible task of fixing, articulating, proving history, and the facts of any events’. Drawing on Caroline Levine’s influential work on form, and focusing on the first episode of Mary Harron’s six-episode adaptation (2017), I argue that the miniseries routinely tantalizes us as a whodunnit, but that it, in fact, reflects back to us our own needs and wants. I go over Atwood’s and Harron’s source material before revealing how they characteristically point to the inherent uncertainties of Grace Marks’s case and how, in so doing, they do significant service to the complexities of her character. My broader claim is methodological: my reading speaks to the two registers identified by Wisker, and it reveals how Harron builds on Atwood by provoking us both to make intentional our partiality as viewers and to situate ourselves in our interpretative projects.