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- Volume 4, Issue 2, 2011
Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2011
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2011
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Adaptation in contemporary Nigerian drama: The example of Ahmed Yerima
More LessApart from myths, legends, history and contemporary reality, adaptation is another long-standing source of African drama. The article examines the sources, motives, nature and form of textual transposition in contemporary Nigerian drama with a specific focus on the plays of Ahmed Yerima, one of the major dramatists who emerged in the country in the 1990s. While paying attention to the general factors behind adaptation, the article examines Yerima’s An Inspector Calls and Otaelo. Intertextuality and transfiguring are crucial to our understanding of the manifestation of adaptation in Nigerian drama. In both plays, political and historical considerations are very dominant in the choice of texts and modes of transposition. Yerima engages in a critical soul-searching to discuss Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament. While a kind of continuity is apparent in the adapted texts through the retention of essential details of characterization, plot and theme, the indigenous cultural milieu accounts for differences. Thus, through adaptation, Nigerian dramatists bring new perspectives into the source texts and draw the audience’s attention to them.
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The Gate Theatre: A translation powerhouse on the inter-war British stage
More LessThis article examines the members-only theatre club – the Gate Theatre Studio – that operated between 1925 and 1940 in Covent Garden. Led by only two successive artistic directors, this relatively small establishment has become one of the most daring institutions of the inter-war British theatre scene, by taking risks in introducing new work from continental Europe and America to British audiences, and thus, going against the grain of dominant indigenous cultural policy. Focusing on the clearly defined agenda to broaden the parameters of performance practice in Britain, the Gate made an effort to align its repertoire to those of European theatres and to nurture home-grown talent in terms of writing, translating and adapting for the stage. In this way, the Gate has irreversibly shaped the profile of stage translation in a culture where interlinguistic communication has had a relatively low status and consolidated the practice of adaptation as an endeavour appealing to British theatre makers and dramatists. Not subject to the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays, due to its private club status, the Gate was also instrumental in revealing the obsolete nature of theatre censorship; successful Gate productions often led to the discovery of new plays by the theatre establishment and to the subsequent lifting of censorial bans for their staging in public theatres.
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‘No dream is ever just a dream’: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut as monofilm
By Kurt TaroffThis article examines Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), in relation to its source text, J.M.Q. Davies’s 1999 translation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle/Dream Story, originally published in 1926. Both the film and the novel are viewed through the lens of monodrama, a dramatic genre characterized by the attempt to convey the subjective psychical experience of a strong central protagonist. Monodramatic traits may also be found in the novel and film, and the article explores how this adaptation typifies certain aspects of the monodrama form and how those traits are portrayed through the specific conventions and limitations of the differing media.
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History, adaptation, Japan: Haruki Murakami’s ‘Tony Takitani’ and Jun Ichikawa’s Tony Takitani
More LessHaruki Murakami’s short story, ‘Tony Takitani’, first published in Japan in 1990, and the film adaptation directed by Jun Ichikawa, released in 2004 under the same title, are important critiques of society in late twentieth-century Japan. I focus on the socio-historical framework that Murakami constructed in the short story and that Ichikawa instantiated in his adaptation. I suggest that Murakami’s ‘Tony Takitani’, an incisive portrayal of unsustainable consumption and social disconnection, is a prescient work that anticipated the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble in the early 1990s – and that Ichikawa’s film confirms the accuracy of Murakami’s dark prescience, but offers a counterpoint to it in an extended storyline that reveals a muted optimism grounded in the possibility of social reconnection.
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How far can you go in telling a story without using words?
More LessMatthew Bourne’s Play Without Words: The Housewarming (2002) offers an especially intriguing work of adaptation. This hybrid piece of dance–theatre choreography suggests simultaneous correspondences with a number of subjects, and also with different artistic media. Bourne’s work explicitly references the 1963 Losey-Pinter film The Servant, which was adapted from Robin Maugham’s novella of the same name, while indirectly corresponding with 1960s British films. Furthermore, the work suggests, in an understated fashion, a correspondence with the theatrical poetics of Harold Pinter, which appears to serve in advancing Bourne’s aspiration to be regarded as a director – creating theatre through movement – rather than a creator of dances. This aspiration, which is manifested in various ways, both directly and indirectly, in interviews conducted with Bourne, underlies his overall approach as a choreographer.
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REVIEWS
Authors: Alison Forsyth, Paul Geary, Laurence Raw, Jamie Sherry and Sarah ThomasCINEMATIC HAMLET: THE FILMS OF OLIVIER, ZEFFIRELLI, BRANAGH AND ALMEREYDA, PATRICK J. COOK (2011) Athens: Ohio University Press, 257 pp., ISBN 13-978-0-8214-1944-1, h/bk, $55.00 NABOKOV’S CINEMATIC AFTERLIFE, EWA MAZIERSKA (2011) Jefferson and London: McFarland & Company, Inc, viii+235 pp., ISBN 978-0-7864-4543-1, p/bk, £33.95 SCREENING SHAKESPEARE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, MARK THORNTON BURNETT AND RAMONA WRAY (EDS) (2006) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 218 pp., ISBN 07486 23515, p/bk, £22.99 FROM FILM ADAPTATION TO POST-CELLULOID ADAPTATION, COSTAS CONSTANDINIDES (2010) New York and London: Continuum, 176 pp., ISBN 978-1-4411-0380-2, h/bk, £55.00 ROYAL PORTRAITS IN HOLLYWOOD: FILMING THE LIVES OF QUEENS, ELIZABETH A. FORD AND DEBORAH C. MITCHELL (2009) Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 327 pp., ISBN 9780813125435, h/bk, £35.50
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 17 (2024)
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Volume 16 (2023)
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Volume 15 (2022)
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Volume 14 (2021)
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Volume 13 (2020)
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Volume 12 (2019)
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Volume 11 (2018)
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Volume 10 (2017)
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Volume 9 (2016)
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Volume 8 (2015)
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Volume 7 (2013 - 2014)
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Volume 6 (2013)
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Volume 5 (2012)
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Volume 4 (2011)
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Volume 3 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 2 (2009)
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Volume 1 (2007 - 2009)
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Editorial
Authors: Richard Hand and Katja Krebs
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