Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 8, Issue 3, 2015

Exploring the nature of the special relationship that links cinema and translation often means analysing the translational process through dubbing or subtitling, that is to say from source to target text or culture. This article aims to discuss the ways in which a multilingual page-to-screen adaptation is filmed. In the context of filming translation, dubbing may present characteristics that are not well-suited to the challenges presented by multilingual films, and none the more so than in one of the most fascinating films, Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris/Contempt (1963), in which translation and adaptation are at the core of its discourse. First, I will demonstrate that the subtitling of the multilingual dialogues in Contempt questions the notion of film translation as mere literal reproduction or transparent transposition. Second, I will show that the multi-layered adaptation exposes Godard’s own interpretation of cinematic truth, ultimately presenting cinema as a metaphor for translation.

This article critically examines the relationship between Othello and music, from the play text to opera, popular music allusions, and diegetic and non-diegetic soundtracks, analysing its adaptability/inadaptability in various contexts, with a focus on the issue of race. It does this through the lenses of adaptation studies and the singular history that adaptations of Shakespeare’s work have. The central question addressed is: what do musical adaptations reveal about the adaptability of the play? What this article aims to achieve – and that which has not been undertaken previously – is to expand the lines of analysis from G. Wilson Knight’s conception of the ‘The Othello music’ to sustained consideration of musical adaptations across periods and media, combining a discussion of the Moor’s ‘musicality’ with re-representations of race, deducing whether or not it sits as uneasily in musical forms as it does in screen adaptations.

This article explores three adaptations of classical Greek stories/myths: Kan Ya Ma Kan/Once Upon a Time (2000), Iphigenia Crash Land Falls On The Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable) (2004) and Trojan Barbie: A Car Crash Encounter with Euripides’ Trojan Women (2007). These adaptations seek to deconstruct ‘source’ texts by presenting new readings that challenge the dominant patriarchal and political discourses embedded in these myths. Even though the plays offer examples of different modes of adaptation, they all use myth as a catalyst to explore issues of gender and politics. The article examines these three feministoriented adaptations in order to explore the ways in which their theatrical practices illuminate and critique contemporary social and political issues.

The Victorian stage life of Sweeney Todd, evolving from George Dibdin Pitt’s adaptation in 1847, has been fairly widely discussed in nineteenth-century theatre scholarship. However, the majority of previous examinations focus on a version of Dibdin Pitt’s melodrama available in John Dicks’ collection of plays from 1883. A much earlier manuscript from 1847 is archived in the British Library’s Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Collection, which became more openly accessible when Sharon Aronofsky Weltman reproduced the entire text in her special journal issue on the play (2011). The manuscript reveals that the inaugural text and performances starkly contrast with the 1883 version. Apart from Weltman’s publication, to date there has been minute critical attention to the 1847 text. This article offers a close analysis of the adaptation processes from Edward Lloyd’s penny blood to the melodramatic reworking, in order to provide the necessary re-examination of a canonical example of a Victorian stage villain. The transition in 1847 demonstrates how and why Todd took centre-stage, the synergy between Dibdin Pitt’s adaptation of the character and contemporary anxieties over urban crime, and that the barber’s theatre debut was the catalyst for fuelling his urban legend, which still remains in the present day.

This article examines the integral subject of the Monster’s speech in reference to stage and film adaptations by Richard Brinsley Peake, James Whale and Nick Dear. The focus of the article is the Monster’s vocality and ability to communicate, a complicated subject from the earliest of the novel’s adaptations. It examines the history of the Monster’s speech as well as the way in which that speech or silence interacts with the layers of adaptation each new version is engaged with. In this way it demonstrates how integral vocality is to a sympathetic vision of the Monster, even when it is no longer present in the adaptation. To utilize Marvin Carlson’s critical idiom, even our visions of the silent Monster are ghosted by the vocality of Shelley’s original creation. Nick Dear’s recent stage adaptation seeks to intervene in this trajectory and restore the Creature’s narrative, giving him both voice and authority over his own experiences.