Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat

heatre and Adaptation heatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat Edited by Margherita Laera Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Margherita Laera, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Margherita Laera has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-4725-2241-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN For David Kohn With all my love, always Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: he heatricality of Adaptation Margherita Laera ix Part 1 Return, Rewrite, Repeat 19 1 2 3 4 5 ‘It’s Very Tied to the Content of the Play’: Basil Jones, Adrian Kohler, Jane Taylor and Mervyn Millar of Handspring Puppet Company in Conversation with Nadia Davids Social and heatrical Adaptation: Grzegorz Jarzyna in Conversation with Paul Allain Creating X-Rays of the Text to Dissect the Present: Ivo van Hove of Toneelgroep Amsterdam in Conversation with Peter M. Boenisch ‘Something New Is Sure To Happen’: Daniel Veronese in Conversation with Jean Graham-Jones Conservative Adaptation in Japanese Noh heatre: Udaka Michishige in Conversation with Diego Pellecchia Part 2 Defusing Tradition 6 7 8 9 On Literality and Limits: Romeo Castellucci of Socìetas Rafaello Sanzio in Conversation with Nicholas Ridout he Subtle Aggressors: Julia Bardsley and Simon Vincenzi in Conversation with Dominic Johnson Between Radical Adaptation and Strategic Adaptability: Ki Catur ‘Benyek’ Kuncoro in Conversation with Miguel Escobar Beg, Borrow or Steal: Lois Weaver in Conversation with Jen Harvie 1 21 35 49 63 77 91 93 107 121 135 viii Contents Part 3 Intercultural Encounters 10 Shakespeare/Two Gents Productions: Denton Chikura, Tonderai Munyevu and Arne Pohlmeier of Two Gents Productions in Conversation with Penelope Woods 11 Being Afected: An Interview with Ong Keng Sen of heatreWorks Singapore in Conversation with William Peterson 12 Hello Darkness My Old Friend: Alvis Hermanis in Conversation with Alan Read Part 4 Crating Adaptations 13 he Novel as ‘Obstacle’: John Collins of Elevator Repair Service in Conversation with Aoife Monks 14 Doing the Impossible: Katie Mitchell in Conversation with Dan Rebellato 15 ‘here Are No Formulas’: Emma Rice of Kneehigh in Conversation with Martin Welton 16 ‘Expert’ Dramaturgies: Helgard Haug of Rimini Protokoll in Conversation with Margherita Laera 17 heatre as an Intellectual Concertina: Simon Stephens in Conversation with Duška Radosavljević Notes on Contributors Index 149 151 165 181 197 199 213 227 241 255 269 273 Acknowledgements his book brings together an extraordinary group of theatre-makers and academics whose work I deeply admire, and with whom it has been a pleasure to collaborate. I am very grateful for the time each has contributed, and for the resulting rigour this has brought to the project. he idea for this collection emerged from a series of 12 public interviews I organized in 2012, entitled the Leverhulme Olympic Talks on heatre and Adaptation. hey took place at Queen Mary, University of London, at the ICA and at the Barbican Centre. he project, generously sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust, also received support from Queen Mary’s Drama Department and Olympics Committee. I want to thank the Head of Drama, Michael McKinnie, and the Olympics Committee Chair, Evelyn Welch, for their endorsement. I am also indebted to Jules Deering and the technical team for providing exceptional assistance to the series of talks, and to Harriet Curtis and Nicola Lee for helping it run smoothly. he European heatre Research Network at the University of Kent kindly teamed up with Queen Mary and the Barbican to support the last talk of the series, with the director Grzegorz Jarzyna. I am also very grateful to Matthew Cohen for his advice on the subject of Indonesian puppetry performance, and to my patient colleagues who transcribed the interviews: Harriet Curtis, Diane Gittings and Susan Higgins. Many thanks to the editorial team at Methuen Drama, especially Mark Dudgeon and Emily Hockley, for making this book happen. Lastly, I want to express my gratitude to my family for their love and encouragement while I worked on this project. Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: he heatricality of Adaptation Margherita Laera heatre returns, it always does. It returns to places where it has already been before and to times in which it has already appeared. And while it does so, it sends us too, the spectators, to those places and times, performance ater performance. heatre also rewrites. It constantly does. It rewrites history, relationships, stories and rules. It refashions beliefs, recycles old and used objects and reassembles them into new embodied experiences. Above all, theatre repeats, and incessantly so. It repeats itself and the act of returning and rewriting, as though it were struck by an obsessive compulsion to reiterate and re-enact, again and again, the vestiges of its past. In so doing, it adapts itself to present contingencies and situations, like an animal species struggling to survive through evolution. heatre, however, does not reshape its coordinates simply to remain alive or to remain itself through time, but also to change the world around it. heatre, one could say, never stops adapting its features to the world and the world to its features. In this book, theatre makers and academics discuss the many modalities in which theatre returns to, rewrites and repeats its objects and desires. hrough 17 commissioned interviews, the contributors to this volume explore the notion of ‘adaptation’ and its multiple relevance to theatre and performance in the twenty-irst century. While the mechanisms of the cultural practice we now call ‘adaptation’ have been associated with theatricality for longer than written historical evidence can account for, they are certainly not limited to the theatre. In Ater Babel, George Steiner proposed that 2 heatre and Adaptation ‘invariance within transformation’ is at the basis of what we call ‘culture’.1 For Steiner, ‘a culture is a sequence of translations and transformations of constants’ relying upon mechanisms such as ‘paraphrase, pastiche, imitation, thematic variation, parody, citation in a supporting or undermining context, false attribution (accidental or deliberate), plagiarism, collage and many more’.2 he production of community, therefore, is rooted in the repetition of cultural units of meaning through the rituals of sociality and belonging, otherwise known as ‘tradition’. But what role does theatre play in the perpetuation of traditional practices? How does theatre contribute to the formation, deformation, and hybridization of ‘cultures’? What relationship is there between adaptation, performance, and change? In the interviews that follow, the term ‘adaptation’ is applied to a wide variety of theatrical operations, uses, and contexts, in which a transformation of sorts takes place. It not only refers to the dramaturgical practice of turning, for instance, a novel into a play script, a domain traditionally covered by playwrights. It also covers the work of directors and their mise en scène, that of actors in performance and rehearsals, that of translators in transferring a text from one language to another, and that of audiences in co-authoring and responding to a piece. A focus on the processes of adaptation, that is, on the modalities in which theatre makers adapt existing cultural material of varying form into performance, can be traced throughout the volume. Here, artists relect on how they practise adaptation as well as why they serially do. While theatre venues continue to bank on the attractive familiarity of adaptations, and more and more university drama departments ofer practical and theoretical modules on how to devise and analyse them, scholarship has so far concentrated on literary and cinematic practice or on speciic subields of Shakespeare Studies and Classical Receptions.3 hrough conversations between theatre and performance academics and internationally renowned ‘serial adapters’ working in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa, this book wishes to explore a variety of approaches and contexts in which stage practitioners make theatre by constantly returning to, rewriting and repeating their methodologies, histories and inherited narratives. Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: he heatricality of Adaptation 3 his volume explores the idea that the mechanisms of adaptation and those of theatricality have something fundamental in common, not least in their relationship with temporality. As approximate repetitions of cultural fragments, adaptations obsessively return to the past and continuously repeat it, even if their intention is to reject it. In adaptation’s logic, time is no linear progression, but a spiral that keeps turning on itself, causing cyclical reoccurrences while ensuring evolution. his logic is seamlessly matched by the ghostliness of performance, its apparatus of reproduction and representation, its ‘restored behaviours’ and recursive apparitions.4 One might say that both adaptation and performance are nostalgic in their ‘ache for return’, their desire to come ‘home’ again and again, wherever ‘home’ might be. In he Haunted Stage, Marvin Carlson writes that ‘[t]he retelling of stories already told, the reenactment of events already enacted, the experience of emotions already experienced, these are and have always been central concerns in all times and places’.5 As a memory machine, theatre is the site for the recollection, re-elaboration, and contestation of readily available cultural material, and for the production of new, and newly adaptable, ideas out of established ones: this makes the position of the theatre spectator uncanny, since, as Herbert Blau states, ‘we are seeing what we saw before’.6 According to Blau, it is our mortality which dooms ‘us’ to repetition.7 He states: What is being repeated in the tautological cycle of performance – replay, reenactment, restoration, the play within the play within – is the memory of the origin of the memory which is being solicited and resisted. It is in this recursive way that performance is a testament to a life that seems to look like death because it is always being let behind.8 One could speak, therefore, of the theatricality of adaptation. One could say that adaptation is a ‘theatrical’ device precisely because it contains, extends and multiplies those principles that are already at the core of performance: restored behaviour, representation of the world and a relentless repetition lacking the exactness of machines. his 4 heatre and Adaptation book examines both works that avowedly adapt from a source and other, less evident instances, in which adaptive mechanisms pertain to the everyday practice of theatre makers. he series of 17 interviews uncover methodologies proposed by stage artists who have repeatedly practised a kind of theatre-making that we might call recursive, stubbornly repetitive, or even productively obsessive. Deinitions and modalities of adaptation Contributors explore the rich signifying potential of the term adaptation and many of its possible metaphorical uses, without following a unifying deinition. Our keyword is a multi-faceted term that allows many uses and interpretations, from the constant adaptation of an actor’s performance to that of other members of the cast in each rehearsal or run (see Woods, p. 157), to the quick changes made to the performance script in response to sudden requests from sponsors in Java (see Escobar, pp. 137–8), to the variations introduced by each collaborator throughout the creative process (see Radosavljević, p. 266), or those brought on to adapt a production to a new venue (see Davids, p. 31), or again those ushered in by a new audience, whose interpretative work understands the production from a diferent perspective or language (see Read, p. 186). However, in Adaptation Studies, a growing ield of scholarly research, the term adaptation primarily refers to a kind of interpretative intervention – much like Steiner’s intertextual practices – which involves transposing a source or stimulus into a diferent language, medium, or culture, seeking ‘matches’ for certain features of the source and proposing ‘mismatches’ for others. Meanings, therefore, may wilfully and/or unwittingly be distorted, parodied and subverted as part of a process of translative refashioning, which can include juxtaposing diferent sources, compressing, or expanding sections of larger works, and adding new material to the old. Evidently, there are several types of adaptation, depending on the nature of the adapted Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: he heatricality of Adaptation 5 work, the kind of engagement with it and the product resulting from this process. In this intertextual sense, the process of adaptation implies negotiations of numerous kinds, such as interlingual, intercultural, intersemiotic, intermedial, but also ideological, ethical, aesthetic and political. Comparative Literature scholar Linda Hutcheon deines adaptation as ‘an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works; a creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/ salvaging; an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work’.9 However, the terminology concerning intertextual practices of rewriting is contested. Some theatre artists and scholars prefer the term ‘appropriation’ to deine their work (see Johnson, p. 112) because adaptation is perceived to be too linked to literary practices and text-based theatre, or because it suggests the idea of a derivative endeavour of lesser value than an ‘original’ work. Others, like English Literature and Drama scholar Julie Sanders, have sought to distinguish between the terms ‘adaptation’ and ‘appropriation’, the latter being more removed from its source.10 However, I ind it more useful to think of adaptation as a synonym of appropriation, because it is too problematic to draw the line between a ‘faithful adaptation’ and an ‘unfaithful appropriation’ (faithful or unfaithful to what, anyway?). If any diference can be elaborated between the two terms, appropriation emphasizes the idea of ‘taking for one’s own use’ and therefore of conscious manipulation, and is thus oten preferable in contexts in which there is little or no concern, and productively so, with ‘staying true’ to the source. It is clear, though, that the multiple modalities of adaptation, stretching from accurate interlingual versions to radical reuses of a stimulus and intra- or intermedial renditions, make categorizations complex but necessary. Let us then sketch a taxonomy of adaptation as intertextual practice – where ‘text’ may refer to performance, ilm, and other non-literary sources. I shall start by considering negotiations between languages based on Roman Jakobson’s classiication of translational practices into the intralingual (or rewording, between the same language), the interlingual (or translation proper, between two diferent languages), 6 heatre and Adaptation and the intersemiotic (or transmutation, between two diferent semiotic systems, such as a verbal sign system and a non-verbal one).11 Following Jakobson’s distinctions, one could say, for instance, that the English script for Split Britches’ and Bloolips’ Belle Reprieve (1991), a feminist rewriting of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, is an intralingual adaptation (see Harvie, p. 146); that Daniel Veronese’s Los hijos se han dormido (2011), an Argentinian rewriting of Chekhov’s he Seagull, is an interlingual version (see GrahamJones, p. 71); and that Romeo Castellucci’s productions Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso (2008), which feature almost no speech at all, are intersemiotic appropriations of Dante’s epic poem (see Ridout, pp. 100–3). However, things get more complicated when we consider the diferent mediums, genres, cultures, and historical periods that are involved in the act of stage transposition. Intramedial adaptations work within the same medium, such as a written play script adapted into another play script, which is the case of Rio Kishida’s adaptation of King Lear (1997) for Ong Keng Sen’s performance (see Peterson, p. 171). Intermedial adaptations, on the other hand, transpose a source into another medium, for instance Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz (2005; see Monks, pp. 203–7), a stage version of Fitzgerald’s novel he Great Gatsby. Moreover, every mise en scène of a play can be considered an intermedial adaptation of a script into a live performance. By the same token, intrageneric adaptations retain the same genre as their source, such as Two Gents Productions’ two-hander Two Gentlemen of Verona based on Shakespeare’s comedy (2008; see Woods, pp. 156–61), while in intergeneric ones we witness a genre shit, for instance with Emma Rice’s and Spymonkey’s comedy version of Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus, renamed Oedipussy (2012; see Welton, p. 228). An intracultural adaptation involves a transposition within the same culture, such as Simon Stephens’ stage version of Haddon’s he Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2012; see Radosavljević, pp. 255–66); while intercultural adaptation (also known as transculturation) transfers one source from one culture into another, such Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: he heatricality of Adaptation 7 as Ong’s two versions of King Lear (1997 and 2012; see Peterson, pp. 169–73). he distinction between intratemporal and intertemporal adaptations is perhaps more complex than one might imagine. It depends on whether the setting of the target text is located in the same period as in the source or in a diferent one, though there is a distinction to be made between the time of writing/publication, the ictional time in which the source and the target texts are set, and the time alluded to in the performance. Most projects featured in this book are intertemporal, but Nick Staford’s and Handspring Puppet Company’s 2007 stage adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 novel War Horse can be considered intratemporal, as the ictional action is set during World War I in both source and adaptation (see Davids, pp. 23–4 and 29–31). An intertemporal adaptation that relocates an old source (either written or set in the distant past) into more recent times is also known as actualization: Katie Mitchell’s Women of Troy (2007) transposed the story of Queen Hecuba and the Trojan War prisoners into a World War II context, with the female characters wearing 1940s dresses. We could debate whether Mitchell’s adaptation constitutes an actualization proper, seeing as it still placed the ictional time comfortably far away from the contemporary world; nonetheless, it did bring the adapted work closer to its intended audience in terms of temporal context by way of costume and cultural references. On the contrary, a mise en scène can become a reconstruction if it attempts to stage a play in the manner in which it is supposed to have been staged at the time of writing or publication. Renditions of Shakespeare’s tragedies in period costume, especially if in reconstructed venues like Shakespeare’s Globe, may qualify as more or less accurate reconstructions. Ideological shits are perhaps the most important to note: intraideological transpositions retain the ideological landscape of their source, while interideological ones do not. A clear case of interideological appropriation is Catur Kuncoro’s Wayang Mitologi (2010), in which the Javanese puppeteer reuses myths from Yogyakarta to lampoon contemporary Indonesian politicians (see Escobar, pp. 122 and 130). It is 8 heatre and Adaptation diicult, however, to ind an example of intraideological adaptation, as the shit in language, culture, or medium always entails a refocusing and repositioning of the adapted work, and consequently of its emphasis on speciic issues. Another distinction to be made is between the two largely opposite – but not diametrically opposed – approaches of ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’.12 hese terms, coined by Lawrence Venuti, are now commonly used in Translation Studies to diferentiate between interlingual translation strategies that aim to make the source text more (domestication) or less (foreignization) familiar to the target reader, preferring or avoiding idiomatic expressions and standard dialect tropes of the target context. hese two terms can be usefully employed in the context of our discussion on intertextual stage adaptation given the interpretative nature of theatrical transposition. Venuti argues that domesticating approaches, which are predominant in the AngloAmerican literary translation industry into English to boost sales, can be considered an instance of cultural colonization because they obliterate the source culture and its diference.13 Although adaptations oten do not even try to be accurate and complete renditions of the source text, their intertextual engagement with their so-called ‘original’ oten betrays attempts to make the audience relate more strongly to the adapted work. his oten comes hand in hand with actualization (relocating an old source to more recent times), recontextualization (relocating a distant source to a diferent context, oten more similar to the receiving one), transculturation (relocating a culturally speciic source to another cultural context, oten the target one) and various other mismatches, such as changes in the plotline, that are introduced to turn the ‘foreign’ elements of the source into more familiar characteristics to facilitate reception in the receiving culture. While domesticating and actualizing approaches can be seen to be vital to the survival and continuing relevance of theatre to its audiences, domestication and actualization can easily become entangled in conservative discourses, reinforcing dominant views and the status quo. On the other hand, foreignizing techniques are oten accused of alienating Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: he heatricality of Adaptation 9 audiences and creating elitist works that can be understood and enjoyed by few. In this book, several approaches along the continuum that connects the domesticating and the foreignizing poles are represented. For instance, Javanese dalang Catur Kuncoro champions the need to actualize Wayang Kulit in order to make young Indonesian people engage more easily with this traditional art (see Escobar, p. 131), while Noh actor Udaka Michishige only makes very minor concessions to the idea of updating the centuries-old Noh tradition to please audiences (see Pellecchia, pp. 77–88). Active foreignization is practised by Julia Bardsley, Simon Vincenzi (see Johnson, pp. 110–17) and Romeo Castellucci (see Ridout, pp. 96–105), whose appropriations of Western ‘classics’, mostly familiar to their target audiences, provoke an unsettling sense of alterity through the use of anti-realist images, non-standard bodies, and radical rewriting techniques. More oten, though, practitioners combine several approaches at once and it becomes diicult to assign a particular production to either of the two ‘camps’: in Katie Mitchell’s Waves, for instance, Woolf ’s novel is both made more approachable through a reduction in size and simpliication of the plot, and more unfamiliar through the self-relexive blending of several live mediums on stage – performance, cinematic projections, and foley art – and a refusal to conceal their machinery and processes. Here, the British audience’s expectation of a familiar, illusionistic type of realism was disturbed by actor-cameramen shooting close-ups, live footage, and foley artists performing their sound efects on stage. As already suggested, the act of ‘updating’, ‘recontextualizing’, and ‘dusting of ’ old or foreign narratives to make them ‘relevant’ and easy to digest in the present day can end up consolidating dominant forms, canonical sources, and current power relations. As Venuti has demonstrated and as I have investigated elsewhere in my work, transferring pre-existing material into another language, culture, or medium involves an exercise in self-deinition through an act of appropriation of the foreign, which raises issues around a given society’s self-representation and the reiteration of ideological exclusions.14 But 10 heatre and Adaptation how might adaptation be an agent for political resistance, rather than a tool for reinstating the norm? Foreignizing techniques, in which the otherness of the source material is exposed and not altered, appears as one possible way forward, because they engage spectators in an act of self-redeinition through unfamiliar encounters at the theatre. Foreignization does not, however, equal exoticization: in the former approach, as Venuti suggests, the inevitable act of domestication inherent in any translation is reduced to a minimum, and the cultural diferences are allowed to shine through; in the latter, diference is highlighted and spectacularized to capture and indulge the spectators’ voyeurism. he diference ultimately lies in the instrumentalization of the foreign, which characterizes exoticization. Another politically productive approach is parody, which oten contains elements of domestication but avoids the latter’s ethical deadlock by critiquing the source. Feminist and queer parodies of canonical ‘originals’ and popular culture, for instance, have proved subversive of dominant heteronormativities (see Harvie, pp. 135–47). Ultimately, however, in every attempt to challenge the politics of a source through adaptation there lies a contradictory stance which accepts to reiterate the ‘norm’, however briely and leetingly, in order to denounce it. Book structure he volume is divided into four parts which examine similar issues, approaches, and debates. Part 1, Return, Rewrite, Repeat, focuses on artists whose work reinterprets existing sources, oten canonical in their respective cultures, in order to ind new meanings or rediscover old ones; their relationship to the chosen stimulus is predominantly one of exploration through performance. Here, TR Warszawa director Grzegorz Jarzyna talks to Paul Allain about adapting the ‘classics’ in a changing Poland to promote debate on important issues for society: Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and Pasolini, as well as ilms Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: he heatricality of Adaptation 11 such as Vitgenberg’s Festen and Murnau’s Nosferatu, become malleable material to tell stories that activate an ‘emotional code [engrained] in our bodies’ (see p. 41). Nadia Davids speaks to Handspring Puppet Company and their dramaturg Jane Taylor about, amongst other projects, the development of animal movements and personality in the blockbuster adaptation War Horse (2007) and the company’s response to the horrifying testimonies of apartheid abuse presented at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, entitled Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997) and based on Jarry’s sinister character. Peter Boenisch considers mise en scène as a form of adaptation in his conversation with the director Ivo van Hove of Toneelgroep Amsterdam, whose projects include innovative, multimedia stagings of canonical plays by Shakespeare, O’Neill, and Euripides, and stage adaptations of ilm scripts by Bergman, Pasolini, Antonioni, and Cassavetes. In a conversation with Jean Graham-Jones, Argentinian playwright/director Daniel Veronese relects on his meta-theatrical adaptations of Ibsen and Chekhov, in which the stories are radically rewritten to relect on issues of performance and theatricality. Lastly, Noh actor and master Udaka Michishige is interviewed by his pupil Diego Pellecchia about the ine balance between innovating the repertoire and respecting Noh tradition in his interpretations of canonical Noh plays and his compositions of new Noh, which adapt historical narratives and igures into the language of the oldest surviving Japanese performing art. Part 2, Defusing Tradition, takes its title from a phrase employed by Italian theatre artist Romeo Castellucci (see p. 97). It features conversations with practitioners whose relationship with sources, or with the traditions and cultures in which they work, is one of more or less overt antagonism; using appropriation as a tool for resistance, they challenge the politics of the ‘original’ on issues like gender, race and power relations, or demonstrate ‘iconoclastic’ dispositions towards the canon. Nicholas Ridout discusses Socìetas Rafaello Sanzio’s work with Castellucci, touching upon the oten disquieting ‘literality’ of his adaptation approach, such as the moment from Inferno (2008) featured on the cover of this book, in which a climber ascended the steep 12 heatre and Adaptation façade of the Cour d’Honneur of the Pope’s Palace in Avignon to ofer spectators the sense of vertigo that Dante describes while descending into hell (see p. 101). Jen Harvie talks to the feminist performance artist Lois Weaver, whose work with Split Britches investigates queer sexualities by appropriating and subverting popular culture from within, through techniques such as lip-synching. Dominic Johnson converses with live artist Julia Bardsley and choreographer/director Simon Vincenzi about projects which radically appropriate dramatic and cinematic characters, such as King Lear and Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse (Vincenzi’s he Ininite Pleasures of the Great Unknown, 2008), and Medea (Bardsley’s Medea: Dark Matter Events, 2011). Wayang Kulit master Catur Kuncoro, the enfant terrible of contemporary Indonesian shadow puppetry, is interviewed by Miguel Escobar about innovating and disrupting a centuries-old tradition, whose canonical repertoire is based on retellings of the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, in order to engage young audiences. In Part 3, Intercultural Encounters, we investigate the politics of a theatre that travels across cultures, contexts, languages, and traditions. Here, artists and their interviewers consider not only transculturation and hybridization of culturally speciic material, but also the politics of adapting to transnational collaborators’ conventions and foreign spectators’ expectations. William Peterson talks to director Ong Keng Sen of heatreWorks Singapore about his transnational Shakespeare plays featuring several languages and performers from diferent Asian backgrounds. Arne Pohlmeier, Denton Chikura, and Tonderai Munyebvu of Two Gents Productions, a multicultural theatre company based in London and Harare, share their thoughts with Penelope Woods about their ‘post-cultural’ three-hander company and their experience of adapting Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (2012) into Shona, one of Zimbabwe’s oicial languages, for a London audience during the Cultural Olympiad.15 Finally, Alan Read’s meandering conversation with the Latvian director, Alvis Hermanis, touches tangentially upon his adaptations of several Russian works, such as Sonya (2006), a short story by Tatiana Tolstaya and Pushkin’s Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: he heatricality of Adaptation 13 verse novel Eugene Onegin (2013), preferring to dwell on his piece without words, he Sound of Silence, which transports Simon and Garfunkel songs into a 1970s Latvian context. Read and Hermanis also discuss how diferent attitudes within European theatre cultures shape reception of touring shows and how theatre ‘adapts’ itself (or otherwise) to audiences on tour. Part 4, Crating Adaptations, examines adaptation as a creative process and includes conversations in which practical techniques for turning novels, essays, plays, and fairy tales into performances are investigated more prominently. Here, artists share aspects of their methodologies such as verbatim dramaturgy, group devising, and improvisation. John Collins of the US collective Elevator Repair Service is questioned by Aoife Monks about the ways in which the group developed a trilogy based on three American modernist novels: Fitzgerald’s he Great Gatsby, Faulkner’s he Sound and the Fury, and Hemingway’s he Sun Also Rises. British director Katie Mitchell tells Dan Rebellato about how she tackled the notoriously intricate writings of Virginia Woolf, Dostoevsky, Sebald and Strindberg to stage subjective experiences, but also how she collaborated with children in creating a musical version of Hansel and Gretel (2012). Martin Welton speaks to Emma Rice of Kneehigh, the Cornwall-based company whose internationally successful work includes popular adaptations of fairy tales for children and adults. German directors-collective Rimini Protokoll’s process for devising adaptations with non-professional performers, such as Karl Marx: Capital, Volume I (2006), is examined in my interview with Helgard Haug, co-founder of the group. Finally, Duška Radosavljević talks to playwright Simon Stephens, whose adaptations include the multi-award-winning he Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2012), and English-language versions of Jon Fosse’s I am the Wind (2011) and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (2012), carried out from literal translations. Many if not most practitioners working in theatre and performance today have practised forms of adaptation for the stage. But some artists, including all of those who have been invited to contribute to 14 heatre and Adaptation this book, have returned to it again and again throughout their career, suggesting that they ind the acts of returning, rewriting, and repeating particularly fruitful and congenial to their creative processes. he selected practitioners relect a desire to cover as many approaches to adaptation as possible through diferent forms of theatre (playwriting, live art, puppetry, among others) from a wide range of contemporary cultural contexts. It has been crucial to cover work devised in European languages other than English, from Latvian to Italian, German, Polish and Dutch, as well as work by artists from Zimbabwean, South African, Singaporean, Indonesian, Argentinian, Japanese and US backgrounds, even though their identities may not be deined by nationality, language, or culture alone. I have mainly included early or mid-career practitioners, and those whose work is still relatively under-explored in dominant academic discourse, while excluding late-career artists such as Robert Wilson, Ariane Mnouchkine, and Suzuki Tadashi, whose adaptations have already generated lively debates. It is my contention that each practitioner featured in this collection of interviews has played a pivotal role in developing current understandings of adaptation and its relationship to performance, experimenting with its possibilities and expanding its deinition. From Catur Kuncoro’s ground-breaking Wayang kontemporer style to Romeo Castellucci’s scandalously ‘literal’ responses to Western ‘classics’, from Split Britches’ feminist appropriations of popular culture to Rimini Protokoll’s work with non-professionals and their biographies, the practitioners featured here have pushed the boundaries of adaptation for the stage.16 As partial and approximate repetitions of cultural material, intertextual webs connect past and future in a metalanguage that participates in the transmission of ideology through the dissemination of mythologies.17 As such, then, adaptations have a role to play in prompting social, cultural, and ideological change. It is my hope that this book will enable those practising and studying adaptations to begin to think of ways in which change might be initiated by transforming, reformulating, challenging, and subverting inherited narratives. Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: he heatricality of Adaptation 15 Selected bibliography Baines, Roger W., Christina Marinetti and Manuela Perteghella (eds). (2011). Staging and Performing Translation: Text and heatre Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carlson, Marvin. (2001). he Haunted Stage: he heatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Carroll, Rachel. (2009). Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Inidelities. London: Continuum. Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan (eds). (2007). he Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(eds). (2010). Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chapple, Freda, and Chiel Kattenbelt. (2006). Intermediality in heatre and Performance. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Forsyth, Alison, and Christopher Megson (eds). (2009). Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Friedman, Sharon. (2009). Feminist heatrical Revisions of Classic Works: Critical Essays. Jeferson, NC and London: McFarland. Hall, Edith, Fiona Macintosh and Amanda Wrigley (eds). (2004). Dionysus since 69. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hammond, Will and Dan Steward. (2008). Verbatim, Verbatim: Contemporary Documentary heatre. London: Oberon. Holledge, Julie, and Joanne Tompkins. (2000). Women’s Intercultural Performance. London: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda. (2006). A heory of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge. Kennedy, Dennis (ed.). (2004). Foreign Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krebs, Katja (ed.). (2013). Translation and Adaptation in heatre and Film. London and New York: Routledge. Laera, Margherita. (2013). Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy. Oxford: Peter Lang. Leach, homas. (2007). Film Adaptation and Its Discontents. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 16 heatre and Adaptation MacArthur, Michelle, Lydia Wilkinson, and Keren Zaiontz (eds). (2009). Performing Adaptations: Essays and Conversations on the heory and Practice of Adaptation. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Massai, Sonia. (2005). World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. London and New York: Routledge. McCabe, Colin, Kathleen Murray and Rick Warner (eds). (2011). True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Radosavljević, Duška. (2013). ‘Devising and Adaptation: Redeining “Faithfulness”’, in heatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 56–84. Sanders, Julie. (2006). Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York, Routledge. Schneider, Rebecca. (2011). Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of heatrical Reenactment. London and New York: Routledge. Steiner, George. (1998) Ater Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Venuti, Lawrence. (1995).he Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. —(1998). he Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Diference. London and New York: Routledge. Notes 1 Steiner (1998), p. 448. 2 Ibid., p. 449 and p. 437. 3 For a general introduction, see Hutcheon (2006); for cinematic adaptations, see Cartmell and Whelehan (2007, 2010); Leach (2007); McCabe et al. (2011). For popular culture, see Carroll (2009). For literary adaptations, see Sanders (2006). For Shakespeare adaptations, see for instance Kennedy (2004) and Massai (2005). For Greek tragedy, see Hall et al. (2004) and Laera (2013). Useful chapters on stage adaptations can be found in Carlson (2008); Chapple et al. (2006); Hollege and Tompkins (2000), and Radosavljević (2013). Krebs (2013) analyses both ilm and theatre adaptations. MacArthur et al. (2009) focus exclusively on Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: he heatricality of Adaptation 17 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 performance. he Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance is also a useful resource. For the notion of ‘restored behaviour’, see Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 28–9 and pp. 34–6. See also Herbert Blau, ‘Universals of Performance, or Amortizing Play’, SubStance, 11.4/12.1 (1982–3), pp. 140–61, (p. 149). Carlson, p. 3. Blau, p. 149, emphasis in the original. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 150. Hutcheon, p. 8. See Sanders (2006), p. 26. Roman Jakobson, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), he Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edn. New York; London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 138–43. See Venuti (1995), pp. 1–34. See Venuti (1998), pp. 8–30. See Venuti (1995 and 1998) and Laera (2013). See p. 155. What is not included in the book is an exploration of dance, operatic, verbatim and documentary theatre, historical re-enactments and live art remakes of famous pieces by other performance artists, since these genres have received dedicated attention in recent years. For documentary theatre, see Forsyth and Megson (2009) and Hammond and Steward (2008). For re-enactments, see Schneider (2011). I am referring here to the notion of mythology as articulated by Roland Barthes in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.