adaptation in

theatre and
performance

contemporary
approaches to
adaptation
in theatre
EDITED BY K ARA REILLY
Adaptation in Theatre and Performance

Series editors
Vicky Angelaki
Department of Film, Theatre & Television
University of Reading
Reading, UK

Kara Reilly
Department of Drama
University of Exeter
Exeter, UK
The series addresses the various ways in which adaptation boldly takes
on the contemporary context, working to rationalise it in dialogue with
the past and involving the audience in a shared discourse with n­ arratives
that form part of our artistic and literary but also social and ­historical
constitution. We approach this form of representation as a way of
responding and adapting to the conditions, challenges, aspirations and
points of reference at a particular historical moment, fostering a bond
between theatre and society.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14373
 Kara Reilly
Editor

Contemporary
Approaches to
Adaptation in Theatre
Editor
Kara Reilly
Department of Drama
University of Exeter
Exeter, UK

Adaptation in Theatre and Performance

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In memory of Professor Herbert Blau (3 May 1926–3 May 2013) who once
wrote, “Things have changed, but the impossible takes a little time”.
 Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the contributors of this volume for their patience with
the editorial process. Thank you also to Liz Tomlin, Graham Saunders,
Tomas Renè, Kate Newey, Adam Ledger, and Scott Proudfit for con-
versations during the process. I also appreciate the opportunity to co-
convene the TaPRA Directing and Dramaturgy Working Group in 2014
with Jacqueline Bolton, Sarah Grochala and Vicky Angelaki where sev-
eral of these papers were first written as early drafts. I’m grateful to all
of the contributors for their patience with a long editorial process. My
gratitude also to the anonymous peer reviewers whose reports helped
the volume. All mistakes are, as always, my own. To paraphrase Samuel
Beckett’s ghost: fail again, fail better.

vii
 Contents

Part I Company and Directorial Approaches to Adaptation,

Introduced by Scott Proudfit

1 Kneehigh’s Retellings 5
Heather Lilley

2 Collective Creation and ‘Historical Imagination’: Mabou

Mines’s Devised Adaptations of History 25
Jessica Silsby Brater

3 Making Music Visible: Robert Lepage Adapts Aspects of

Siegfried Without Shifting a Word 49
Melissa Poll

4 ‘The Thrill of Doing it Live’: Devising and Performing

Katie Mitchell’s International ‘Live Cinema’ Productions 69
Adam J. Ledger

ix
x    Contents

Part II Re-mediating the Book to the Stage, Introduced by

Frances Babbage

5 (Re)Mediating the Modernist Novel: Katie Mitchell’s Live

Cinema Work 97
Benjamin Fowler

6 The Spirit of the Source: Adaptation Dramaturgy and

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage 121
Jane Barnette

7 Have We Found Anne Frank? A Critical Analysis of

Theater Amsterdam’s Anne 143
Samantha Mitschke

8 Adapting The Kite Runner: A Fidelity Project to

Re-Imagine Afghan Aura 161
Edmund Chow

9 Fanny Hill Onstage: TheatreState and April De Angelis’s

Feminist Adaptations 175
Kara Reilly

Part III Reinscribing the Other in Contemporary Adaptations

of Greek Tragedy, Introduced by Eleftheria Ioannidou

10 Hypertheatrical Engagement with Euripides’ Trojan

Women: A Female ‘Writ of Habeas Corpus’ 195
Olga Kekis

11 A Tale of Two Jordans: Representing Syrian Refugees

Before and After 2011 213
George Potter

12 Homer in Palestine 231

Gabriel Varghese
 Contents    xi

Part IV Postmodern Meta-Theatrical Adaptation,

Introduced by Kimberly Jannarone

13 The Neo-Futurists(’) Take on Eugene O’Neill’s Strange

Interlude 251
Adrian Curtin

14 Theatrical Mash-up: Assembled Text as Adaptation in

Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella 275
Scott Proudfit

15 Controversial Intentions: Adaptation as an Act of

Iconoclasm in Rupert Goold and Ben Power’s Faustus
(2004) and the Chapman Brothers’ Insult to Injury
(2003) 295
Sarah Grochala

16 Multivalence: The Young Vic and a Postmodern

Changeling, 2012 317
Nora J. Williams

17 Ensaio.Hamlet: Adaptation as Rehearsal as Essay 331

Pedro de Senna

Index 349
 Notes on Contributors

Frances Babbage is a professor in Theatre and Performance at the

University of Sheffield, UK. She has published widely on performance,
adaptation and rewriting and is the author of Re-Visioning Myth:
Modern and Contemporary Drama by Women (Manchester University
Press, 2011) and Augusto Boal (Routledge Performance Practitioners,
2004).
Jane Barnette is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at University of
Kansas, Lawrence, USA. She produced an original adaptation of Stephen
Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, co-created with Michael Haverty for
Kennesaw State and 7 Stages in Atlanta. Her book on Dramaturgy and
Adaptation is under contract with Southern Illinois University Press.
Her articles and reviews have appeared in Theatre Symposium, Text and
Performance Quarterly, Theatre Journal, and Theatre InSight.
Jessica Silsby Brater is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of
the BA and MA programmes in Theatre Studies at Montclair State
University, Montclair, USA. She is the author of Ruth Maleczech at
Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work (Bloomsbury, 2016). Brater holds a
BA from Barnard College and a PhD from the Graduate Center, City
University of New York.
Edmund Chow  is an applied theatre practitioner who received his PhD
at the University of Manchester. Under the supervision of Professor
James Thompson, his doctoral research examined the representations
of Afghan identities in theatre and the impact of its global circulation.
xiii
xiv    Notes on Contributors

For more than a decade as an arts educator, he has taught in second-

ary schools, prisons, and universities in Singapore, New York, and
Manchester. Edmund is a recipient of two scholarship awards from the
National Arts Council. He is currently teaching at the National Institute
of Education in Singapore.
Adrian Curtin is a Senior Lecturer in the Drama department at the
University of Exeter, Exeter, UK. He is the author of Avant-Garde
Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave, 2014), which won
the 2015 Early Career Research Award, awarded by the Theatre and
Performance Research Association (TaPRA). He has written several jour-
nal articles and book chapters on theatre sound, musical performance,
and modernism. He is currently working on a book project that exam-
ines how modern dramatists and theatre-makers have explored issues
relating to mortality in their work. He is the book reviews editor of
Studies in Theatre and Performance.
Pedro de Senna  is a theatre practitioner and academic. He was born in
Rio de Janeiro, where he started performing in 1993, and has an MA
in Theatre: text and production from the University of East Anglia,
UK. He is a lecturer in Contemporary Theatre and Programme Leader
for the BA Theatre Arts (Theatre Directing) at Middlesex University,
London, UK. His research interests include Translation and Adaptation
Studies, Directing and Dramaturgy, and Disability and Performance. His
play A tragédia de Ismene, princesa de Tebas, a re-appropriation of the
Theban myth, is published by Móbile Editorial (2013).
Benjamin Fowler is a Lecturer at Sussex University, Brighton, UK.
He recently completed his PhD at the University of Warwick, examin-
ing politics and perception in the work of Katie Mitchell and Thomas
Ostermeier. He has worked as a freelance director and assistant direc-
tor (at venues including the RSC, the Almeida and Opera Holland
Park), and as a workshop leader for the National Youth Theatre. In 2012
he spent three months in Japan working alongside Jonathan Munby as
Associate Director on a Japanese-language production of Romeo and
Juliet, which played in Tokyo and Osaka.
Sarah Grochala  is Lecturer in Writing for Theatre at the Royal Central
School of Speech and Drama, London, UK. She was an associate art-
ist with the theatre company Headlong. Her research examines the
use of alternative dramaturgies in contemporary British and European
 Notes on Contributors    xv

theatre, particularly within the practice of playwriting. She is also a play-

wright herself. Her plays include S-27 (Finborough Theatre, London,
2009; Griffin Theatre, Sydney, 2010; Annex Theatre, Toronto, 2012),
which won the Amnesty International Protect the Human Playwriting
Competition and was shortlisted for the King’s Cross Award and the
Leah Ryan Prize for Emerging Women Writers.
Eleftheria Ioannidou  is lecturer at the University of Groningen in the
Department of Arts, Culture and Media. Her book Greek Fragments
in Postmodern Frames: Rewriting Tragedy 1970–2005 was published by
Oxford University Press. She was a lecturer at University of Birmingham
from 2012 to 2015. From 2010 until 2012, she held a Humboldt
Research Fellowship at the Freie Universitat, Berlin, and had previously
studied theatre in Athens and Royal Holloway, London, and read for
a doctorate at the University of Oxford, working on the reception of
Greek tragic texts in recent decades. Her ongoing research focuses on
the political and ideological appropriation of Greek tragedy under fascist
regimes in the inter-war period and also explores the impact of the eco-
nomic crisis on Greek theatre and culture.
Kimberly Jannarone is a professor at University of California, Santa
Cruz. Her book, Artaud and His Doubles (University of Michigan Press,
2010), interprets the theatre of Antonin Artaud in the intellectual and
political history of interwar Europe. It won Honorable Mention for the
Joe A. Calloway Prize for best book in drama and theatre. Her edited
volume, Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right, examines avant-
garde innovation in the service of right-wing regimes (University of
Michigan Press, 2015). Her next book is Mass Performance, a cultural
history that examines the phenomenon of thousands of people perform-
ing the same thing together at the same time. She has produced and
directed collaboratively devised pieces, including The Odyssey (2016) and
the Gynt Project (2013), with the UCSC Theater Arts and Digital Arts
and New Media programmes.
Olga Kekis is an independent scholar who holds a PhD in Drama
from the University of Birmingham, Birmingham UK. Her doctoral
studies explored contemporary radical adaptations of Athenian drama.
Her research interests include the theory and practice of Theatrical
Adaptation, Theatre History, and Museum Theatre. She has presented
at IFTR and TaPRA as well as other national and international meetings.
xvi    Notes on Contributors

She is currently working towards the publication of her PhD Thesis in

book form and at the same time she is involved in the local theatre scene
in Hereford, where she lives.
Adam J. Ledger  is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at the
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK. His research interests cen-
tre on performance practice: current publication projects include The
Director and Directing: Craft, Process and Aesthetic in Contemporary
Theatre and an edited collection on devising and adaptation. Adam
has published frequently on the work of Odin Teatret. His search
includes Caravania!, which toured nationally, and Igloo with The Bone
Ensemble.
Heather Lilley is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at Anglia Ruskin
University, Cambridge, UK, where she teaches theory and practice on
Drama and Performing Arts courses. Her practice and research focuses
on devised theatre and applied drama; her publications include work
on audience reception, contemporary devising companies including
Kneehigh Theatre and adaptation. Heather established the Reminiscence
Theatre Archive of Pam Schweitzer at the University of Greenwich, and
continues to create theatre with and for the elderly.
Samantha Mitschke is a playwright and theatre historian specializ-
ing in British and American Holocaust theatre. She is the author of a
number of articles on areas ranging from the representation of the queer
Holocaust experience to site-specific performance at Auschwitz, and
a reviewer for New Theatre Quarterly and Holocaust Studies: A Journal
of Culture and History. She is currently writing a book on empathy and
Anglophone Holocaust theatre.
Melissa Poll is an Adjunct Professor at Kansas State University. She
received her PhD in Drama & Theatre from the University of London,
Royal Holloway, London, UK. She has worked as a professional actor,
dramaturg, and freelance theatre critic alongside her academic endeav-
ours. Currently, Melissa is in the process of expanding her research into a
book for Palgrave Macmillan, Robert Lepage’s Scenographic Dramaturgy:
The Aesthetic Signature at Work, which interrogates how Lepage’s evoca-
tive scenography functions as an adaptive process and product. Melissa’s
research on performance-making and interculturalism has been published
in Body, Space & Technology Journal, Canadian Theatre Review, and
Theatre Research in Canada.
 Notes on Contributors    xvii

George Potter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English

at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, USA. Previously, he taught Middle
Eastern film, literature, and culture at the Council for International
Educational Exchange Study Center in Amman, Jordan. He has pub-
lished in The British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Arizona
Quarterly, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and multiple
book collections. His current research focuses on economic and social
geography in Jordanian film.
Scott Proudfit is an Assistant Professor of English at Elon University,
Elon, USA. He is the associate editor of A History of Collective Creation
and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013) and the co-editor of Women, Collective Creation,
and Devised Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Before obtain-
ing his PhD from Northwestern University in 2008, he worked with the
Actors’ Gang and the Factory Theater in Los Angeles and with Irondale
Ensemble Project in New York, often on devised plays. In addition, for
almost a decade he worked as an editor for the newspapers Back Stage
and Back Stage West.
Kara Reilly is a theatre historian and dramaturg. Her books include
Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2011), and the edited collection Theatre, Performance and
Analogue Technology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). She is co-editor of
the book series Adaptation in Theatre and Performance.
Gabriel Varghese completed his doctoral studies on the history and
development of Palestinian theatre in the West Bank after the Oslo
Accords, supported by a scholarship from the Arts and Humanities
Research Council. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the Kenyon
Insitute in Jerusalem (2016–2017). He is also the co-artistic director of
Brighton-based Sandpit Arts, an award-winning cross-arts platform for
showcasing the creative cultures of the Middle East and North Africa.
His book Theatre’s counterpublics: Palestinian theatre in the West Bank
after the Oslo Accords​ is forthcoming from Palgrave.  
Nora J. Williams completed her PhD in Drama at the University
of Exeter, Exeter, UK in 2016. Her thesis considers the intersec-
tions of performances, texts, and editions of early modern drama using
Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling as a lens. She has recently pub-
lished in Shakespeare Bulletin and is the current Chair of the STR New
Researchers’ Network.
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Mike Shepherd as a Love spotter, Tristan and Yseult,

2005 with generous permission from Steve Tanner and
Kneehigh Theatre 12
Fig. 2.1 Jesusa Rodriguez in Las Horas de Belén, 1999 with
generous permission from Julie Archer 40
Fig. 3.1 Siegfried (Der Ring des Nibelungen) featuring Eric
Owens (Alberich) and Bryn Terfel (Wotan), 2011 60
Fig. 6.1 The first entrance through the barrel is made by the
puppet, manned by three puppeteers standing behind
the barrel 127
Fig. 6.2 The youth daydreams about the circus 129
Fig. 6.3 Youth encounters his first actual battle, the animation
continues to display his terror by morphing into the
red animal 130
Fig. 6.4 Bryan Mercer as ‘Tall’ in his death dance, the
‘hideous hornpipe’ 132
Fig. 6.5 Two puppet designs by Tanner Slick 134
Fig. 6.6 At the end of the play, the puppet carries a folded
flag, marching through the portal 135
Fig. 8.1 The flying of kites in The Kite Runner 164
Fig. 13.1 Brendan Buhl as Sam Evans and Dean Evans as
Mrs. Evans in Act 3 of the Neo-Futurists’
Strange Interlude 262
Fig. 13.2 (L to R) Jeremy Sher, Merrie Greenfield, and Joe
Dempsey in Act 6 of the Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude 264

xix
xx    List of Figures

Fig. 13.3 (L to R) Jeremy Sher, Joe Dempsey, Brendan Buhl,

and Dean Evans (with a Cabbage Patch doll) in Act 8
of the Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude 266
Fig. 15.1 Poster for Faustus, which premiered at Northampton
in November 2004, used with permission of Scott
Doran and Eureka! image design 299
Fig. 15.2 Faustus in his shadowy study, lit by a single candle 306
Fig. 15.3 Jonjo O’Neill (Dinos) and Stephen Noonan (Jake) 307
Fig. 15.4 Jake Chapman (Steven Noonan) and Helen/Helena
(Sophie Hunter) in the studio 308
Fig. 15.5 Faustus 2007—Jason Baughan (Mephistopheles) and
Michael Colgan (Faustus) 309
Photo 4.1 Screenshot detailing ‘Secret’ from Traveling on One Leg,
with permission from Ingi Bekk and Lily McLeish 76
Photo 4.2 Rehearsal for Traveling on One Leg, Deutsches Schauspielhaus
Hamburg. Note shot number on screen 81
 Introduction to Contemporary
Approaches to Adaptation

This volume is called Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre,

because it offers readers 17 case studies that examine adaptation in the
contemporary theatre. Adaptation is a slippery term, and like drama-
turgy, it eludes definition because it is so context specific. This vol-
ume does not seek to narrow the definition of adaptation, but instead
to expand it. The book is divided into four parts: Part I Company and
Directorial Approaches to Adaptation, Part II Re-mediating the Book to
the Stage, Part III Reinscribing the Other in Contemporary Adaptations
of Greek Tragedy and Epic, and Part IV Postmodern Metatheatrical
Adaptation. Each part is introduced in detail by a specialist in Adaptation
Studies. Attempting to define what ‘counts’ as adaptation seems limit-
ing at best, impossible at worst. Instead, focusing on a wide variety of
approaches is a more open way to create a Socratic dialogue about adap-
tation. I would argue that even the ancient Greek playwrights can be
seen as adaptors. Audiences knew the myths already and went to the the-
atre to see how the stories would be re-told. As postmodern American
playwright Charles L. Mee writes about his re-making project:

None of the classical Greek plays were original: they were all based on ear-
lier plays or poems or myths. And none of Shakespeare’s plays are original:
they are all taken from earlier work. As You Like It is taken from a novel by
Thomas Lodge published just 10 years before Shakespeare put on his play
without attribution or acknowledgment. Chunks of Antony and Cleopatra
are taken verbatim, and, to be sure, without apology, from a contemporary

xxi
xxii    Introduction to Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation

translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle is taken

from a play by Klabund, on which Brecht served as dramaturg in 1926;
and Klabund had taken his play from an early Chinese play.1

What Mee articulates here is that every great poet is also a thief.
Shakespeare and Brecht were great playwrights and great adapt-
ers. In other words, theatre practitioners find inspiration and stimulus
from already existing works of art. The notion of originality arises with
Romantic poets, but the actual nature of the theatre is that it repeats. By
knowing the stories and adapting them, new generations revivify them
and breathe life into them, making them fresh, exciting and unique to
the moment in which they are staged.
To my knowledge, this is the first edited book collection that looks
solely at theatre adaptations in the context of Adaptation Studies.
Throughout the volume, authors reference Linda Hutcheon’s water-
shed book A Theory of Adaptation and Julie Sanders’s Adaptation
and Appropriation. Theatre and performance studies has been given
two key resources for engaging with adaptation in recent years: Katja
Krebs’s edited collection Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and
Film and Margherita Laera’s insightful collection of interviews Theatre
and Adaptation: Return, Repeat, Rewrite. In these texts, adaptation is
explored in context-specific productions. This is the only way to explore
adaptation: through specific, material concrete examples that help us to
build both archive and repertoire.
This project and this book series both grow out of my own work as
a dramaturg which began almost 20 years ago. During this time, I have
seen that onto-epistemic mimesis shapes theatre artists. I have defined
onto-epistemic mimesis elsewhere as representation or ‘mimesis that
changes a person’s way of knowing and therefore their way of being’,
and re-shapes the observers’ understanding of the world (Reilly 7).
Adaptation allows the artist to celebrate history and the ephemeral qual-
ity of the theatrical medium. Adaptation acknowledges that we have been
here before: in the theatre, engaged in telling this story. Pleasure comes
through repetition with a difference and in haunting.
This volume is dedicated to one of my mentors and teacher Herbert
Blau. It was the haunting of the paternal ghost in Hamlet that inspired
Blau to first turn the phrase ‘calling up the ghost’:

The ghosting is not only a theatrical process but a self-questioning of the

structure within the structure of which the theater is a part. What seems
 Introduction to Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation    xxiii

true in the play of appearances—as most ontological discourse has assured

us in our time—is that there is no way in which the thing we want to
represent can exist within representation itself, because of the disjunc-
ture between words and things, images and meanings, nomenclature and
being—all of which cause us to think that theater is the world when it’s
more like the thought of history. (199)

Adaptation shows us the thought of history. More specifically, adaptation

presents history’s ghosts to us as we perceive and interpret it in the con-
temporary moment. The concept of ghosting has since become popular
in theatre and performance studies by way of Marvin Carlson’s Haunted
Stage and the now emerging field of Spectrality Studies.2 Blau argues
that ontological discourse after modernism—or writing that searches
for ‘being’ and essence—only illustrates our lack: there is no solid being
anymore. The grounds of certainty that human beings are at the cen-
tre of the universe radically shifted after the advent of Copernicus and
Galileo during the Enlightenment. Since human beings are not at the
centre of the solar system, there is a gap between the vision of theatre in
the theatre artist’s mind and the actual theatre in representation—unfor-
tunately, you can only get so close to your vision as a theatre maker. For
Blau this was one of the reasons he stopped directing—the high quality
of his imagined productions never matched what he saw onstage. I lis-
tened to him say on numerous occasions that he much preferred to stage
a play in his mind as he read it rather than actually staging the play in the
world. This gap in the representational power of theatre to translate the
image from the mind’s eye onto the stage is similar to the distinct gap
between words and things that typifies the beginning of Structuralism.
After Ferdinand de Sassure demonstrated that the gap between the sig-
nifier and the signified, or the distinction between word and thing was
random and out of alignment: one man’s mouton became another man’s
mutton.3 Similarly the stage image created by the theatre maker may
read very differently to audiences. The result of all of this uncertainty
is that we are perhaps mistaken when we follow Jacques from As You
Like It in saying that ‘theatre is like the world’. Instead, as Blau sug-
gests, ghosting or adaptation shows us that theatre is much more like
the thought of history. Each generation remakes the classics in their own
image for their own contemporary moment, engaging with the texts of
the past in the present. Performance’s ontology, as Peggy Phelan and
others have demonstrated, is one of disappearance. Performance leaves
traces of itself like history thinking out loud. The ephemeral quality of
xxiv    Introduction to Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation

the theatre is by definition part of its condition for being. Ghosts are
what performances evaporate and transform into in the mind’s eye as
images of the theatre merge with our thoughts and transform us as sub-
jects-in-process. As Derrida points out in Archive Fever:

A scholar addressing a phantom recalls irresistibly the opening of Hamlet.

At the spectral apparition of the dead father Marcellus implores Horatio:
‘Thou art a scholar, Speak to it Horatio’. I have tried to show elsewhere
that though the classical scholar did not believe in phantoms and truly
would not know how to speak to them, even forbidding himself to do so,
it is quite possible that Marcellus had anticipated the coming of a scholar of
the future who, in the future and so to conceive of the future, would dare
speak to the phantom. (39)

Dramaturgs and adapters potentially are these scholars of the future,

addressing these phantoms. Carlson argues that postmodern theatre is
concerned with ‘recycling’ material and re-using it freely to create ‘new
relationships, effects and tensions’ and to summon up traditional theat-
rical and historical ghosts.4 Carlson’s concept of the memory machine
suggests a kind of technological element to adaptation. The root word
of the Greek techne means art or craft, and adaptation is a sort of tech-
nology designed to engage audiences in hearing the story again. In
Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’, he teaches us that ‘storytelling
is always the art of repeating stories’. The storyteller repeats the story
in order to make it his or her own. Adaptation is in part about repeti-
tion. One of our earliest technologies is storytelling; this was expressed
in Robert Icke’s production of Annie Washburn’s Mr Burns, A Post-
Electric Play at the Almeida in 2014. After a nuclear apocalypse—caused
in part by a deadly virus that makes it impossible to take care of nuclear
reactors—a group of survivors huddle around a campfire retelling each
other the plot of an episode of The Simpsons. By working collaboratively
to rediscover the story, the participants remain calm for that moment:
telling the story is a way to keep their fear at bay. Over the course of
82 years this form of storytelling leads the storytellers to create a theatre
troupe, which develops into a kind of innovative abstract opera. The play
suggests that The Simpsons becomes the basis of a new cultural mythol-
ogy not unlike that of the Greeks. Retelling the story of The Simpsons in
Mr Burns has helped create a new cultural mythos. As a result, people
survive the trauma of their destroyed civilization.
 Introduction to Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation    xxv

Rachel Carroll has written in her introduction to Adaptation in

Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities that ‘all adaptations express
or address a desire to return to an “original” textual encounter; as such,
adaptations are perhaps symptomatic of a cultural compulsion to repeat
(1). While Freud associated the repetition compulsion with trauma, he
also recognized that playful acts of repetition might alleviate certain trau-
matic anxieties. For example, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud uses
the example of a grandson who rehearses his mother’s disappearance by
throwing a spool and holding onto the string, and announcing “Fort!”
or “Gone!” Using the string, he then returns the object to himself with
a resounding “Da!” or “Here!” The spool represents the mother. Part of
what the child rehearses is the discomfort of the mother leaving—rep-
resented by the spool—but the child can return the spool to himself.
This comforts him and he knows the mother will return: the game keeps
his anxiety of abandonment at bay. Through this game of disappearance
and return, the child calms himself by taking mastery over the situation.
When Harold Bloom talks about the ‘anxiety of influence’ in relationship
to writers feeling the oppressive weight of the canon, we might use the
fort/da story as a metaphor for adaptation. The writer or devisers bring
the story closer to themselves by inhabiting it and re-writing it.
Part of the anxiety of influence that Bloom argues is the oppressive
weight of the canon can also be seen as something that is rehearsed and
played out in adaptation. This is certainly part of what T.S. Eliot dis-
cusses in his landmark essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” We
get closer to the canonical or classic story through adaptation. As Julie
Sanders suggests in Adaptation and Appropriation ‘adaptation becomes
a veritable marker of canonical status; citation infers authority’ (9). The
canonical authority is transferred onto the adapter. As Walter Benjamin
wrote in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’:
‘every day the urge gets stronger to get hold of an object by way of
its reproduction’. Here he was talking about painting and sculpture in
the age of mass media; however, this passage applies equally to adapta-
tion. Through retelling the canonical story, the teller takes on the man-
tle of the storyteller. The desire to get inside a story is born from the
repetition compulsion and perhaps this compulsion is at the root of
adaptation. When we repeat stories, doing so acts as a way of claiming
ownership over them; we get inside their dramaturgy and make sense of
them through direct engagement. But adaptation, as Hutcheon points
xxvi    Introduction to Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation

out, ‘is not slavish copying; it is a process of making the adapted material
one’s own’ (21). In each of the case studies in this volume, the adap-
tors re-make the story through their own novel approach to dramaturgy,
sceneography, or by translating and re-mediating a story onto the stage.
Mostly importantly, as Hutcheon argues, they make the story their own
and therefore the act of adaptation should never be seen as secondary,
but instead as a creative act in its own right.

Book Structure
Part I Company and Directorial Approaches to Adaptation is intro-
duced in detail by collaborative creation expert Scott Proudfit. The part
opens with Heather Lilley’s insightful chapter ‘Kneehigh’s Retellings’.
Informed by extensive personal interviews, Emma Rice says she pre-
fers the term ‘retelling’ to adaptation. Kneehigh’s work is their ver-
sion of the story, but the invitation is always there for other artists to
make their own approach and retell that story in their own way. Jessica
Silsby Brater’s chapter ‘Collective Creation and ‘Historical Imagination’:
Mabou Mines’s Devised Adaptations of History’ closely examines two
productions that ‘engage’ in feminist history: Ruth Maleczech’s Bélen:
A Book of Hours and Joanne Akalitis’s Dead End Kids. Melissa Poll exam-
ines how Robert Lepage’s scenography can be considered a visual adap-
tation without changing a word of Wagner’s Siegfried. Finally, Adam
Ledger uses material from his rehearsal observations and interviews in
order to discuss Director Katie Mitchell’s devising process as a form of
adaptation.
Part II ‘Re-mediating the Book to the Stage’ is introduced by
Adaptation Scholar Frances Babbage. The Part offers five case studies
where novels or diaries have been remediated to the stage. In Chap. 5
Benjamin Fowler looks closely at Mitchell’s impulse to capture the
‘thought’ of modernist novels and how technology helps her to get
closer to the novel. By including two chapters on Katie Mitchell, the
volume offers two distinct insights into her dramaturgical and devising
process. In Chap. 6 Jane Barnette writes about her experience adapt-
ing Red Badge of Courage and coins the portmanteau term adapturgy,
which is adaptation and dramaturgy combined. Barnette explains the
ways in which the skills of the production dramaturg and new play
dramaturg collide and produce the stage play. In Samantha Mitschke’s
chapter ‘Have We Found Anne Frank? A Critical Analysis of Theater
 Introduction to Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation    xxvii

Amsterdam’s Anne’, Mitschke analyses three different adaptations

of the diary to the stage. She looks closely at issues of fidelity as does
Edmund Chow who examines Matthew Spangler’s adaptation of Khaleid
Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner. Chow examines Spangler’s desire
‘to be good again’ to the people of Afghanistan after the War of Terror
through an ‘authentic’ adaptation of the novel. The final chapter in this
part is my examination of two feminist adaptations of John Cleland’s
notorious Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.
Part III ‘Reinscribing the Other in Contemporary Adaptations of
Greek Tragedy’ is introduced by classical Greek theatre scholar Eleftheria
Ioannidou. The three chapters in this part all examine adaptations of the
story of the Trojan War, and more specifically the plight of the Other.
Olga Kekis examines two adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women: Kaite
O’Reilly’s Peeling and Christine Evans’s play Trojan Barbie. Both plays
offer a radical re-envisioning of the The Trojan Women for the contem-
porary moment. In George Potter’s chapter ‘A Tale of Two Jordans:
Representing Syrian Refugees Before and After 2011’ he juxtaposes the
pre- and post-2011 Jordanian imagination of Syrians in three produc-
tions. Gabriel Varghese looks at the international collaboration between
Border Crossings and Ashtar Theatre in the creation of This Flesh is
Mine, an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad.
Part IV ‘Postmodern Metatheatrical Adaptation’ is introduced by
modernism expert Kimberly Jannarone. The part examines five con-
temporary postmodern productions as case studies. This part sets out to
show the connections between ghosting, adaptation, and postmodern
appropriation in the conceptual underpinnings behind those practitioners
whose work is self-consciously metatheatrical. Adrian Curtain examines
the Neofuturists’ re-staging of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude argu-
ing that the company makes the anti-theatrical play speak to a contem-
porary audience in this irreverent and playful adaptation. Scott Proudfit
looks closely at Bill Rauch and Tracy Young’s Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella
as a popular theatrical mash-up. Sarah Grochala examines Rupert Goold
and Ben Power’s adaptation of Faustus, which juxtaposed the Chapman
brothers’ rectification of Goya’s etchings with the story of Faustus.
Nora J. Williams also looks at the radical postmodern adaptation of The
Changeling at the Young Vic in 2012. Finally, the volume closes with
Pedro de Senna’s exploration of Brazilian theatre ensemble Companhia
(Cia) dos Atores Ensaio Hamlet as an essay, a rehearsal, and an ‘autopsy’
of the play. The volume closes with the idea that canonicity is something
xxviii    Introduction to Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation

artists must dissect and transform in order to revivify texts and make
them wholly relevant to the contemporary moment.
Adaptations provide us with insight into the dramaturgical imagina-
tions of artistic creators. The productions analysed here demonstrate
some of the wide variety of approaches available to adaptors in the con-
temporary moment. Indeed the editorial goal here is one of plenty—
there are multiple ways into the volume just as there are multiple
approaches to adaptation. The approaches in these chapters are offered
as investigations for adaptation as the thought of theatre history, ghost-
ing, and the rich possibilities adaptation holds for tomorrow’s theatre.

Kara Reilly

Notes
1. This forms a key part of Charles L. Mee’s manifesto for his (re)making
project, much of which is documented here. See http://www.charlesmee.
org/about.shtml.
2. See Pilar Blanco and Peeren’s The Spectralities Reader (2013) for the
emergence of the field. Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994) was also critical.
For specifics to theatre studies see Luckhurst and Morin Theatre and Ghosts
(2014).
3. Sassure Course on General Linguistics: ‘You take on the other hand a sim-
ple lexical fact, any word such as, I suppose, mouton–mutton, it doesn’t
have the same value as sheep in English. For if you speak of the animal on
the hoof and not on the table, you say sheep’.
4. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: Theatre as a Memory Machine (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003) 168.

References
Benjamin, Walter. 2002. The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai
Leskov. In Illuminations. New York: Random House.
Benjamin, Walter. 2002. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction. In Illuminations, trans. New York: Random House.
Blau, Herbert. 1982. Take Up the Bodies. Carbondale: University of Illinois Press.
Bloom, Harold. 1987. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Carroll, Rachel. 2009. Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities.
London: Continuum.
 Introduction to Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation    xxix

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of
Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 2015. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. London: Dover.
Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge.
Krebs, Katja. 2014. Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film. London:
Routledge.
Laera, Margherita. 2014. Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat.
London: Bloomsbury.
Luckhurst, Mary and Emilie Morin. 2014. Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality,
Performance and Modernity. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Phelan, Peggy. 1999. Unmarked. London: Routledge.
Pilar Blanco, María del and Esther Peeren. 2013. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts
and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London: Bloomsbury.
Reilly, Kara. 2011. Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History.
Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Sanders, Julie. 2005. Adaptation and Appropriation. Abingdon: Routledge.
Sassure, Ferdinand De. 1960. Course on General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally
and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Reidlinger. London: Owen Press.
Washburn, Anne. 2014. Mr Burns: A Post-electric Play. London: Oberon.
 PART I

Company and Directorial Approaches to

Adaptation, Introduced by Scott Proudfit

Company approaches to adaptation in the theatre may seem antitheti-

cal to directorial approaches, at first glance. The former suggests a crea-
tive process based on decentralized authority and diverse responses to a
source text or narrative, while the latter suggests a single authority in the
creative process with a guiding ‘take’ on the source. This particular sup-
position about the group creative process stems from the common belief
that a natural distinction exists between company-generated and direc-
tor-generated work in the theatre, a belief that perhaps unintentionally
has been reinforced by histories of devised theatre and collective crea-
tion that adopt as their starting point 1960s’ avant-garde performance in
Europe and the Americas. The communitarian ideals of a small number
of Western theatre collectives during this decade seem particularly sym-
biotic with the hypothesized ‘postdramatic turn’ in the modern theatre.
The influx of improvisation and chance as guides in the creative pro-
cesses of a number of visible 1960s’ theatre collectives suggest that the
embrace of physical theatre coincided with the rejection of the primacy
of the text, an anti-authoritarian impulse that led to the director rapidly
becoming as unnecessary and unwelcome in the rehearsal room as the
playwright. Following this narrative, in the contemporary theatre, the
company and the director have become opposing forces: the former dis-
seminating authority, the latter consolidating it.
2  PART I  COMPANY AND DIRECTORIAL APPROACHES TO ADAPTATION ...

However, as the chapters in this part demonstrate, theatre history

that acknowledges the roots of contemporary company-generated devis-
ing and adaptation in an earlier ‘wave’ of collaborative impulses—at the
beginning of the twentieth century—demands that group-centred and
directorial approaches are rarely antithetical. It was, after all, the rise of
the modern director in the late nineteenth century that demanded a new
kind of collaboration with designers, writers, and performers in order to
achieve the total artwork. The legacy of this collaborative impulse in the
early twentieth century was not only a new reverence for the authority
of the director-auteur but also simultaneously a transfer of authority in
the generative process from directors and playwrights to performers who
took a new responsibility for their creative work—performers who acted
as creators of their own individual mise en scene.
This more-accurate lineage of collaborative work in the modern thea-
tre can be perceived in Melissa Poll’s chapter, ‘Making Music Visible:
Robert Lepage Adapts Aspects of Siegfried Without Shifting a Word’,
which looks at Lepage’s production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des
Nibelungen at the Metropolitan Opera. Poll connects Lepage’s interac-
tive scenography, in which performers’ vocal intonations are immediately
reflected in the flow of 3D images projected from the mobile planks that
form the various settings of Wagner’s opera cycle, to the productions
of Adolphe Appia. For his 1920s’ revivals of Wagner’s works, director-
designer Appia is credited with more fully realizing the composer’s dram-
aturgy than even Wagner was able to at Bayreuth. Appia, like Lepage, is
a director whose strong scenographic concepts were recognized in his
time, while his empowerment of actors (in Appia’s case, an empowerment
he considered necessary so that actors might mediate between Wagner’s
music and the physical space) has been often overlooked. As Poll writes,

Appia viewed performing bodies as the material expression of the music

and scenography as an extension of the actor, he sought to enhance the
meaning-making interactions between the actor and the stage space
through sets and lighting.
From Wagner to Appia to Lepage, Poll traces the development of a
type of adaptation of Wagner’s operas that relies on ‘bodies in motion’ to
rewrite and thereby adapt the composer’s canonical works.
Related to Lepage’s interactive scenography, the ‘live cinema’ pro-
ductions helmed by director Katie Mitchell, as described in Adam
Ledger’s chapter ‘“The thrill of doing it live”: Devising and Performing
Katie Mitchell’s International “Live Cinema” Productions’ may seem
 PART I  COMPANY AND DIRECTORIAL APPROACHES TO ADAPTATION ...  3

to depend on a director’s singular vision, when actually they are gener-

ated through Mitchell’s extensive collaboration with ‘technicians, camera
operators, sound artists, musicians, and actors’. Only multilayered group
collaboration could achieve the type of minutely choreographed and
technologically assisted productions that Mitchell has become known for,
in which audiences divide their attention between a carefully constructed
‘film’ of the live narrative performance and the stage presentation itself.
As a starting point, these collaborative adaptations often utilize as their
source texts a single novel or short story.
Since ‘live cinema’ relies heavily on the cinematic close-up, thereby
focusing on the psychology of a single character, it is appropriate that
Mitchell’s work with actors descends ‘in large part from Stanislavski’,
combining the creation of ‘precisely detailed’ biographies of characters
created in rehearsals with improvisations that explores these proposed
character histories. Mitchell’s collaboration, though, is as much with the
camera operators and technicians capturing these performances as it is
with the actors performing. The result, as Ledger points out, is adapta-
tion as ‘collective labour, in which matters of authorship and production
are devolved through pockets of expertise’, Such collaboration is better
understood by tracing it back to the forebears Mitchell herself acknowl-
edges, early-twentieth-century directors such as Stanislavski who first
pursued the collaborative impulse in the modern theatre, than to collec-
tive-creation practitioners of the mid-twentieth century.
Mitchell’s reliance on her actors to ‘work in groups to produce per-
formance proposals’ connects her ‘live cinema’ adaptations, which previ-
ously have been misread as solely products of Mitchell’s individual vision
and style, to Kneehigh Theatre’s popularist retellings of folklore under
the direction of Emma Rice—as detailed in Heather Lilley’s chapter
‘Kneehigh’s Retellings’. The similarities in process between Mitchell and
Rice are striking, reinforcing the fact that an assumed necessary division
between director-centred and company-centred work is problematic at best.
As with Mitchell’s ‘live cinema’, there is no doubt that Kneehigh’s
work is ‘director-led’, whether it is Rice or Mike Shepherd leading. As a
leader, Rice describes her role as fundamentally concerned with delega-
tion and enablement. Whether collaborating with her writers, her actors,
or her designers, Rice’s job primarily is ‘setting them tasks’. Mitchell’s
description of her own work as a director echoes Rice’s closely. As with
Rice, Mitchell insists that the generating of ideas in her process has to
come from the group not from the director. In past productions, she
explains, ‘I proposed very little—I set tasks’.
4  PART I  COMPANY AND DIRECTORIAL APPROACHES TO ADAPTATION ...

At the same time, unlike the productions of Mitchell and Lepage

described in these chapters, the Kneehigh Theatre adaptations that Lilley
highlights do not begin with a single, identifiable source. Rather, the
company takes as it source texts ‘cultural memories that have pluralistic
resonances for individuals and within interpretive communities’. As Rice
puts it, ‘I don’t believe anybody owns a story’. Nevertheless, as Lilley
reveals, Rice is clearly at the centre of Kneehigh’s ‘tightly structured and
yet playful exploration of performance material’.
The question, then, is not whether contemporary company-devised
adaptation in the theatre has leaders but rather the degree to which these
leaders share the generating of these adaptations with their fellow art-
ists. On the far end of the spectrum, in terms of decentralized author-
ity in the creative process, is Ruth Maleczech, whose directing at Mabou
Mines is profiled in Jessica Silsby Brater’s chapter ‘Collective Creation
and “Historical Imagination”: Mabou Mines’ Devised Adaptations of
History’. More than her fellow co-artistic directors JoAnne Akalaitis or
Lee Breuer, Maleczech describes her philosophy of directing as hand-
ing off authority: ‘Neither one of them involves their collaborators at
the level that I do’, she notes in Brater’s chapter. ‘The collaborators have
completely free rein’.
Connecting the ‘historical pastiche’ of Mabou Mines’ 1980 produc-
tion Dead End Kids with the ‘partisan iconography’ behind the creative
process of its 1999 production, Belen: A Book of Hours, Brater describes
an ethos of adaptation that has moved even further than Kneehigh’s
from the single-source adaptations of canonical texts by Mitchell and
Lepage. At Mabou Mines, the source material in adaptation is disrupted,
challenged, and amended. As Brater describes it, Belen, which tells the
story of a Mexico City sanctuary-for-women turned prison ‘function[s]
as an excavation of sorts, unearthing fragments of personal histories and
daily living and then inventing characters and stories that tell us who
these women were and how they spent their days’.
Ultimately, as these four chapters suggest, it may be that the creative
work at Mabou Mines and Kneehigh Theatre clearly looks more decen-
tralized because their sources are multiple, diverse, and therefore encour-
age a process in which the inevitable leaders in the adaptation process
collaborate with their fellow artists in particular ways. In the end, the
type of source (or sources) and the treatment of these sources in adap-
tation may be the most important factors when explaining the extent to
which a director or a company becomes the more visible ‘brand’ behind
a series of productions.
 CHAPTER 1

Kneehigh’s Retellings

Heather Lilley

Kneehigh Theatre have been telling stories since 1980, and from the
very beginning a large proportion of those stories have been adaptations,
or what joint artistic director Emma Rice would prefer to call ‘retellings’. 

I don’t know why I use the word adaptation, I much prefer retelling, I
feel that’s what we do; we retell stories. And so using the word ‘adapta-
tion’ is already making it more reverent than I feel. In truth, I don’t really
feel irreverent, I just think it is my turn. I am already looking forward to
someone else telling it next and three cheers for whoever does!… They are
retellings and I don’t believe anybody owns a story. (Rice, author inter-
view, 2014)

In a comprehensive history of Cornish theatre, Alan Kent has charted

the development of the company in three distinct phases that loosely
follow changes of company members and subsequent shifts in the com-
pany’s interests and theatrical styles. Interestingly, each of these three
phases—children’s theatre and development of site-specific work; col-
laborations with playwright Nick Darke on Cornish themed work; and
Emma Rice’s artistic directorship—have included adaptations or what

H. Lilley (*) 
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: Heather.Lilley@anglia.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 5

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_1
6  H. Lilley

she would prefer to call retellings. Kent attributes Kneehigh’s com-

mitment to retelling stories to the importance of ‘fairy tales, folk tales,
myths and legends’ in defining Cornish identity (Kent 2010, p. 749).
The period I am focusing on in this chapter is that identified as the third
phase by Kent, in which Rice, and founder member Mike Shepherd,
have jointly led the company to increasing critical acclaim, with co-
productions at Britain’s National Theatre and major regional theatres,
far-reaching international tours and the creation of their own nomadic
performance venue, The Asylum. The original interview material that
underpins this chapter is all from this phase, dating from 2004 to 2014,
prior to Emma Rice’s tenure at the Globe beginning in 2016. During
this period, the company were particularly prolific, producing a number
of adaptations, gaining recognition as one of Britain’s leading devising
companies, and publishing a number of co-authored/collaboratively cre-
ated play texts.
During the phase of work that I am concerned with in this chapter
—from 1999 to 2011—the company published an anthology of four,
devised adaptations, The Kneehigh Anthology Volume One, with accom-
panying forewords offering ‘insight into Kneehigh’s approach to making
theatre, revealing how a script can emerge from a collaborative devising
process’ (Kneehigh Theatre 2005, p. 209). In programme notes and
press material for shows during this time, both Rice and Shepherd have
aligned their work with a folkloric, oral tradition of reshaping stories and
making them relevant for new generations. This folkloric tradition has an
intrinsic multivocality that marries perfectly well with devising, as prac-
ticed by Kneehigh as a collaborative process of shared authorship that
includes, but is not limited to: director, writers, performers, designers,
composers, and musicians tasked with exploring their own personal rela-
tionship to the material and their collective consciousness of it within
contemporary culture. Furthermore, placing the work within this con-
text of oral storytelling leads us away from the branch of adaptation
studies concerned with origin, ownership, and fidelity, towards a much
broader conceptualization of source texts as cultural memories owned by
no-one and everyone, that have pluralistic resonances for individuals and
within interpretive communities. At the heart of Kneehigh’s approach
to adaptation is a desire to explore the mutability of stories, revealing
and reinvigorating their relevance within contemporary culture, through
exploration of their personal resonance.
 1  KNEEHIGH’S RETELLINGS  7

When I decide to do a story, I don’t tend to go and read or watch it, I

tend to work on what my cultural memory of it is, because that’s my truth
… my foundation will be my memory. And I’m sure that’s one of the rea-
sons why I do adaptations—I want to work with that emotional memory.
(Rice in Radosavljevic 2013b, p. 103)

Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation, a leading text in the move

away from a bias towards ‘fidelity’, is therefore a useful text for unpack-
ing Kneehigh’s processes of adaptation. Hutcheon’s emphasis on adap-
tations as entirely new pieces of work, and her attempts to analyse the
changes that take place across mediums and genres, and through ‘dif-
ferent personal artistic filters’ are relevant to Kneehigh’s approach
(Hutcheon 2006, p. 84).
Interviewing Rice and writer Carl Grose in 2014, has revealed the
extent to which the company’s creative process changes for different pro-
jects. In describing the creative practices involved in making a Kneehigh
retelling, Rice spoke of a spectrum with wholly, group devised work at
one end and written adaptation—as a solo, pre-rehearsal activity—at the
other. Her conceptualization of this spectrum seemed to relate to the
extent that the company had co-authored the performance text in the
rehearsal room, and also the extent to which the adaptation could be
said to be either loosely based on a story without any particular ‘original’
source text or much more tightly scripted from one or more immediately
recognizable versions. However, Rice and Grose’s attempts to plot the
company’s shows along this spectrum proved difficult as none seemed to
fit particularly neatly into such categorization.
Liz Tomlin has carefully argued in Acts and Apparitions, that the drive
to fit new works into a binary system, which includes devised theatre
against text-based theatre, seems bound up with the particular agendas
of producers, funders, and critics rather than theatre makers or audi-
ences (Tomlin 2013, p. 9–10). I might add a further binary regarding
adaptation here, with adaptations that seek to replicate a singly authored
‘original’ in a new medium against looser ‘retellings’ that present audi-
ences with new works of fiction, significantly re-authored by their mak-
ers. I would argue that Rice’s notion of a spectrum is the consequence
of those same agendas identified by Tomlin. Categorizing their works in
this way is no doubt useful to Kneehigh in signalling some of the differ-
ences between shows to programmers and co-producing venues, such as
the level of fidelity to a source text, or the likelihood of a finished script
8  H. Lilley

before rehearsals start. However, this detracts from the complexity of the
company’s adapting and devising methodologies. Placing works at either
end of this spectrum reinforces simplistic notions of a singular, original
source text and also the restrictive binary of devised theatre against text-
based theatre, both of which are actually challenged and complicated
by Kneehigh’s work and Rice’s desire to be a ‘reteller’ rather than an
adapter. As Radosavljevic states in Theatre-Making, devising, and in rela-
tion to Kneehigh we should add adapting, ‘increasingly requires to be
seen as a ubiquitous creative methodology rather than a genre of (non-
text-based) performance’ (Radosavljevic 2013a, p. 68).
Interviewing Rice during the 2004 run of The Bacchae at the West
Yorkshire Playhouse, highlighted the company’s resistance at that time
to categorizing their work and Rice talked of trying ‘desperately not to
define what we do’, while at the same time having to explain the col-
laborative authoring processes of their shows in order to be able to pub-
lish play texts of their adaptations (Rice, author interview, 2004). The
desire to publish these texts has pushed the company to articulate their
views on devising and adapting a little more clearly, and has led Rice to
the ‘retelling’ term as a way of signally the company’s alliance to an oral
storytelling tradition in which intertextuality, narrative mutability, and
shared cultural ownership of stories is prioritized over single authorship
and fixed originals. Rice’s conceptualization of herself and Kneehigh as
retellers rather than adapters seems to be a more accurate and revealing
articulation of their practice than the notion of a devised–adapted spec-
trum. By calling themselves retellers the company are asserting their
long-held desire to ‘keep affirming the group not the individual’ in all
of their working methods (Rice, author interview, 2004). As retellers,
Kneehigh put their source texts through the ‘artistic filters’ of a direc-
tor-led collaborative practice in which performers, writers, musicians,
and designers engage in tightly structured and yet playful exploration
and creation of performance material. Devised adaptation as practiced by
Kneehigh is a complex, collaborative process of recreating myths, fairy
tales, classic texts, and films as popular, accessible, and often both cel-
ebratory and subversive theatrical experiences. This chapter is a study of
Kneehigh’s creative processes alongside analysis of several of the works
that they have generated since 1999, all of which might be termed
devised adaptation, providing we remember that this does not signify
a singular, fixed practice, but rather a pluralistic, personalized and ever
emergent set of approaches to retelling known tales.
 1  KNEEHIGH’S RETELLINGS  9

Retelling in the Context of Adaptation Studies

In order to analyse their process and performance work, it is useful to
examine Kneehigh’s general approach to retelling stories in relation to
adaptation studies. Like researchers in the field of contemporary per-
formance, scholars of adaptation have shifted their focus away from
attempts to categorize works into a fixed genre, towards developing
greater understanding of the creative processes involved in adaptation,
in terms of both production and reception.1 Similarly, as definitions of
devising have been usefully expanded to account for a diversity of prac-
tice, the focus of adaptation studies has been expanded beyond the
bounds of ‘fidelity criticism, a paradigm that measures the success of an
adaptation by its level of fidelity to the “original” text’ (Lefebvre 2013,
p. 2). As Rice has indicated, Kneehigh’s interest in retelling stories is not
driven by a desire to replicate an assumed ‘original’. Their process begins
with exploration of personally inflected retellings and a keen interest is
taken in how stories might change to reflect differing perspectives and
differing contexts. ‘Fidelity criticism’ would, therefore, be an inappropri-
ate theoretical framework for the study of their processes and produc-
tions. Radosavljevic’s critique of press reviews for Kneehigh’s version of
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (2006), supports this assertion and reveals that
‘various types of bias about adaptation and even staging a classic play still
exist’ among theatre critics and audiences, which will no doubt prove
interesting given Rice’s appointment as Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s
Globe in 2016 (Radosavljevic 2013a, p. 68).
In Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary
Practice, Govan et al. also refer to a tendency among conservative crit-
ics to judge adaptations as ‘poor copies’ of their source texts, but argue
strongly that expecting any devising company to even attempt to authen-
tically recreate an ‘original’ is entirely futile.

How can devised performance possibly adapt fiction to create an authentic

replica? Or indeed should it? The format of the original, as a piece of nar-
rative, and the copy, as a dramatic form, dictates that there will be a num-
ber of differences. The characteristics of these two modes mean that it is
impossible for a stage version of a piece of fiction to be faithful, or authen-
tic. (Govan et al. 2007, p. 94)

Ignoring fidelity discourses, Kneehigh approached their adaptation

of Cymbeline in their usual idiosyncratic manner, by finding their own
10  H. Lilley

personal connections to the material and using those to make an acces-

sible and relevant retelling for a contemporary audience. For Rice, as
director, this meant focusing on its foreboding fairy tale atmosphere,
and ‘families as we know them, damaged, secretive, surprising and frus-
trating’ (Rice, in Kneehigh Theatre 2007, p. 5). For writer, Grose, the
attraction was its Pulp Fiction-like ‘violence and weird humour’ with its
‘three bizarre narratives that all kind of collide at the end’ (Grose, author
interview, 2014).2 This description exemplifies Hutcheon’s theory of
adaptation, in which source materials are ‘filtered’ through the adapters’
personal ‘intertexts’.

The creative transposition of an adapted work’s story and its heterocosm

is subject not only to genre and medium demands … but also to the tem-
perament and talent of the adapter—and his or her individual intertexts
through which are filtered the materials being adapted. (Hutcheon 2006,
p. 84)

Two seminal Kneehigh productions—Tristan and Yseult (2003) and

Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter (2005)—exemplify this idea of ‘cultural
memory’ as a source text particularly well. The creative process for these
adaptations was quite different, and yet there are some strong similari-
ties between the resulting productions in terms of the relationships cre-
ated with the audience, and the use of performance space to add layers of
meaning and enhance the audience’s awareness of intertextuality at play.
The company’s retelling of the epic Cornish myth, Tristan and Yseult
was based rather freely upon a children’s version of the myth and com-
pany members’ varied knowledge of other versions. The performers
improvised a chorus of love spotters, in anoraks and colourful balaclavas,
to retell the myth from the perspective of the ‘unloved’ in a Tarantino-
inspired world of sharp suits and violent passions. Aside from the love
spotters’ improvisations, the story was brought to life through frag-
ments of text written in isolation by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy,
music composed by Stu Barker and Bill Mitchell’s set designs. Tristan
and Yseult was originally an outdoor production at Restormel Castle
in Cornwall and Rufford Abbey in Nottinghamshire (2003), and these
stunning settings were incorporated into the action, blurring the stage–
audience boundaries and enhancing the epic and romantic nature of the
myth. When the production was revived as an indoor show for national
and international touring (2005) the company replicated this to some
 1  KNEEHIGH’S RETELLINGS  11

extent by making use of auditorium space as ‘the club of the unloved’.

This creation of a club setting playfully involved the audience in the
action and allowed for explicitly intertextual visual referents, such as the
vinyl sleeve for Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (Fig. 1.1).
By way of contrast, the script for Brief Encounter had to be fixed
in advance, and was based much more closely on two textual sources:
Coward’s screenplay and his earlier stage play Still Lives. Rice explained
however, that while she ‘wouldn’t call it [Brief Encounter] a devised
show’ she would still call it a ‘devising company’ (Rice, author interview,
2014).

Even creating something as outwardly traditional as Brief Encounter you

try and have actors that are going to bring something new into the space,
something surprising, and understand the language of devising. (Rice,
author interview, 2014)

While a script, adapted in advance from the two written sources, was
in place for the rehearsal process, Kneehigh’s version also engaged
fully with the status of the film as a British classic. The performance
drew heavily on memories of the film and also on a shared nostalgia
for the cinematic experience of the 1930s and 1940s. In performance
Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter utilized London’s Haymarket Cinema to cre-
ate an evocative, cinematic, and self-referential retelling realized through
simultaneous use of stage, screen, and auditorium space that enhanced
the audience’s sense of the piece as a shared cultural memory.3
By focusing on a collective cultural consciousness, Rice sees Kneehigh
as following in the footsteps of all storytellers, including Shakespeare
and Brecht, in taking known stories and reshaping them for new audi-
ences. The company’s approach to storytelling is also popularist, with
Shepherd and Rice sharing a strong aversion to any sense of elitism in
the arts. The choices of source text therefore, often relate directly to
popular culture, such as Kneehigh’s adaptations of well-known fairy tales
and films. Retellings of well-known fairy tales have included Cry Wolf,
based on Little Red Riding Hood (2003), Rapunzel (2006), Hansel and
Gretel (2009), and a Cinderella story, Midnight’s Pumpkin (2012). Fairy
tales suit the company’s performance style because of the direct nature
of the storytelling that translates well into direct address to the audi-
ence; the scope for physical comedy, music, song, tricks, and stage magic;
and for their thematic exploration of the ‘inner landscapes’ of human
12  H. Lilley

Fig. 1.1  Mike Shepherd as a Love spotter, Tristan and Yseult, 2005 with gen-
erous permission from Steve Tanner and Kneehigh Theatre
 1  KNEEHIGH’S RETELLINGS  13

experience.4 Retellings of well-known films include Brief Encounter and

also Powell and Pressburger’s quintessentially British, wartime classic
A Matter of Life and Death (2007). These retellings assume a certain
amount of recognition from the audience and playful intertextual refer-
ences are made in each, not only to the meaning or particular style of
original versions, which in the case of fairy tales are often explicitly sub-
verted and reversed, but also to the genre and historical context that the
originals are embedded in. To borrow Hutcheon’s terms, Kneehigh’s
retelling of popular works create ‘the doubled pleasure of the palimpsest:
more than one text is experienced—and knowingly so’ as the audience
enjoy the playfulness of ‘repetition’ and of ‘difference’ between versions
(Hutcheon 2006, p. 116).
However, as Hutcheon’s also asserts, ‘for an adaptation to be success-
ful in its own right, it must be so for knowing and unknowing audiences’
and this presents a greater challenge when a source text is likely to be
well known by some, but completely unknown to others, as in the case
of less canonical myths and fairy tales and classic texts (Hutcheon 2006,
p. 121). With regards to fairy tales, the extent to which the audience
know a particular tale may not be that significant a factor, as the tropes
of the genre are so engrained within our cultural consciousness that
the audience can still enjoy a sense of intertextual play. As Julie Sanders
argues in Adaptation and Appropriation, fairy tales ‘participate in a very
active way in a shared community of knowledge, and have therefore
proved particularly rich sources for adaptation’ (Sanders 2006, p. 45).
Indeed, Rice demonstrates this point herself when she says that ‘I didn’t
know the story of The Red Shoes, but I knew what it meant somehow,
as it’s in our cultural psyche’ (Rice, author interview, 2014). Whether
or not audience members were familiar with Hans Christian Andersen’s
version or Powell and Pressburger’s film, they could still recognize the
subversive nature of Kneehigh’s retelling in which cross-gender casting
and cross-dressing highlighted social constructs and challenged aspects
of Christian morality.
Where Kneehigh have tackled weighty classics, Rice believes that the
company’s task has been to ‘reveal’ the meaning of the sources as clearly
as possible and to attempt to emphasize human themes, such as love,
family, loss (Rice, author interview, 2014).

I think I am by nature populist, I don’t always get the classics. I often find
them impossible to understand and I don’t enjoy things being so difficult
14  H. Lilley

that you can’t ‘get in’, that you can’t enjoy … I don’t think that’s dumb-
ing down, I think its saying there’s all sorts of richness that we can abso-
lutely celebrate and explore, but that there is no elite club, everybody is
in this club. Everybody has to be able to enjoy this night [a given perfor-
mance night] on some level. (Rice, author interview, 2014)

This does not mean, however, that Kneehigh’s adaptations of classic texts
are not challenging and do not offer interesting and sometimes pro-
vocative critiques of contemporary society. Their version of Euripides’
The Bacchae (2004) is an excellent example of a retelling that was both
accessible and challenging, as audiences were invited to celebrate light-
hearted bacchic revelry—through audience participation including drink-
ing wine with Dionysus and singing comic songs with ‘his women’—that
turned sharply to unsettling chaos and then brutal violence at the end
of the play. This dramatic change of register was at the centre of theatre
critic’s responses, for example Lyn Gardner remarked that Rice ‘lulls us
into a false sense of security … when it reaches its malignant climax you
are quite taken by surprise. After the furious storm comes the terrifying
silence’ (Gardner 2004).
Rice’s approach to the piece was to view the subject of femininity
through the lens of a cross-gender chorus, all male performers with bare
chests and tutus exploring why a grandmother, a teenager, and a meno-
pausal woman might be tempted to leave society and seek excitement on
the wild mountain. This chorus led the audience through the complex
narrative of the Greek tragedy, at one point in the style of a school les-
son on the blackboard. Reflecting on the production Rice described how
the company had devised this scene in response to their own attempts to
unravel the complex narrative.

My job is to reveal, not to conceal. And in something like The Bacchae that
was so simple that structure … we all sat down and we couldn’t under-
stand it, so we sat in that room [at the Barns] with the blackboard and said
‘let’s get this straight. Who’s who? Who was Zeus?’ And we literally did it
on the board, and there’s me thinking well if we had to do this, how can I
expect anybody who comes into the theatre to understand it? (Rice, author
interview, 2014)

This exemplifies Kneehigh’s approach to retelling as a process of reveal-

ing and simplifying that should not be dismissed as ‘dumbing down’,
 1  KNEEHIGH’S RETELLINGS  15

because the result is accessible, non-elitist, and popular theatre that can
be moving and thought-provoking. This example also reveals the suit-
ability of devising methodologies as valuable collaborative processes for
unlocking and reimagining source texts.

Devising Retellings Through Three Stages

of Development

Through my research I have come to think of Kneehigh’s adaptation

process as loosely divided into three key stages: (1) The director devel-
ops his/her concept for the show in collaboration with core members of
the company and/or co-producers, and exploration of the chosen source
materials begins. This may or may not include the writing of either frag-
ments of text, or a more substantial script, (2) An ensemble of core
members, cast and crew embark on two weeks of intensive, creative work
at the barns; and (3) What we might consider to be a more standard
rehearsal period ensues, often at a co-producing venue, and the structure
of the piece is fixed ready for performance. This third stage might also
be said to encompass the run of the show itself, where the audience are
invited into the process of retelling through pre-performance activity in
and around venues, through direct address and participation during the
performance, and indeed through that ‘pleasure of the palimpsest’ that
characterizes the reception of an adaptation (Hutcheon 2006, p. 116).
The artists involved in each stage of development, and the man-
ner of their involvement, can vary from one production to the next,
as Kneehigh operate on a core and pool structure: ‘common to many
British theatre companies where there is a small permanent core, usually
made up of founder members, almost always including an artistic direc-
tor. Individual projects may bring together a larger number of partici-
pants and these will normally be people to whom the company returns
again and again’ (Mermikides and Smart 2010, p. 16). At present,
Kneehigh’s artistic directors, Rice and Shepherd, head the company and
very much lead the devising process; both are performers, and when not
directing, Shepherd still performs in most Kneehigh productions. The
contribution of other writers and performers that might be said to make
up the company’s ‘pool’ should not be underestimated however, as many
have a longstanding affiliation to the company and clearly share a vocab-
ulary of practice.
16  H. Lilley

In Kneehigh’s published play texts credit is always attributed to the

contribution of the whole company in creating the work, and Shepherd
founded the company upon principles of collaboration and commu-
nity. In describing their collaborative practices, Kneehigh often draw
on conceptions of space; the space of their rehearsal Barns as ‘elemen-
tal’ and ‘inspiring’; the space of Cornwall as ‘outside’ of London and as
‘a place where you can make things happen’; and the creative space of
rehearsal where the company comes together to devise. On their website,
Kneehigh define themselves in the following way:

We are based in a collection of barns on the south Cornish coast, they are
at the top of a hill where the road ends and a vast horizon stretches far
beyond Dodman Point. By their very nature the barns let the weather in
and out again. A large multi-fuel burner needs to be stoked and fed for
rehearsals; there is barely any mobile phone reception and nowhere to
pop out for a quick cappuccino. The isolation of the barns, and the need
to cook and keep warm provides a real and natural focus for our flights
of imagination. This is not a conceit; it is a radical choice that informs all
aspects of our work. Although much of our work is now co-produced with
larger theatres, we always try to start the creative process at these barns, to
be inspired by our environment and where we work. This creative space is
at the heart of how we create and conceive our work. (Kneehigh Theatre
2014)

Kent also describes Kneehigh as an artistic community, and visiting the

Kneehigh barns at Goran Haven, where the creation of all their shows
begins, makes it immediately apparent that Kent’s description is not an
idealized version of a vague company ethos, but rather relates directly to
the practical way in which Kneehigh still approach making performance:

[Shepherd] developed a belief in an assembly of actors who lived, worked

and ate together in a communal way, making energised creative space.
Pieces of theatre would develop organically and through ‘communion’
in the art of theatre … underlying the organic development are research,
experiment and an emphasis on crafting work. (Kent 2010, p. 746)

Research clearly dominates the first stage of the creative process that I
have identified, with the director working in a fairly isolated way on the
germination of an idea for a show. Kneehigh Theatre’s work is strongly
director led, either by Shepherd or Rice, whose sensibilities drive the
 1  KNEEHIGH’S RETELLINGS  17

shape and aesthetics of their productions. In the first phase of the process
much of the work is carried out individually by the director and through
discussion with other company members who might begin to work
on writing text, composing music, or designing for the piece. As Rice
describes her chosen source texts as ‘cultural memories’ her preference is
to conceptualize the piece from her own memory of the text or film she
is going to adapt, or, in the case of some myths (Tristan and Yseult) or
classic texts (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Euripides’ Bacchae), to work
from a children’s version (Rice, author interview, 2014). Rice admits
to doing very little research and stresses that working too cerebrally,
with multiple versions or academic articles, carries a danger of making
her ‘feel stupid or invalidated’ and distancing her from her instinctual
attraction to a particular story (Rice, author interview, 2014). Rice does
concede however, that other members of the company balance her emo-
tional and instinctive approach. Grose for example likes to undertake a
lot of research, always working directly with the source text, and taking
confidence from knowing as much about it as he can. Within this first
phase it is usual for these different kinds of research to go on indepen-
dently, as an initial concept for the retelling begins to be formulated.
Rice has spoken candidly in interviews about her approach to direct-
ing as quite authoritative in terms of creatively authoring the show (in
distinction to the play text) and taking responsibility for making final
decisions. Rice believes that through strong leadership she is able to cre-
ate ‘an environment in which people have good ideas’ and actually feel
freed up within the process to be creative, thoughtful, and playful (Rice,
author interview, 2014).

At its heart, the word devising is of great importance at the very seed of
the show. So you’re telling the actors ‘this is not something I’m going to
tell you to do’, so you say ‘we’re going to devise it’. Even if it is a script,
it’s a useful word to say this is not set, this is not decided. (Rice, author
interview, 2014)

Having participated in two devising workshops run by Shepherd, I can

say that he shares this aim with Rice and his approach is intended to free
actors up to take creative risks and to offer ideas with a sense of ‘generos-
ity’, ‘lightness’, and ‘mischief’ (Shepherd 2010). Govan et al. suggest
that the creative play and improvisation used in early devising companies
to author work, is now a prevalent methodology in the rehearsal room of
18  H. Lilley

director led and scripted productions (Govan et al. 2007, p. 39); and in
Devising in Process, Mermikides and Smart highlight a sense of creative
play as one of the shared characteristics of many contemporary devising
processes.

What we mean by ‘play’ is both the willingness to improvise around ideas

and the degree of strategic flexibility purposefully left within the process,
with many companies delaying fixing their pieces until a very late stage.
(Mermikides and Smart 2010, p. 24)

Their definition relates well to Kneehigh’s use of devising within what I

have identified above as the second phase of their creative process. It is
during this second phase that the director opens the act of reimagining
and retelling out to more participants, through devising methodologies.
Some might simply call this period the start of rehearsals, but this would
not necessarily signify the important focus placed on building an ensem-
ble, and on the kinds of exploration of source materials that we might be
more used to associating with R&D (research and development) periods.
Who exactly is involved, and what exactly takes place during this period,
is of course variable and project specific. However, there are certainly
common elements that reveal the journey of a given source text through
what Hutcheon would describe as the director’s ‘personal artistic filters’;
then the personal emotional memories and shared cultural consciousness
of the cast and crew; before finally, the wider interpretive community of
the audience (Hutcheon 2006, p. 84). As Rice describes it:

The next thing that I would always do is start building the foundations of
‘why’. Now I’ve made an awful lot of decisions, and I know the world, I
know why I’m doing it, but what I do next is try and get the ensemble to
key into why they might do it and to begin to fill in the blanks. (Rice, in
Radosavljevic 2013b, p. 101)

By outlining specific exercises that the company use in this phase to

explore their source texts, we are able to see how their aim—to retell sto-
ries in a non-elitist, relevant, often celebratory and sometimes challeng-
ing way—influences and is manifest in their creative practice. Attending a
two-day devising workshop with Shepherd, at Beintheworkfest in Berlin
(2010), I was able to experience a condensed version of this second
phase of the process, where the focus is jointly on building an ensemble
 1  KNEEHIGH’S RETELLINGS  19

and inspiring creative ideas; opening up the source text via interpretive
and representational activities. The workshop was based on Gabrielle
Garcia Marquez’s short story, ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’,
which is a story that Shepherd has returned to several times. He and Bill
Mitchell devised an outdoor production called Windfall in 1993, before
returning to the story as part of the 3 Islands project between Cornwall,
Malta, and Cyprus in 2003; and Shepherd directed a production of it
in association with Little Angel Theatre in 2011, written by Anna Maria
Murphy with puppets by Sarah Wright. With Little Angel Theatre, four
puppeteers retold the story through a whole community of puppets liv-
ing in a grey-washed, rain-soaked, crab-invested fishing village. In this
retelling, the fate of the village—visited by a suspected angel, overrun
with miracle seekers and tourists, and at the mercy of dubious religious
leaders and bankers—resonated with the changing landscape of many
British coastal towns courting tourism and development. While our
workshop and the subsequent puppet version with Little Angel were not
linked, participating in the workshop and then later watching the pro-
duction has brought into clearer focus the relationship between develop-
mental stages of devising and finished performance.
Unlike at the barns, we were not sharing accommodation, cooking
together, or running along the Cornish cliff tops in the mornings, but
essentially the progression of work that we undertook mirrors Rice and
Shepherd’s description of beginning work at the barns, with care taken
to unite the participants as an ensemble. The atmosphere of the work-
shop was light hearted, gleeful even; we sang a lot and we played a lot
of games, not just initially, but throughout the two days, in order to
become comfortable with each other, to keep ‘charging the space’ and
to ‘re-energize’ ourselves. However, storytelling always remained our
primary focus and many of the games revolved around what Shepherd
calls ‘storying’ (Shepherd 2010). Shepherd described ‘storying’ as ‘exer-
cising our storytelling muscles’ and he tasked us to create stories from
the contents of our bags, from sculptures, from simply positioning actors
on a marked-out stage. We then applied many storytelling techniques
to Marquez’s text, engaging in what Kneehigh actress Joanna Holden
has described, in relation to Hansel and Gretel (2009), as ‘finding ways
you want to tell the story—whether it’s through puppetry, whether it’s
through music, whether it’s through movement, whether it’s through
you as a performer’ (Holden, in Radosavljevic 2013b, p. 110).
20  H. Lilley

Some key elements of Kneehigh’s approach to adaptation emerged,

such as a preference for instinctive, immediate responses. These
responses were placed very simply under headings such as: Themes/
Characters/Design. These were explored through quick imaginative
tasks, such as drawing striking images from the story. Finally, they were
condensed into bullet points of action from which we created little pic-
ture books. The materials that were generated soon supplanted the text
itself and, displayed around the rehearsal room, these became our points
of reference. Several of the ideas that emerged from these storytelling
exercises pointed towards the retelling that Shepherd went on to create
with Little Angel. Such as the nosey neighbour as narrator, the mother’s
entrepreneurial desires as a significant turning point in the action, and
the strong sense of a community caught up in consumerist greed that
only serves to reveal people’s fickleness and teach them about the ambi-
guity of capitalist and religious figures of authority. My experience of the
workshop thus exemplified how Kneehigh’s approach ensures that the
finished production is inflected with the interpretations and interests of
the cast as they emerge during the collaborative play of this second phase
of the creative process.
However, had a version of the story been fully created from this work-
shop, it would certainly have differed a great deal to Little Angel’s pup-
pet play in form, aesthetic, and thematic character, because Kneehigh’s
devising exercises focus not only on retelling the story, but also on
exploring the cast’s personal connections to it through their collec-
tive artistic skills. A lot of time is devoted to finding that shared sense
of ‘why’ and following that ‘why’ off in interesting tangents. For exam-
ple, one of the workshop participants related the story to aspects of his
childhood in communist Poland. He felt that his desire for consumerist
goods and his longing for the consumer choice of the West, was reflected
somewhat in the villagers’ dreams and aspirations. Shepherd asked the
participant to retell his story in Polish with another performer improvis-
ing an on-the-spot translation. Then, because we were an international
group with quite varied levels of performance experience, we repeated
the exercise in other languages and in an invented ‘gobbledegook’—this
exercise was one of several that helped to relieve the pressure of impro-
vising dialogue and suggested ways in which we might find our own
unique playing style. All of the storytelling exercises—creating and cos-
tuming characters, bringing those characters to life, and devising scenes
complete with puppets, lights and music—while never really at odds with
 1  KNEEHIGH’S RETELLINGS  21

Marquez’s story, were characterized by our own interpretations, our own

strengths as performers, and our natural characteristics. It was very clear
how Kneehigh’s approach to exploring source material could evoke per-
sonal responses that, once shared and explored, give performers a strong
sense of investment in the material.
Rice describes the material generated at this stage of a show’s forma-
tion as a ‘fertile palette of words, music and design’ (Kneehigh Theatre
2014). Writer Anna Maria Murphy, speaking specifically of The Red Shoes,
supports this description.

Everything in this company’s work tells the story: the actors, the set, the
music, the costume, the props. A living script grows with Emma [in the
case of The Red Shoes] and the actors, through devising, improvisation and
the poems. Each plays an equal part. I say it is living, as it’s always chang-
ing and we all own it. (Murphy in Kneehigh Theatre 2005, p. 179)

The inclusion of writers within devising processes is extremely common,

and as Mermikides and Smart point out, has its precedent in many of
the devising collectives of the 1970s (see Mermikides and Smart 2010,
p. 12). Rice has spoken of casting the writers for a project in the same
way that she would cast the performers, and claims to work with them
in a very similar way, by setting them tasks. These tasks might include
observing and writing up scenes devised by performers or generating
fragments of text inspired by the source material. Grose describes his
experiences of writing text for Kneehigh as quite varied. Within one pro-
duction he explains that

Some of it [the script] is written by me pre-rehearsals, some of it is impro-

vised, the actors come up with stuff, and some of it is improvised and then
I write it. (Grose, author interview, 2014)

When writing text and lyrics for the fairy tale adaptation The Wild Bride
(2011) Grose wrote a lot of material independently in advance, which
was then given to Rice to ‘cut and paste it and put it together and use
what she wanted, and she would say look “this bit is all gonna be image,
this is all gonna be dance, so we don’t need that”’ (Grose, author inter-
view, 2014). The Wild Bride’s central character—represented by three
actresses—did not speak, therefore much of the action was devised
through physical theatre and dance; the fact that Grose is accustomed to
22  H. Lilley

working with Kneehigh as a deviser/performer as well as writer, meant

that Rice could create the adaptation and final script using his text quite
freely. This supports Mermikides and Smart’s assertion that:

The simple presence of the playwright in rehearsal opens up a dia-

logue which can offer different perspectives and opportunities to explore
ideas physically, visually and interactively before the script is finalised.
(Mermikides and Smart 2010, p. 22)

Tom Morris, writer for several Kneehigh adaptations, gives a detailed

description of this process as he experienced it with The Wooden Frock
(2003), which was based on the short story ‘Wooden Maria’ from Italo
Calvino’s Italian Folktales.

The devising team (four actors, a designer, a composer, a lighting designer,

Emma and myself) told the story to each other while Emma and Bill
[Mitchell, founder member and designer] evolved a vision for the world
in which our play would take place … Before a word was written Mike
Shepherd was wearing a wimple and neat Moroccan slippers and answer-
ing to the name of ‘Nursey’. In this way, the characters and the story were
cooked up together by the group. As the people of the play emerged, I
wrote words for the scenes they were improvising. (Morris, in Kneehigh
Theatre 2005, p. 124)

Kneehigh’s core and regular company members share a working vocab-

ulary and practice, which Grose calls ‘a kind of shorthand’ that inspires
confidence and a sense of freedom within the process (Grose, author inter-
view, 2014). The director of each Kneehigh show leads the creative pro-
cess from the front, but relationships between all of the roles are rich and
productive, and the input of each collaborator is valued as they approach
the task of retelling a story from a shared consciousness of it. As Rice says:

Kneehigh is a team. The shared imagination is greater than any individ-

ual’s, so we begin the rehearsal process by returning to the story. We tell
it to each other, scribble thoughts on huge pieces of paper and relate it to
our own experience. We create characters, always looking to serve and sub-
vert the story. (Rice, in Kneehigh Theatre 2005, p. 13)

Devising and adapting are intrinsically linked within Kneehigh’s crea-

tive processes, as methods for interpreting, revealing, and sharing
 1  KNEEHIGH’S RETELLINGS  23

a story, regardless of whether they have (1) a vague or specific source

text(s) , and (2) fragments of dialogue, lyrics, and poetry or closer to a
full script to work with. Both their devising and adapting strategies are
very securely founded on the principle that, while individual artists might
own their creations or versions, nobody in fact owns a story. Studying
Kneehigh reaffirms the value of stories as mutable and transferable across
history, contexts, and media. Kneehigh’s retellings remind us that for
some the joy of adaptation is in the pleasure of acknowledgement, rec-
ognition, and comparison of intextualities, but for others, retellings offer
the pleasures of discovering a story that was not or only vaguely known,
and of having something revealed and made relevant that was assumed
to be archaic or too difficult to be understood and enjoyed; Kneehigh’s
retellings attempt to reach and satisfy both of these audiences.

Notes
1. For a concise overview of this shift see Lefebvre, Benjamin, ed. Textual
Transformations in Children’s Literature: Adaptations, Translations,
Reconsiderations. New York and London, Routledge, 2013 (Lefebvre
2013).
2. For further discussion of Kneehigh’s Cymbeline, see Radosavljevic, Duska.
Theatre-Making: Interplay between text and performance in the twentieth
century. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 (Radosavljevic 2013a).
3. For detailed analysis of Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter, see Georgi, C.
“Kneehigh Theatre’s Brief Encounter: ‘Live on Stage-Not the Film’”.
Raw, L. and Tutan, D. The Adaptation of History: Essays on Ways of
Telling the Past. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co Inc., 2012.
pp. 66–78 (Georgi 2012).
4. Rice often aligns Kneehigh’s view of fairy tales to Bruno Bettelheim’s The
Uses of Enchantment (1978), which offers a reading of fairy tales as psy-
chological aids, particularly to children, in coming to understand the social
world. For detailed analysis of Cry Wolf see Lilley, Heather. “Everyone in
the Room has a Connection to the Story”, Journal of Adaptation in Film
and Performance. 5.2, 2012. pp. 149–166 (Bettelheim 1978; Lilley 2012).

Works Cited
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of
Fairy Tales. London: Penguin Books, 1978.
Gardner, Lyn. (2004). “The Bacchae”. Guardian, Web. 2 October 2014.
24  H. Lilley

Georgi, C. “Kneehigh Theatre’s Brief Encounter: ‘Live on Stage-Not the Film’”,

in Raw, L. and Tutan, D. ed. The Adaptation of History: Ways of Telling the
Past. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co Inc., 2012, pp. 66–78.
Govan, Emma, Nicholson, Helen, and Normington, Katie. Making a
Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practice. London and New
York: Routledge, 2007.
Grose, Carl. Author Interview. 2014.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge,
2006.
Kent, A. M. The Theatre of Cornwall: Space, Place, Performance. Bristol: Westcliff
Books, 2010.
Kneehigh Theatre. Kneehigh Anthology Volume One: Tristan and Yseult, Red
Shoes, The Wooden Frock, The Bacchae. London: Oberon Books, 2005.
Kneehigh Theatre. Cymbeline. London: Oberon Books, 2007.
Kneehigh Theatre. (2014). Company Website, http://www.kneehigh.co.uk/
page/the_barns.php, accessed 29 May 2014.
Lefebvre, Benjamin, ed. Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature:
Adaptations, Translations, Reconsiderations. New York and London:
Routledge, 2013.
Lilley, Heather. “Everyone in the Room has a Connection to the Story”. Journal
of Adaptation in Film and Performance 5.2, (2012): pp. 149–166.
Mermikides, Alex, and Smart, Jackie. Devising in Process. Basingstoke and New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Radosavljevic, Duska. Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance
in the 21st Century. Bassingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013a.
———. The Contemporary Ensemble: Interviews with Theatre-Makers. London
and New York: Routledge, 2013b.
Rice, Emma. Author Interview. 2014.
Rice, Emma, and Shepherd, Mike. Author Interview. 2004.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York:
Routledge, 2006.
Shepherd, Mike. Beintheworkfest Workshop. 2010.
Tomlin, Liz. Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice
and Theory, 1990–2010. Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 2013.
 CHAPTER 2

Collective Creation and ‘Historical

Imagination’: Mabou Mines’s Devised
Adaptations of History

Jessica Silsby Brater

The American avant-garde theatre company Mabou Mines was founded

in 1970 as a collective; each founding member was a co-artistic direc-
tor. This structure of collective creative leadership has endured through-
out the company’s history. Each artistic director, past and present, has
provided Mabou Mines with an independent yet interrelated artistic
approach to both process and production. The company is known for
producing original works by a single author (most frequently co-artis-
tic director Lee Breuer) and for wildly imaginative adaptations of plays,
including classics such as King Lear (Lear 1987) and A Doll’s House
(Mabou Mines’ DollHouse 2003). But the work of several of the co-artis-
tic directors also reveals a common interest in adapting people and events
of the past into contemporary characters and stories for the stage. The
resulting body of unconventional history plays are often devised through
processes of collective creation.

J.S. Brater (*) 
Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, USA
e-mail: braterj@mail.montclair.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 25

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_2
26  J.S. BRATER

JoAnne Akalaitis’s, Ruth Maleczech’s, and Julie Archer’s work for the
company on Dead End Kids (1980) and Bélen: A Book of Hours (1999)
illustrate Mabou Mines’s interest in devised adaptations of history by
troubling the relationship between women and conventional master
narratives about the past. These productions exemplify Mabou Mines’s
intensively collaborative process and commitment to producing original,
American work for the stage. This chapter explores each production’s
distinctive approach to devising and adaptation as a mode for reimagin-
ing women and events of the past.
In Dead End Kids and Belén, Mabou Mines changes identifiable his-
torical source material to challenge accepted notions of history, confront-
ing audiences with new perspectives on people and events of the past and
undermining the authority of traditional master narratives. Each produc-
tion illuminates a different facet of their approach to the collaborative
process and adaptation: Dead End Kids, with its intricately embroidered
patchwork of adapted research material and invented scenarios, uses his-
torical pastiche. Meanwhile, Belén’s imagistic fictionalized scenarios are
better described as partisan iconography.
In Past Performance: American Theatre and the Historical
Imagination, Roger Bechtel writes that his aim is to

investigate and understand what I perceive to be new and complex the-

atrical strategies for representing—or perhaps a better word might be
engaging—history. History, in the plays and productions I examine, is not
understood as a mere reference to the historical record; rather, these pro-
ductions marshal historical reference to interrogate history—the idea of
history, its uses and abuses, as Nietzsche would have it, rather than its facts
alone—and our relation to it. (Bechtel, 16)

This is a useful framework for examining Dead End Kids and Belén
within the milieu of historical drama. These productions take an ener-
getic and muscular approach to wrestling with their respective histories,
inserting themselves assertively into the record of the past and insisting
that we do not take the idea of history or the figures and stories it has
documented for granted.
Dead End Kids and Belén lend weight to the importance of these
women’s histories by going through the motions of representation
night after night, for different spectators. As Freddie Rokem writes of
 2  COLLECTIVE CREATION AND ‘HISTORICAL IMAGINATION’ …  27

the repeated appearance of the ghost in Hamlet in Performing History:

Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre:

What can be seen in Hamlet is how a burden (some kind of unfinished

business from the past) becomes transformed into an actor’s being and
doing ‘this thing’ on the stage, appearing again in tonight’s performance,
continuously performing a return of the repressed on the theatrical stage.
History can only be perceived as such when it becomes recapitulated,
when we create some form of discourse, like the theatre, on the basis of
which an organized repetition of the past is constructed, situating the cha-
otic torrents of the past within an aesthetic frame. (Rokem, xi)

Likewise, the female figures and stories in these productions haunt the
stage to remind us of those who have been ignored, such as the prisoners
of Belén and those, such as Marie Curie, whose discoveries unwittingly
led to tragedy. These figures also ask us to re-examine the traditional
master narrative, pointing us toward a feminist historiography by inter-
twining the personal with the political and reorganizing hierarchical
arrangements of historical reference.
Although Mabou Mines is organized as a collective, not every artis-
tic director participates in every production and projects have resulted
from collaborations of almost every imaginable combination of artistic
directors and associates. There is, nonetheless, a shared set of concerns
among the co-artistic directors: a dedication to language and research,
an interest in a multi-media approach to storytelling (though not neces-
sarily conventional narrative), a blending of comedy and sentimentality, a
highly collaborative development process that in some cases borders on
collective, a rehearsal process that integrates design elements with per-
formance, and an emphasis on giving performers significant power in
shaping and guiding artistic decisions. These characteristics have tended
to influence the approach to making the work rather than resulting in a
‘house style’; though Breuer and Maleczech are both founding artistic
directors, it is hard to imagine two productions more dissimilar in mood,
style, and scope than her 1999 production of Belén: A Book of Hours
and his 2003 DollHouse, despite the fact that both engage with ques-
tions about the representation of gender. Breuer suggests that if there
is a common stylistic thread among productions, it may come from the
sheer number designed by former co-artistic director Julie Archer during
her tenure with the company from the late 1970s until her resignation
28  J.S. BRATER

in 2013. In describing Mabou Mines’s lack of a unified house style,

Breuer suggests that the distinctive approach of the Wooster Group is
attributable to the company’s sole artistic director: ‘I honestly don’t
think there is a discernible Mabou Mines style that spreads to a number
of different people, just like there is no Wooster Group style—it’s just
Liz [LeCompte]’.1 Mabou Mines is distinct from the Wooster Group, of
course, because of its structure of shared artistic directorship, but Breuer
is pointing to the discrete nature of the aesthetics of the Mabou Mines
co-artistic directors.
Mabou Mines does, however, have a strong tradition of textual adap-
tation, and the use of historical source material in the collectively created
projects examined here can be considered in the context of productions
such as Akalaitis’s work with Colette’s writing in Dressed Like an Egg;
Maleczech and Breuer’s reimagining of Shakespeare in Lear; Breuer’s
inventive take on Ibsen in DollHouse and on Tennessee Williams in Glass
Guignol; and Maleczech’s Imagining the Imaginary Invalid, which com-
bines Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid with material drawn from texts
on the history of medicine. Because each artistic director has contributed
an autonomous aesthetic and methodology, the two case studies that fol-
low do not represent overarching approaches to devising and adaptation
for the company. Instead, their development processes and characteristics
in production point to similarities as well as to original, distinctive quali-
ties of particular productions in Mabou Mines’s body of work.
Dead End Kids is one of the most famous productions in Mabou
Mines’s history. Conceived and directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, it was
developed and produced at New York City’s Public Theater during the
company’s extended residency there, premiering in November 1980
and was adapted into a film in 1984. The company of actors researched,
wrote, and helped to develop scenes and text. Maleczech played Marie
Curie. This role, which emphasized Curie’s contribution to science as
well as elements of her biography, proved to be central to Akalaitis’s ver-
sion of the history of nuclear power and its relationship to patriarchal
and capitalistic structures of authority.
With Belén: A Book of Hours the company took up gender, power, and
history again under Maleczech’s direction with a design by Archer. The
production, which premiered in March 1999, was performed bilingually
in Spanish and English and based on Mexican history. It also expands
Maleczech’s assertion that the company ‘makes American work’, to
include the USA’s southern neighbour, as Maleczech had already done
 2  COLLECTIVE CREATION AND ‘HISTORICAL IMAGINATION’ …  29

in Sueños, a piece about the life and work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
(1989). Belén featured poems by US poet Catherine Sasanov and per-
formances by Mexican artists Liliana Felipe and Jesusa Rodriguez.2 Belén
was performed internationally, opening in Mexico City as part of XV
Festival del Centro Storico at El Claustro de Sor Juana. The US premiere
took place in April 1999 at Mabou Mines’s former ToRaNaDa studio
at PS 122 in New York’s East Village. The production also toured to
Chicago, San Francisco, the University of California at Northridge, and
back to Mexico City (this time to Rodriguez and Felipe’s Teatro de La
Capilla), and then back to PS 122 in 2000.
The Catholic Church built Belén in 1683 as a refuge for prostitutes
and pregnant, indigent women. It quickly underwent changes that made
life for the women there increasingly restrictive as clergy who ran the
institution, initially founded as a sanctuary, began to search the streets
for women they deemed undesirable, abducting and imprisoning them.
As the Belén production program explains, ‘once a woman entered,
she could never leave’.3 Belén was converted into a prison for men and
women in 1860 by the Mexican government and became so notorious
as a site of torture that it was torn down in 1935. In contrast to the
famous Marie Curie, the lives of Belén women have been lost to history.
The research, development, and production of this piece functioned as
an excavation of sorts, unearthing fragments of personal histories and
daily living and then inventing characters and stories that tell us who
these women were and how they spent their days.
Dead End Kids and Belén are history plays that establish an interroga-
tive relationship with the past. The nature of this relationship is differ-
ent in each case; each production establishes a distinct methodology
particular to its perspective on the history it investigates. Nonetheless,
these productions have certain characteristics in common. They are not
realistic attempts at historical reconstruction. Neither do they pretend to
be objective. They are, as Peter Weiss described his documentary drama,
frankly ‘partisan’ (Weiss, 294).

Dead End Kids

Akalaitis created Dead End Kids as a “response to the tremendous
political movement” in the USA surrounding the use of nuclear
power.4 “It seemed kind of natural to me that Ruth would play Marie
Curie,” she says, describing the similarity in looks between the women
and Maleczech’s facility with accents. Curie provided the fulcrum for
30  J.S. BRATER

Akalaitis, and when the director adapted the work to film in 1984, she
expanded Maleczech’s role. Curie was, Akalaitis says, “a woman who was
a pre-eminent scientist and basically killed herself doing her work, who
was incredibly important in a world where women are not important.”
Greg Mehrten, a former company member who also performed in Dead
End Kids, remembers that Maleczech was intent on learning the science
behind the activities she portrayed onstage as the Nobel Prize-winning
chemist and physicist. ‘She had this scene where she was taking the radi-
oactive elements and she really learned how to do that’, Mehrten says.
The science that secured Curie’s entry into the historical record was cru-
cial to Maleczech’s portrayal of the important figure.
In reviews of the production, Akalaitis is often credited with writing
as well as directing Dead End Kids as she is in the film version, although
the Mabou Mines website attributes the text to Akalaitis ‘with the com-
pany’, with excerpts from other documents written by a lengthy list of
figures from Paracelsus to General L.R. Groves.5 Akalaitis agrees that the
script was indeed written ‘with the company’. Collaborators recall that
the performers immersed themselves in the research process alongside
Akalaitis. The subject was ‘too vast for one person to do all the research’,
Maleczech said, ‘it needed all the people in the piece to do it’.6 Mehrten
recalls a process of interdisciplinary collaboration:

Originally it started out as a workshop where a lot of people who weren’t

in Mabou Mines were invited to think in collaborative ways—musicians
and filmmakers, all kinds of people—because it wasn’t meant to be like a
normal play. It had all these vignettes from different periods in history all
around the subject of nuclear power.7

The development process, with its heavy emphasis on research, was one
to which Maleczech readily responded. According to Maleczech, she
developed a performance that eventually became scripted, while Akalaitis
remembers the performance as ‘always slightly improvised’. Maleczech’s
attention to the research that facilitated her creation of Curie is an early
example of Mabou Mines’s investment in this phase of the process.
Maleczech’s costume for Curie, the performer recalled, was copied from
a dress that she and Akalaitis had seen slung over the back of a chair
when they visited the scientist’s former home, now a museum in Paris.
Akalaitis, according to Maleczech, selected material she wanted to
include in the piece from the research brought in by the company and
 2  COLLECTIVE CREATION AND ‘HISTORICAL IMAGINATION’ …  31

put it in order. ‘JoAnne is a structuralist’, Maleczech said in describing

Akalaitis’s directorial approach,

she structures everything. She doesn’t ever want anything on the stage
that isn’t a structure. It can be an emotional structure, it can be a physi-
cal structure, it can be a movement structure, it can be a language struc-
ture, but it’s got to be structured. That’s where her heart goes. When
we made The Red Horse Animation we each had a part of the red horse.
David Warrilow’s part was the Story Line. My part was the Heart Line,
and JoAnne’s part was the Outline. And it’s very appropriate that that was
her part.

Mehrten’s description of Akalaitis’s process for Dead End Kids in which

artists from various disciplines came together to collaborate, is also
characteristic of Maleczech’s directorial approach. But where Akalaitis
actively shapes the contribution of her collaborators, Maleczech worked
with what she got. ‘Julie Archer could have made any set for Belén’,
Maleczech said, ‘it’s up to her what she makes. She makes it, I’ll work
with it’. Maleczech’s description of divergent directorial inclinations
highlights the distinct nature of aesthetic prerogatives among co-artistic
directors as well as resulting stylistic differences.

A Staged History of Nuclear Power

Much of the critical attention surrounding Dead End Kids centres on
the notorious scene in which David Brisbin’s sleazy stand-up come-
dian leads a naïve female audience member, played by Ellen McElduff,
through a series of sexually exploitative manipulations of a raw roasting
chicken as he suggestively reads excerpts of a document describing the
consequences for livestock in the event of a nuclear war. In ‘Staging the
Obscene Body’, Elinor Fuchs describes her own discomfort as an audi-
ence member during this sequence and the widespread disdain with
which critics greeted the scene. In the end, however, Fuchs writes,
‘most critics, sympathetic with the director’s political intentions, finally
“allowed” it on political grounds’. Fuchs also documents an audience
walkout during a presentation of the scene:

In an interesting sequel, the nightclub scene was presented as a single

excerpt at a joint anniversary celebration of the War Resisters’ League
32  J.S. BRATER

(WRL) and Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament in May 1983

… women in the hall began to shout to the female character, ‘Don’t do
it honey, don’t let him do it to you!’ Within moments, accompanied by
mounting booing and hissing, there occurred a full-scale feminist walkout
from the hall … The performance was broken off and an angry confronta-
tion with the director followed. (Fuchs, 36)

The melee Fuchs describes followed a presentation of the scene outside

of the context of the play, but Akalaitis subsequently developed a reputa-
tion for controversy—she is now the veteran of a showdown with the
Beckett estate over her production of Endgame (1984) and an infamous
ousting by the board of the Public Theater which ended her brief and
tumultuous tenure as the only female Artistic Director in the organiza-
tion’s history. It should come as no surprise, then, that this earlier, inten-
tional provocation was so successful.
The confrontational nature of this scene makes it an excellent micro-
cosm for examining the larger patterns at work in the piece. Dead End
Kids puts familiar figures, images, and histories together in a provoca-
tive and uncomfortable way. The result disrupts what we know about the
appearance of nuclear power on the political landscape and points to our
complicity, as well as that of the scientific community, in its proliferation.
One mode of disruption in Dead End Kids is Akalaitis’s empha-
sis on comedy, a strategy that Mabou Mines has relied on regularly for
the purposes of distancing and juxtaposition. Dead End Kids avoids
the polemical by incorporating satire and parody as well as visual gags,
as when Marie Curie appears with a black poodle (on a walk through
Central Park in the film version), book-ended by scenes of Faust and
Mephistopheles (the latter in human form). Akalaitis even parodies
comedy itself with Brisbin’s decidedly unfunny stand-up comedian. But
Maleczech’s adaptation of Curie is funny, and her ability to control the
comedy invests the figure with power. Akalaitis recalls that Maleczech
employed ‘a kind of comedic Polish accent. It was very, very funny and
I have no idea how she did it, but she did it’. Maleczech remembered a
process that relied on a collective adaption of historical information. ‘She
had a Polish-French accent’, Maleczech explained,

and of course I’d never heard Polish, so I would make it up! And then in
the Faust section, which was done in German, I was the translator—Marie
Curie was the translator—and so I had to translate Goethe’s Faust …
 2  COLLECTIVE CREATION AND ‘HISTORICAL IMAGINATION’ …  33

But it had to be funny, so at first it was improvised and eventually it was

scripted because I said the same thing over and over.

Although no video survives of the stage production, the film adapta-

tion is now available for purchase.8 It opens with a scientist drawing on
a chalkboard and delivering an enthusiastic explanation of the atom. Less
than five minutes later, the late Mabou Mines co-artistic director Fred
Neumann’s cigarette-smoking armchair intellectual sets the stage for
a historic reconstruction of medieval-looking attempts at the alchemi-
cal transformation. An evening talk show dedicated to pseudo-scientific
inquiry (‘Welcome to the incredible, unbelievable world of alchemy’, one
co-host beams) in which a magician makes a handkerchief into a dove
and enacts other improbable feats and the co-hosts discuss the history of
alchemy. Then, of course, there is the stand-up comedian. These narra-
tive threads establish surprising juxtapositions between familiar situations
and figures, pairing birthday party magicians with ancient alchemical
theory.
In fact, such contrasting scenes highlight another unlikely and ulti-
mately lethal pairing: the US government’s machismo and jingoism
and its access to science with the capacity to create an atomic bomb. As
Fuchs notes, despite her discomfort with the too-stupid audience mem-
ber and the too-seedy comedian, she ‘recognized … the most unsettling
version of the connection Akalaitis had been making all along between
the war state and the sexist state, male nuclear fantasies and the exploita-
tion of women’.9 Thus, Dead End Kids develops two trains of thought.
One has to do with the abuse of nuclear power, both in the real world
and in male fantasies. The other has to do with how we ended up with
the capacity to make a nuclear bomb in the first place.
The latter question takes us all the way back to Aristotle and other
Classical proponents of alchemy. The first third of Dead End Kids func-
tions as a sort of history of alchemy or perhaps as a history of the ges-
tational period of science. As the drama unfolds, alchemy and modern
science collide with the introduction of Marie Curie. Once she appears
on the scene in Dead End Kids she continues to lurk around the cor-
ners of the production, demonstrating the centrality of this character to
Akalaitis’s conception of the project.
Later Curie tells her own story, one that resonates with an overlap-
ping of interconnected personal and professional triumphs. She describes
meeting her husband, Pierre Curie in terms that glow with a shared
34  J.S. BRATER

commitment to science, not the traditional language of romance. ‘A con-

versation about science began between us,’ says Maleczech’s Curie, ‘soon
he caught the habit of speaking to me about his dream of a life conse-
crated entirely to scientific research and he asked me to share that life’.
Among the Dead End Kids cast of characters, only Curie possesses this
sense of an integrated professional and personal life, and Maleczech and
Akalaitis are careful to embed this intersection throughout Curie’s story
in the film. This distinguishes her even among the female characters; we
are not, for instance, privy to the home life of Ellen McElduff’s teacher
or the professional life of McElduff’s naïve female audience member.
Curie and her husband Pierre worked in a shed that served as their
laboratory, just outside the home they shared with their daughter, we
learn. ‘It was in this abandoned shed that the best and happiest years of
our life was spent entirely consecrated to work … This period was for my
husband and myself the heroic period of our common existence’. In this
shed, Curie decided to ‘devote’ herself to the purification of radium. ‘In
1902 I possessed one decigram of radium. It had taken me four years to
produce it’, she continues,

The baby had been put to bed and cried again. I stayed with her until she
fell asleep then I went down and tried to sew, but I was too restless. I sug-
gested to Pierre that we go to the laboratory. We opened the door in the
dark. I begged Pierre not to light the light. The reality was more entranc-
ing than we had wished. It was spontaneously luminous.10

Here, Curie’s husband, child, and scientific innovation are linked

together in the pride she feels for her accomplishments. Maleczech’s
voice is warm, and we have the sense of Curie as a particularized individ-
ual because of her slightly untraceable yet charming accent. She describes
the qualities of radioactivity, its ability to make images on photographic
plates through black paper and to disintegrate the paper in which it is
wrapped as if she is a parent talking about a precocious child. ‘What
could it not do?’ she asks proudly.11
Marie Curie is the only character in Dead End Kids whose view of
science and domesticity are so irrevocably interwoven. This makes her
the ideal figure to haunt the later, post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki scenes.
As a mother, she is a poignant presence in the doorway of the audi-
torium where she watches the schoolteacher played by McElduff read
eyewitness accounts of the horrors of Nagasaki aloud to children in a
 2  COLLECTIVE CREATION AND ‘HISTORICAL IMAGINATION’ …  35

singsong voice. McElduff holds a large picture book and pauses occa-
sionally to make sure the children understand the more difficult words.
‘Those people who managed to get out by some miracle’, she reads in
a sweet, soothing voice, ‘found themselves surrounded by a ring of fire
and the few who did make their way to safety died twenty to thirty days
later from the delayed effects of the deadly gamma rays’.12 Marie Curie
looks on with a mixture of regret and wonder.
The sinister intermingling of sophisticated nuclear activity and inno-
cent daily life also inserts itself into a scene in which high school girls,
played by Maleczech and Akalaitis’s daughters, Clove Galilee and Juliet
Glass, respectively, demonstrate the wonders of nuclear power in a sci-
ence fair exhibit. They admiringly describe a nuclear-powered coffee
pot, plutonium-heated long johns, and a nuclear-powered pace maker.
‘Radiation is the most recent step in man’s ancient quest to preserve
food’, they rave, eating irradiated hamburgers.13
We see Marie Curie in the film version staring out the window at a
nuclear power plant as she travels past it in a train and again, sitting in
an armchair and watching another television program in which McElduff
plays a crazed mother who helps her son to assemble a hydrogen bomb
as a scout project. Curie’s repeated appearances, in which she silently
observes the consequences of her scientific contribution, are infused with
regret. They leave the impression that Curie is haunting the history she
handed down, unable to detach herself from her beloved radium and the
series of consequences she could not have foreseen.
Although Marie Curie may be at the centre of the drama for Akalaitis
and for the audience, Dead End Kids is, without a doubt, an ensemble
piece. It makes use of the pastiche that has resulted from its process of
collective creation, presenting its story of nuclear power as a collage of
fact, fiction, science, and stage magic. By blending selected history with
imaginative invention, Dead End Kids suggests that we can alter the
course of the future. The juxtaposition Fuchs identifies between Curie’s
maternal presence and the ‘manifestations of the sexist state’ is a unify-
ing motif that functions to humanize a political problem of colossal pro-
portions. Akalaitis’s imaginative coupling of real and fictional scientists
and narratives underscore Dead End Kids as story of nuclear power rather
than of a history of it, just as the subtitle suggests. Akalaitis and company
are adapting historical sources, not staging history to provoke the audi-
ence into taking action.
36  J.S. BRATER

In Search of Lost Time: Belén’s Book of Hours

Belén: A Book of Hours
In 1995, Maleczech was in Mexico City on a National Endowment for
the Arts (NEA) fellowship to observe the work of performer and political
activist Jesusa Rodriguez. While visiting El Habito, the political cabaret
that Rodriguez ran with her partner Liliana Felipe, Maleczech first saw
Felipe perform songs she had also composed. Maleczech knew that she
wanted to collaborate with Felipe, though on what she was not yet sure.
Coincidentally, Maleczech was staying in the same hotel as the American
poet Catherine Sasanov, who was also in Mexico City on an NEA fellow-
ship. Over lunches and dinners during their stay, Maleczech and Sasanov
talked about Mexico City. ‘One night’, says Sasanov,

I told Ruth about something from Mexico City’s history that interested
me greatly, and that I was sleuthing around, trying to find out more about,
el Recogimiento de Belén (the sanctuary of Bethlehem), a Catholic run
sanctuary for women without means of support, run like a prison, and
eventually, turned into a secular prison.14

This conversation, which began as an earnest personal conversation

between artists working in different mediums would blossom into a the-
atrical collaboration.
Six months after parting ways in Mexico City, Maleczech contacted
Sasanov to say that she was interested in Belén and to ask her if she
would like to write a libretto for a theatre piece about it. Felipe would
set the poems to music that she would sing live; Rodriguez would also
perform. Because Felipe didn’t speak English, Sasanov would work with
a translator so that Felipe could compose the music and perform the
poems in Spanish.
Maleczech recalled that Sasanov sent her a number of poems, almost
all of which Maleczech promptly returned because she thought Sasanov
could do better. Sasanov recalls an interactive fluidity in the early days of
the process:

I would write a poem, then pass it by Ruth for her blessing. We might
talk about a type of poem she would like to see in the piece (or a tone, a
viewpoint), and I would go back with that and see what I could do (this
became more common as the piece began to take form; at the beginning,
 2  COLLECTIVE CREATION AND ‘HISTORICAL IMAGINATION’ …  37

I was free to see what I came up with). If she liked the poem, it then went
to the translator.

Maleczech worked in a similar manner with the five writers she gath-
ered together to create the poems for Mabou Mines’s Song for New
York, which premiered in 2007.15 The artistic team on Belén worked by
mail until being granted residencies in 1998 at the Sundance Theatre
Laboratory in Utah and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center at
Lake Cuomo in Italy, where they spent concentrated time working with
each other and with Archer, the designer, who had done her own visual
research in Mexico.
In fact, Maleczech had drawn Archer into designing for the thea-
tre in a similarly intuitive manner. Initially Archer was a babysitter for
Maleczech and Akalaitis’s respective children when the women’s two
families shared an apartment in New York’s East Village in the 1970s.
Maleczech discovered through conversations with Archer that the lat-
ter was a sculptor. When a Mabou Mines sculpture piece for Akalaitis’s
Dressed Like an Egg (1977) was in need of repair, Maleczech suggested
Archer for the job. Maleczech and Archer teamed up for the OBIE-
Award winning design of Vanishing Pictures (1980), Maleczech’s direct-
ing debut, and continued to collaborate until Maleczech’s death in 2013.
According to Maleczech, during the developmental residencies for
Belén, Sasanov and a translator, Luz Aurora Pimentel, worked in the
mornings, handing translations off to Felipe in the afternoon. Maleczech
and Rodriguez worked throughout the day, developing a scripted series
of gestures and movements depicting household chores that would
unfold in a non-verbal parallel track as Felipe performed the songs.
Sasanov, who is nearly fluent in Spanish, recalls working closely with the
translator ‘to make sure each translation was as close as possible to the
original’. When they were satisfied with the translation,

it was passed to Liliana to set to music. Amazingly, it was rare that Lili
needed to make much of any change in wording for the music to fit. Once
she had a song ready, we gathered around her and listened (or, if we were
all scattered long distance, we listened via cassette tape). At this point,
Jesusa and Julie Archer, came in, thinking about movement and visuals.
I was exceedingly lucky to be present at all the rehearsals as Belén was cre-
ated. I loved how the work came together, all very organic. I didn’t just
write a finished piece and pass it on to Ruth. Each of us had our part with
38  J.S. BRATER

each individual song/poem that I created. At times, I might make sug-

gestions of images I had seen that my collaborators might be interested in
working with or incorporating into the visuals or as part of the movement
of the piece. Or I might bring up one of my obscure details that we’d con-
sider working into the piece.

This overlapping interchange—cultural, linguistic, and multi-media in

nature—was crucial to Belén’s development. It also proved to be char-
acteristic of the final product, which capitalizes on the porous boundary
between translation and adaptation. A note in the programme describes
the process:

A challenge in developing a theatre piece with artists that speak different

languages is to work in a way that the collaborators are not struggling
with language as they create. Catherine Sasanov wrote the twelve poems in
English. Ruth Maleczech suggested they be translated into Spanish so that
Liliana Felipe could freely set them to music. Julie Archer then worked to
integrate the English of the poems into the visual life of the work. Ruth
Maleczech wrote a silent scenario for Jesusa Rodriguez to be understood
by all. By this process Las Horas de Belén - A Book of Hours became a truly
bi-lingual, bi-national, bi-cultural collaboration.16

This international, intercultural exchange was successful for audiences

and collaborators alike; Felipe and Rodriguez were given OBIE Special
Citations for their performances, becoming the first Mexicans to receive
the award, and Sasanov says ‘working on Belén was one of the great
events of my life’.
Contrasting her own directorial approach to Akalaitis’s and Breuer’s,
Maleczech explained, ‘neither one of them gives their collaborators the
leeway I do, but it’s not leeway really—that’s not the right word because
it sounds like permission. No, neither one of them involves their col-
laborators at the level that I do. The collaborators have completely free
reign’. Perhaps this is why, throughout her career, Maleczech was drawn
to artists with backgrounds in more independently created forms of art,
such as sculpture and poetry. And perhaps this is why Sasanov, a poet,
and Archer, who began as a sculptor, responded so keenly to Maleczech’s
directorial inclinations. Maleczech sought out collaborators who bring
a strong point of view into the room. ‘I like it when it’s feisty’, she
said, ‘and I like it when things are messy for a long time … I’m a real
 2  COLLECTIVE CREATION AND ‘HISTORICAL IMAGINATION’ …  39

appreciator of people rooting around and coming up with whatever

comes to mind and then trying to figure out why exactly that came to
mind and how it crosses with somebody else’s passion’.
In Belén, the indignities perpetrated against Rodriguez’s character are
unfurled in the guise of normality, unfolding as part of the rhythm of
daily life. The sense of the quotidian surrounding episodes of oppression
and abuse underscores the production’s explicit message that subjuga-
tion is, in fact, part of habitual life for many women. The subtitle of the
play, ‘A Book of Hours’ refers to Christian devotional books, drawing
attention to the religious origins of the institution in which these women
find themselves. It also underscores the hours that made up the days and
years spent at Belén in captivity.
Sound, light, projection, and performance are all calculated to
invoke this reference, astonishingly clear even in a recorded version of
the performance at the ToRoNaDa. Before the lights come up on stage,
a projection appears on the wall: ‘like certain refined forms of torture,
household chores must be repeated as soon as they are done’.17 The
words disappear abruptly, accompanied by a jarring aural effect that
seems a cross between thunder and the door to a prison cell clanging
shut (Fig. 2.1). This aural trope will recur throughout the performance.
As the play begins, four distinct tracks emerge. Felipe, at a piano, sings
Sasanov’s poems in Spanish while the English translations are projected
on the wall. Meanwhile, Rodriguez enacts a variety of household tasks—
the ones we were warned about in the opening projection. Sometimes
she is the woman in the poems and sometimes she is another woman,
engaged in routine work that parallels the lines of the poem in some way,
and who, according to Maleczech, may not even know the women at
Belén. All of this is punctuated by outbursts in English delivered by a
woman, our contemporary, who is looking back over the past history of
Belén. The fourth track is provided by Archer’s design. Images collected
by Archer of saints and photographs of women line the walls. Projected
outlines of plants and flowers, giant in scale, infiltrate the stage with a
mysterious menace.
In her review of Belén for the Village Voice, Alisa Solomon writes
‘sound, text, and movement follow separate trajectories that sometimes
intersect, sometimes run parallel, and sometimes, by contradicting each
other, collide.’ Solomon argues ‘the clash and confluence of these events’
results in
40  J.S. BRATER

Fig. 2.1  Jesusa Rodriguez in Las Horas de Belén, 1999 with generous permis-
sion from Julie Archer
 2  COLLECTIVE CREATION AND ‘HISTORICAL IMAGINATION’ …  41

a complete, disquieting universe. More associative than narrative, the per-

formance never actually tells the history of Belén. Rather, it summons
Belén’s ghosts—and their cousins from all the places women have been
tormented—for a ghoulish yet gorgeous encounter.18

Space is crucial in the encounter Solomon describes; although Rodriguez

and Felipe are near to each other, it is clear that they inhabit separate
areas. The outbursts, performed by Monica Dionne, come from a lofted
space above and away from Rodriguez and Felipe, while the projections
appear on every available surface, including Rodriguez’s body.
Solomon’s description recalls Rokem’s notion of staged spectres
haunting history, one that reverberates with Marvin Carlson’s Haunted
Stage. Here, however, Belén’s ghosts have gathered to haunt us with
unfamiliar spirits: women whose records were long ago expunged; their
histories deemed unimportant to Mexico City’s scribes.
In her 2001 article for Theatre Journal, Roslyn Costantino mines
the production’s visual imagery for its subversive retelling of the his-
tory of racism that played an insidious role in the oppression of women
in Mexico. In one particularly arresting scene, Rodriguez sets out flour
and whisks eggs. We expect her to make bread. Instead, she undresses,
smears herself with beaten egg, and covers herself in flour, whiting her-
self up before our eyes. Though this exploration is based in Mexican his-
tory, the production’s imagery is expansive enough to evoke struggles of
women throughout time and across the globe. ‘Without speaking a word
during the play’, writes Solomon,

Rodriguez enacts women’s timeless chores—ironing, sewing, cooking—in

exacting ways, sometimes transforming these labors into stark images of
women’s subjugation. Her movement, neither realistic nor romantic, jerks
and sputters ever so slightly, as if to emphasize the archetypal nature of
this endless drudgery. Maleczech likens it to Meyerhold’s biomechan-
ics; Rodriguez says she found inspiration in watching stop-action films of
growing plants.19

Rodriguez’s distancing style of performance is juxtaposed with Felipe’s

impassioned singing and the tortured outbursts. Maleczech’s use of
binary tension, the alienating style of Rodriguez’s performance, and epic
storytelling techniques force the audience to confront a brutal history of
women without sentimentality.
42  J.S. BRATER

Where Dead End Kids makes use of ensemble playing to re-envision

the past and present of nuclear power, Belén relies on virtuoso perfor-
mances to magnify the lives of women who have been swept aside in
history: Rodriguez’s striking physical performance, the forceful and
exuberant cabaret style music composed and performed by Felipe, and
prominent and arresting projections by Archer that appear and disappear
as if they have a life of their own. Sasanov’s poems permeate the stage.
They are sung by Felipe, projected on the wall, and wordlessly enacted
by Rodriguez. Maleczech and company make the lives of their subjects in
Belén as large in performance as they have been small in recorded history.
Maleczech’s direction in Belén creates a space between the performer
and her enactment and between the performers and each other, thereby
augmenting the scale of presentation. The space between performers is
emphasized by Felipe’s singing and Rodriguez’s near silence, the fact
that Rodriguez appears not to be aware of Felipe’s presence, and by plac-
ing Monica Dionne in an entirely separate area above and away from
Rodriguez and Felipe for the outbursts. The projections, which give an
impression of giant, two-dimensional puppets, seem driven by an unseen
exterior force and help to create a sense of hyper-reality in which images
and emotions are invested with acute intensity.
It is Rodriguez and Felipe’s performance styles that establishes room
between each of them and the audience. Rodriguez, Maleczech noted, is
a seasoned cabaret performer and her natural instincts were for a broad,
bold, and fluid physicality. Maleczech worked with Rodriguez to circum-
vent her physical routine, breaking her movement down into a precise
unfolding of tiny gestures that add up to a larger picture. What results
here, a physical landscape that seems to unfold in time lapse, has a jarring
effect on the viewer. Felipe’s singing and piano playing are so ferociously
forceful that they prevent the audience from slipping into the easy com-
fort that performance by such an accomplished musician can induce.
Felipe’s passion and volume in the small space of the ToRaNaDa jux-
taposed with Rodriguez’s finely tuned alternation between stillness and
hyperactivity and the grim humour that is incorporated into most of her
scenarios keep the audience engaged but at bay, providing them with
room to process what they are experiencing on an intellectual level.
The images projected onto Rodriguez’s body are part of a pattern of
tactics underscoring her corporeal presence. Roslyn Constantino’s 2001
article makes the case that Rodriguez’s figure embodies the struggle of
Mexican feminist activists:
 2  COLLECTIVE CREATION AND ‘HISTORICAL IMAGINATION’ …  43

for the last 30 years in Mexico, where the female body has served as the
stage upon which national identity has been constructed, feminist schol-
ars, writers, and artists have devoted much energy to the task of locating
the persistence of women’s intervention into spaces to which they suppos-
edly denied access as well as to representing women’s resistance to systems
designed to control every aspect of their life.20

The episode in which Rodriguez whites up with flour and the one in
which she dances in her underwear with a knife, holding its glinting form
against her skin, are also associated with this trope, as is her nudity in
such close proximity to the audience. These images serve to spotlight
Rodriguez’s body, making it appear to be hypersensitive to stimuli and
emphasizing its subjectivity to outside forces. These forces are what con-
signed the women of Belén to be prisoners. ‘The hand that stretches out
to strangle operates in full daylight and has many names’, a projection
warns us, ‘Oppression, Poverty, Injustice, Dependence’.21
Both Dead End Kids and Belén make use of everyday life as a back-
drop for the horrors that Maleczech and company require the audience
to acknowledge. In Dead End Kids, manifestations of daily life appear as
distinct episodes, such as the high school science fair. Other scenes, such
as the one in which Mephistopheles appears to Faust with nine heads, are
infused with a magical feeling. In Belén, there is no escape from the omi-
nously ordinary. Every day elements may take on surreal qualities, but
this is because of the way in which Rodriguez and Maleczech manipulate
familiar objects. A trench coat on a hanger begins as a sewing project
and becomes a dance partner and later a rapist. Costantino reports that
the collaborators were moved by the then current news about ‘unsolved
rapes and murders of hundreds of young women working in the maquila
factories in US-Mexico border towns. Official indifference to this vio-
lence echoed the stories that they were uncovering about’ Belén’s
women.22 In this imagined version of another time and place, elements
of everyday life morph into monstrosities.
As if nightmarish versions of recognizable objects weren’t enough,
a calculated strategy of interruptions further unsettles the audience.
Flashes of light, the clanging sound that repeatedly signals the end of
an episode, and the outbursts from the chained contemporary woman
(Dionne) above our heads create a feeling of disjunction. Even
Rodriguez’s stop motion movement style keeps the audience from set-
tling in. For the US audience, the singing in Spanish and outbursts and
44  J.S. BRATER

projected words in English also amount to an interruptive strategy;

although the projections of the poems mean that non-Spanish speakers
can understand the words, the simultaneous use of two languages also
establishes a complex process of reception, especially for bilingual mem-
bers of the audience. These interruptive techniques unravel narrative
threads and disrupt our sense of time.
Maleczech’s unmooring of linear time gives the audience a taste of
what it might be like to spend life in prison; routine days, with little to
distinguish one from the next, Maleczech and her collaborators suggest,
have deprived Belén’s women of their sense of progression. Maleczech’s
strategy of interruption is also a practiced method of undermining con-
ventional narrative structure, one that has long been advocated by fem-
inist critics as a tactic for promoting non-patriarchal representation on
stage.

‘History Nibbled into Beds’

The close of the first poem in Belén, ‘A Memory of Things to Come’,
reads

From Belén, I can see

how they’ll lock prisoners away
in the arms of a star
Rats will nest in the archives:
Our history nibbled into beds.23

Here Sasanov speaks simultaneously to a desire for acknowledgement

of lost histories and the improbability of recovering records that would
make such recognition possible. In Belén and Dead End Kids Akalaitis,
Maleczech, and their collaborators sift through scraps of the past and
piece them together to revisit forgotten episodes or reconstruct them
from a point of view that has been relegated to the off-site storage of his-
tory. What these artists lack in historical documentation they make up for
with political conviction and theatrical imagination.
Although Dead End Kids’s historical pastiche is distinct from Belén’s
partisan iconography, both productions ask audiences to formulate their
own ‘idea’ of internationalized American history. This is no less than
what the highly collaborative development process for each production
 2  COLLECTIVE CREATION AND ‘HISTORICAL IMAGINATION’ …  45

demanded of its co-creators. The eclectic artistic backgrounds of these

collaborators makes them particularly suited to such a task, providing
them with a variety of approaches with which to interrogate research and
respond theatrically. Mabou Mines insists upon a place for these figures
and stories in the collective historical record by assuring their place on
the stage night after night in performance.
Where Akalaitis’s project in Dead End Kids is more overtly political,
Maleczech’s is in part a recuperative effort to revitalize forgotten and
misunderstood figures, though her engagement with the famous sci-
entist Marie Curie demonstrates that her initiative is a more expansive
one. What distinguishes Mabou Mines’s staging of history is the degree
to which interpretations are shaped by the contributions of collabora-
tors working in concert. The results are representations that encompass
a range of points of view about Mabou Mines’s subjects, insisting that
historiography must acknowledge the multiple perspectives of its players
and storytellers.
While Dead End Kids insists that the audience confront the dangers
of nuclear proliferation and the patriarchal structure that enables it, Belén
demands that the audience recognize the institution’s female ghosts,
who have haunted the outskirts of history. By recognizing them, we
assign them their rightful place in our record of the past and acknowl-
edge the significance of subjugated women around the world and across
time. These productions, furthermore, ask us to reimagine the con-
tours of the historical narrative. By incorporating women’s work—bak-
ing, sewing, mothering—into the staged lives of their central characters,
Belén and Dead End Kids interrogate the very meaning of what Bechtel
describes as historical reference. What do we record, these artists ask us,
why do we record it, and who creates accepted ideas about our shared
history? Rather than present audiences with neatly bundled packages,
Maleczech, Akalaitis, and Mabou Mines send us home with a puzzle,
inviting us to participate in constructing another possible configuration
of the past.

Notes
1. Lee Breuer, interview with the author conducted in May 2012.
2. Felipe was born in Argentina though she lives and works primarily in
Mexico.
46  J.S. BRATER

3. Program, Belén: A Book of Hours, presented at Teatro de La Capilla in

Mexico City in 2000, Mabou Mines office archives.
4. All quotations by JoAnne Akalaitis in this chapter are taken from an inter-
view conducted by the author in December 2011.
5. The Renaissance physician Paracelsus is credited with founding toxicol-
ogy and studied alchemy and the occult, among other fields. General
Leslie Richard Groves oversaw the secretive US government initiative to
develop atomic weapons during World War II, known as the Manhattan
Project.
6. All quotations by Ruth Maleczech in this chapter are taken from inter-
views conducted by the author between July 2011 and March 2012.
7. All quotations by Greg Mehrten in this chapter are taken from an inter-
view conducted by the author in July 2011.
8. Dead End Kids is available for streaming through Cinema Guild at
http://store.cinemaguild.com/nontheatrical/product/1144.html.
9. Ibid.
10. Dead End Kids, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis (New York: Cinema Guild,
1986), VHS.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. All quotations by Catherine Sasanov in this chapter are taken from e-mail
correspondence between Sasanov and the author in November and
December 2011.
15. Song For New York featured poems by Migdalia Cruz, Maggie Dubris,
Patricia Spears Jones, Karen Kandel, and Imelda O’Reilly.
16. Programme, Belén: A Book of Hours, presented at Teatro de La Capilla in
Mexico City in 2000, Mabou Mines office archives.
17. Belén: A Book of Hours (Mabou Mines, 1999), DVD. Copy provided to
the author by Mabou Mines.
18. Alisa Solomon, “Prison Prayers,” Village Voice, 25 May 1999.
19. Ibid.
20. Roselyn Costantino, ‘Embodied Memory in Las Horas de Belen. A Book
of Hours.’ Theatre Journal 53, no. 4 (2001): 608.
21. Belén: A Book of Hours, DVD.
22. Costantino, 608.
23. Catherine Sasanov, Belén: A Book of Hours. Printed in production pro-
gramme supplement by Mabou Mines, Mabou Mines office archives.
 2  COLLECTIVE CREATION AND ‘HISTORICAL IMAGINATION’ …  47

Works Cited
Bechtel, Roger Past Performance: American Theatre and the Historical
Imagination (Lewisberg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), Print.
Belén: A Book of Hours (Mabou Mines, 1999), DVD.
Fuchs, Elinor. ‘Staging the Obscene Body,’ TDR 33, no. 1 (1989): 36, Print.
Rokem, Freddie, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in
Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), Print.
Weiss, Peter, ‘Notes on the Contemporary Theater,’ tr. Joel Agee, in Essays on
German Theater (New York: Continuum, 1985), Print.
 CHAPTER 3

Making Music Visible: Robert Lepage

Adapts Aspects of Siegfried Without Shifting
a Word

Melissa Poll

Featuring a US$ 16 million budget, six years in development and a

45 ton set, Ex Machina’s co-production of Richard Wagner’s sixteen-
hour Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Metropolitan Opera hinges on
director Robert Lepage’s interactive scenography as a form of adapta-
tion. This chapter, which is based on my experience auditing rehearsals
at the Metropolitan Opera in October 2011 and January 2012, posits
that Lepage’s scenography, built via an architectonic set and performers’
bodies in space, adapts Siegfried by developing Wagner and Appia’s pre-
scribed aesthetics and subverting aspects of the opera’s potentially prob-
lematic politics of representation.1

M. Poll (*) 
Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA
e-mail: melissajpoll@gmail.com

© The Author(s) 2018 49

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_3
50  M. Poll

On Adaptation and Scenography
The upsurge in theatre centred on physical performance texts in the last
fifteen years contextualizes this chapter’s understanding of adaptation.2
Published in English in 2006, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic
Theatre examines contemporary performance’s shift toward ‘dissolving
the logocentric hierarchy and assigning the dominant role to elements
other than dramatic logos and language’ (Lehmann 93). By stress-
ing that ‘the text is no longer the central and superior factor’ in thea-
tre (Lehmann and Primavesi 2014, 3), Lehmann invites us to reconsider
the essential tools necessary to make theatre. Though adaptations are
often defined by alterations to the dramatic text, mise en scène (particu-
larly that of auteur-directors such as Benedict Andrews, Julie Taymor, or
Robert Lepage) is increasingly being seen as an adaptive language and
form of authorship in its own right, capable of reconfiguring canonical
texts through non-logocentric means. As highlighted by Daniel Fischlin
and Mark Fortier, adaptation occurs ‘not only between verbal [dra-
matic] texts, but between singing and speaking bodies, lights, sounds,
movements and all the other cultural elements at work in theatrical pro-
duction’ (7). Collectively, these elements inform my understanding of
scenography, which follows on Tali Itzhaki’s definition of the term as
‘Everything on stage that is experienced visually—in essence, a human
being in a human space’ (qtd. in Howard, xv). This chapter explores
how Lepage adapts extant texts through the visual world of the play—
the bodies, objects, and medias employed on stage and their dialogic
interplay in space—rather than shifts to the written play or opera text.
In other words, adaptation is considered here through a re-evaluation of
what constitutes authorship and an investigation of how adaptations are,
in and of themselves, original works. By accepting that forms of author-
ship exist beyond the literary text, such as ‘the arrangement of the stage,
the shapes and rhythms of the bodies on stage and the idiom and texture
of the performance’ (Shepherd 153), we can read Lepage’s scenography-
based adaptations as new works.
My research also turns to the etymological root of the verb ‘adapt’
to further develop what the term might include. Hailing from the word
adapter (French), and adaptare (Latin), adapt means ‘to fit’ (Oxford,
‘adapt’). Like Linda Hutcheon, who employs adaptation’s etymology to
‘think of narrative adaptation in terms of a story’s fit and its process of
mutation or adjustment … to a particular cultural environment’ (31),
 3  MAKING MUSIC VISIBLE: ROBERT LEPAGE ADAPTS ASPECTS …  51

I frame Lepage’s scenographic adaptation as a way for a canonical text

to evolve via the visual language of its adaptive period and the perfor-
mance-making process it undergoes. While the story and script may
remain the same, the scenography employed in Lepage’s Siegfried con-
tributes new material to the extant text, be it ‘added backstory, character-
or world-development’ (O’Flynn 193; Dena 151). As my later discussion
of Lepage’s rendering of the Ring’s potentially anti-Semitic characters
will demonstrate, his theatrical process and product not only adapt the
Ring’s possibly problematic politics of representation, revealing new
interpretations of central characters, but also challenge contemporary
standards of opera production. Non-traditional casting and the narrative-
building development of physical sequences, both components of the
scenography or the ‘visual direction of the stage’ (Mitsuri Ishii qtd. in
Howard xv), are essential to Lepage’s adaptation.

Lepage’s Ring and Its Inherited Aesthetic

Throughout his thirty-year career as a theatre-maker, Robert Lepage
has employed scenography as the central tool with which he devises
new works and radically reconfigures extant texts. Among the results
are The Nightingale and Other Short Fables, a signature re-envision-
ing of Stravinsky’s opera that centres on Lepage’s highly aestheticized
‘twenty-first-century chinoiserie’ (Gilbert, Rossignol 1) and Elsinore, a
one-man adaptation of Hamlet crafted through the dialogue between
a performer and a scenic machine. To create the Ring set, Lepage and
his Ex Machina team members travelled to Iceland, home of the poetic
and prose eddas that informed Wagner’s narrative. Lepage describes
the terrain as ‘a land of fire and ice … where nature speaks to you,
so it gives you a plethora of ideas for image, set design, music, sound
effects’ (Gilbert, ‘Behind the Ring’). This trip led Lepage and his set
designer Carl Fillion to two ideas: ‘One was that the [Ring] scenery …
would come from the landscape of Iceland, and the other was to cre-
ate one basic set that could be used throughout the four operas … to
display the 30 plus locations that appear in it’ (Gilbert, ‘Behind the
Ring’). Inspired by the idea of Iceland’s shifting tectonic plates, Lepage
and Fillion crafted their set from 24 moveable, 726-pound fiberglass
and aluminium planks. The planks would transform physically to sum-
mon the Ring’s various settings and act as a screen for interactive, three-
dimensional video projections, which were ‘applied in a major theatrical
52  M. Poll

environment for the first time—without the need for glasses to experi-
ence it’ (Lederman). At first glance, Lepage’s set is a complicated and
visually overwhelming contraption, a fact that, alongside its propensity to
malfunction in performance, prompted the Metropolitan Opera singers
to come up with the somewhat ominous nickname ‘the machine’.3 And
yet, as the upcoming discussion will demonstrate, the scenography for
Ex Machina’s Siegfried offers both the evocative scenic atmosphere and
kinetic environment ultimately suggested but never physically realized by
Wagner and Appia.
When it came to producing the Ring, both Wagner and Appia strug-
gled with the limitations of popular nineteenth-century scenography,
which privileged historical exactitude and lavish décor while relying on
two-dimensional, painted flats. For the inaugural 1876 Bayreuth pro-
duction, Wagner had asked for sets mirroring his score’s modulating
leitmotifs through the changeability of nature, making ‘air, earth, fire
and water … symbolic correlatives’ to his characters’ inner emotional
states (Carnegy, Wagner 77–78); nonetheless, because his request con-
flicted with the dominant design aesthetic of the era, Wagner found him-
self working with pictorial, two dimensional sets (Millington, ‘Faithful’
271).4 He became convinced that nineteenth-century technology and
the popular aesthetics of German Romanticism and grand opera were
incapable of giving the Ring a fitting visual score. For his 1882 produc-
tion of Parsifal at Bayreuth, the composer and his design team forsook
the ‘grandiose effect to a future opera’ and adhered to the ‘undeviating
principle of reverent simplicity’ (Wagner, ‘Parsifal’ 309). An 1887 essay
on Wagner’s Parsifal staging emphasizes how the composer’s scenic use
of ‘vertical and horizontal lines’, shadows and light, and ‘a great void’ of
open stage space successfully reflected the contrasting musical leitmotifs
dictated by the score (Beckett 92). These aspects of Parsifal’s scenog-
raphy, which were guided by music and suggested, rather than literally
represented by the setting, embodied what Wagner saw as ‘the right kind
of “visibility” for his musical deeds’ (Carnegy, Wagner 119).
Adolphe Appia would also seek to craft a visual world for the Ring’s
music. When he first saw the Ring in a Dresden production modelled
after Wagner’s Bayreuth staging, he was inspired by the score but found
himself frustrated by the fundamental stylistic disconnect between the
Ring’s music and the production’s reliance on popular, nineteenth-
century design aesthetics that hampered the expressive potential of the
score:
 3  MAKING MUSIC VISIBLE: ROBERT LEPAGE ADAPTS ASPECTS …  53

Does the vision he [Wagner] applied to the stage match all the power he
unfolds in his score? Today nobody could hesitate to say that the master
put his extraordinary work in a traditional stage frame of his period …
while everything in the auditorium of Bayreuth expresses his genius, every-
thing behind the footlights contradicts it. (Appia, ‘Comments’ 91)

In sketching and theorizing a new form of scenography, Appia brought

focus to what he viewed as the Ring’s need for scenic leitmotifs, which
paralleled Wagner’s repetition and variation of central musical themes:
‘Appia viewed the setting of Brunhilde’s rock as something akin to a vis-
ual leitmotif … [its] visual form associates different episodes with one
another, allowing them to assume greater levels of meaning with each
appearance’ (Buller 1998, 44). For Appia, because Brunilde’s rock
would need to consistently take the same minimalist shape in its every
appearance, shifts in the lighting’s intensity, colour and direction would
therefore embody the leitmotifs’ changes in tone and mood, playing a
vital role in terms of expressing the music’s inner drama. The performer
would then act as ‘the intermediary between the music and its physical
setting’ (Beacham 126); because Appia viewed performing bodies as the
material expression of the music and scenography as an extension of the
actor, he sought to enhance the meaning-making interactions between
the actor and the stage space through sets and lighting.
Parallel principles are brought to the stage through Lepage’s Siegfried
scenography. Its foundation resides in distinct configurations represent-
ing the Ring’s main leitmotifs and settings. Ex Machina’s production
manager, Bernard Gilbert notes, ‘Throughout the process we discov-
ered that the visuals reflect and mirror the leitmotif system that Wagner
invented for his music’ (‘Behind the Ring’). As described by Lepage, sce-
nic discoveries unfolded in the following way:

We said, ‘What if we give ourselves a set of rules, that are at least in the
same nature as those leitmotivs? Let’s say we have a very classical bare
stage, with 24 movable planks. What different combinations can we make
to find an image to accompany that leitmotiv?’ We just kind of played
with that … So with one shape we said, ‘Okay, those are the hands of the
giants. What are the giants about?’ They’re just two giant hands saying:
‘We want to be paid’ … Every time a shape triggered that kind of rich
argument, we would keep it. We discovered a forest, and a staircase down
to Nibelheim, and the spine of the dragon, and the horses of the Valkyries.
(in Everett-Green)
54  M. Poll

Of the plank configurations employed in Siegfried, the forest and

Brunhilde’s rock are, in their expansive minimalism, among the most
effective scenic layouts. For the forest, ‘the planks … rose to become a
huge movie screen depicting Fafner’s forest in saturated emeralds and
blues’ (Cohn) while Brunhilde’s rock brought the planks into a slightly
angled, broad formation. These canvas-like configurations, used more
frequently in Siegfried than in any other production in the 2010–2012
cycle (Tommasini ‘Dragons’), provide simple, open spaces upon which
Lepage’s design team can project the ‘wild grandeur and the infinite
changeability of nature’ that Wagner sought to express his music and his
characters’ shifting inner states (Carnegy Wagner 77).
While Lepage’s planks craft concrete signposts for Siegfried’s leitmo-
tifs and corresponding settings, Étienne Boucher’s lighting and Pedro
Pires’s video design signal the musical themes’ evocative shifts. Cohn
writes:

These projections used 3D technology to give the leaves and roots a tac-
tile immediacy, with the Forest Bird flying in space between its branches.
The forest for once truly seemed enchanted—an impression buttressed by
the lustrous sounds that conductor Fabio Luisi was drawing from the Met
Orchestra. The Forest Murmurs held the audience rapt; we lingered with
Siegfried in this magical space, waiting to discover what he discovered.

The Forest Bird’s light and airy theme, crafted by woodwinds and shim-
mering strings, takes literal shape as the three-dimensional bird soars
across the expansive plank formation, coming to rest and preen his feath-
ers in Siegfried’s lap. Light and projections serve a similar role during
Siegfried and Brunhilde’s initial meeting on her rock. When revisited in
Lepage’s production, Brunhilde’s rock remains encircled in vivid, crack-
ling images of flames, licking the edges of the expansive plank formation
to embody Wagner’s magic fire leitmotif. Once Siegfried has success-
fully crossed the fiery boundary, breaking Wotan’s spell, he discovers
Brunhilde arising to greet daylight ‘with a flurry of harps … in a bright C
major’ (Millington, ‘Leitmotif’). Lepage and his designers establish the
mood of this life-altering new day by encircling Brunhilde in a dynamic
atmosphere—as the harps pluck out her theme, she arises from her sleep
surrounded by rich, verdant grounds and leaves playfully tumbling across
the landscape. As the scene advances and the love leitmotif is introduced,
the lighting becomes progressively warmer and the surrounding flowers
 3  MAKING MUSIC VISIBLE: ROBERT LEPAGE ADAPTS ASPECTS …  55

bloom, reflecting the rising intensity of Brunhilde and Siegfried’s mutual

attraction.
Though the aforementioned sound and light cues operate indepen-
dently of the action on stage, in Siegfried, Lepage also employs interac-
tive scenography that reacts to the singers’ sounds and movements; as
per Appia’s theory, the performing body acts as an intermediary between
the music and its physical space. In this, we witness the ways in which
adaptations are ‘directly and openly connected to recognizable other
works’ (Hutcheon 21). These ‘other works’ are not just confined to ope-
ras, literature, or films; Appia’s evocative sketches and theories for the
Ring can be seen in Ex Machina’s production though they were never
materially realized by the designer.5 An example of this interactive sce-
nography occurs after Siegfried has stabbed the malevolent Fafner-
cum-dragon and the dying giant appears in human form to convey his
plaintive final notes. As the failing Fafner (Hans Peter König) emerges
from his cave and crumbles to the earth, motion sensors cue video
images prompting the clear blue forest stream directly above König’s
head to gradually run a vibrant red that saturates the planks with blood.
Such expressive scenography powerfully underlines the music and brings
its related drama to the fore, prompting critic Roberta Smith to com-
ment: ‘I “got” both the musicality of the “Ring” and its tragic, nearly
Shakespearean magnitude as never before’. Interactive technology is also
at work when Siegfried gazes into a pool of water, questioning his iden-
tity—Lepage’s scenography allows Siegfried’s live mirror image to gaze
back blankly through the crystal stream. Here, Siegfried’s bravado and
charm falls away, presenting the confused and disconnected young man
at the heart of Wagner’s drama. Beyond these instances, another stun-
ning use of interactive scenography in Siegfried occurs in the third act’s
overture when the score builds to a powerful reassertion of Wotan’s
theme. This is foreshadowed in Lepage’s production as the entirety of
the planks’ broad surface becomes the Rhine and two large ravens fly
over its expanse. When Wotan appears and the theme peaks, he slowly
draws his arm over the water, causing a series of concentric circles to rip-
ple outward. Craggy mountains then to rise up from the river’s depths
while lightning pierces the sky, a clear sign that the apocalypse is loom-
ing. As Smith notes:

These are not, perhaps, subtle effects, yet they sharpen your understanding
of what’s going on in the moment, unfolding as the music and the drama,
56  M. Poll

so inextricably entwined, also unfold. In a sense they function similarly to

the seat-back titles: enriching meaning and making it more accessible. And
they bring the eye into the already complex interaction of mind and ear
that Wagner’s art so lavishly stimulates. (R. Smith)

Beyond its ability to interact with singers, Lepage’s set possesses the
technological capacity to develop Appia’s theories on interactivity by cre-
ating a dynamic interchange without the actor/intermediary:

For its visual sleight of hand, the 3-D technology being deployed at the
Met will also interact with the movement of the set. The set uses a bank of
projectors, motion-capture cameras and computers to fashion the images.
The tilt on the stage allows for hundreds of different projections, changing
in slivers of a second, at the different depths to help create, say, the colour,
shading and contour of a rock, or at least to convince the eye. The imagery
is rendered in realistic detail using fractals: fractured geometric shapes that
keep iterating reduced-size copies of themselves according to mathematical
formulas. When the fractals are programmed into the computerised light
system, the result is a dense symphony of geometric detail, giving the illu-
sion of three dimensions. (Wakin and Lohr)

This effect unfolds thanks to technology crafted expressly for Ex

Machina’s scenography-driven adaptations. Sensei software’s ‘motion
and sound-detecting equipment, along with a special encoder to correct
perspective distortion’, dictates and distributes shifts in the vibrant digital
images (Lentz), exemplifying the ways in which adaptation can unfold
within specific media. As Andy Lavender writes:

Adaptation describes not only a process of dealing with source texts and
artifacts, reshaping them for different media and new audiences; it also
describes the way in which different media evolve by adjusting to changing
technological arrangements and aesthetic affordances. (499–500)

Lepage uses this technology during the final section of the orchestral
overture for Siegfried, in which no performers are present. Siegfried’s
overture features a ‘subdued drum roll and a pair of brooding bas-
soons, setting the scene in the dark forest, where the dragon Fafner
has his lair, and, at the same time alluding to the crafty scheming of
the dwarf Mime’ via contrabasses (Millington, ‘Leitmotif’). Through
Lepage’s use of motion sensors, these shifting musical leitmotifs and
 3  MAKING MUSIC VISIBLE: ROBERT LEPAGE ADAPTS ASPECTS …  57

the set’s reconfiguration into a giant vertical wall trigger the appear-
ance of an underground world populated by three-dimensional snakes,
grubs, and other subterranean bugs. As the aforementioned leitmotifs
are brought to the fore, interactive sound technology highlights them,
allowing different creatures to navigate the planks in ways that best par-
allel the music, be it scuttling speedily or slithering dopily along. ‘Now
the 3-D projections can lend this metallic surface an appearance of depth
and movement. Thus, in the brooding opening measures of Acts 1 and
2, snakes and other creepy-crawly creatures really seem to be writhing
through a thickly wooded terrain’ (Silverman). Here, Lepage adheres to
Wagner’s appeal for ‘deeds of music made visible’ (‘Destiny’) and, with-
out a performer, gives the music a physical presence on stage.6

Subverting Accepted Readings Through Casting

and Physical Performances

Though Lepage’s scenography develops and innovates Wagner and

Appia’s theories on the Ring, there are aspects of Wagner’s source
text that the Québécois director’s staging appears to purposely subvert.
Hutcheon notes that adapters are ‘just as likely to want to contest the
aesthetic or political values of the adapted text as to pay homage’ (20).
In this case, the extant text is adapted by breaking with accepted cast-
ing norms and developing characters’ back stories (Dena 151). Like any
artistic team facing the Ring cycle, Peter Gelb, Robert Lepage, and the
Metropolitan Opera’s principal conductor, James Levine, were presented
with Wagner’s problematic caricatures of Jewishness through the charac-
ters of Alberich and Mime.7 Their decision on how to move forward as
well as Lepage’s work with the singers playing these characters would be
influenced by the professional and cultural climate in which the Ring was
produced and received. As Linda Hutcheon notes, ‘an adaptation, like
the work it adapts, is always framed in a context—a time and a place, a
society and a culture’ (142).
Enduring debates have centred on sensitivities around the issue of
anti-Semitism in opera with questions surrounding producing works that
arguably traffic in problematic renderings continuing to arise today. In
2010, charges of anti-Semitism in Wagner’s Ring sparked protest when
a production of the cycle opened in Los Angeles. ‘One [protester’s]
banner read: “Wagner: Loved by Nazis, Rejected by Humans”’ (Ng).
58  M. Poll

Resistance also accompanied the Metropolitan Opera’s 2014 production

of the Death of Klighoffer. Composed by John Adams, Klinghoffer dram-
atizes the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship and the mur-
der of a Jewish-American passenger by the Palestine Liberation Front.
When first produced in 1985, Klinghoffer prompted outrage. Many
viewers ‘felt it unduly favoured the Palestinian point of view’ (Ross,
‘Klinghoffer’).8 After discussions with the Anti-Defamation League in
2014, the Metropolitan Opera cancelled all simulcasts of its upcoming
production. Regarding this decision, Peter Gelb noted that he did not
think that the opera was anti-Semitic but, referring to the Israel-Palestine
conflict, stated that going forward with the broadcast ‘would be inap-
propriate at this time of rising anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe’
(in Cooper). Given these reactions against Wagner’s Ring and Adams’s
Death of Klinghoffer, the decision made by Gelb, Levine, and Lepage to
cast Eric Owens, an African-American singer, as Alberich points not only
to Owens’s formidable talent but also to consideration of the potential
challenges of producing the tetralogy and a conscious effort to subvert
them. The effectiveness of adding Owens to the visual world of the play
in a reinterpretation of Alberich would hinge, in part, on broader cast-
ing/representational norms in twentieth- and twenty-first century opera.
For African-American male performers, breaking colour barriers is a
continued challenge in the entertainment industry, particularly at the
Metropolitan Opera. Though singer Robert McFerrin was scheduled to
be the first African American to perform in a leading role at the opera
house in 1955, the company made a last minute decision to engage a
black female singer (Marian Anderson) three months prior to McFerrin’s
planned debut.9 In an article charting the history of black male perform-
ers at the Metropolitan Opera, Wallace Cheatham identifies a possible
link between the decision to replace McFerrin with Anderson and the
insecure ‘position and image of black males in opera’ thirty-two years
later (6). By 1987, over three decades after McFerrin’s 1955 debut,
the Metropolitan Opera had cast only four African-American male per-
formers in lead roles (Cheatham 3). Just under ten years later, the status
quo had not shifted. In her 1997 article ‘Black Male Singers Feel Like
“Invisible Men” of U.S. Opera’, Verena Dobnik presents the continued
difficulties faced by African American male singers in the country: ‘This
season [1996–1997], the Met, with almost 200 men on its solo roster,
has one black tenor, two baritones and a rarely used countertenor. At
Chicago’s Lyric Opera, there isn’t a single black male cast in a leading
 3  MAKING MUSIC VISIBLE: ROBERT LEPAGE ADAPTS ASPECTS …  59

role, and the Houston Grand Opera has one, a bass-baritone’. Dobnik
also references conductor James Levine’s twenty-fifth anniversary perfor-
mance at the Metropolitan Opera in 1996, which lasted eight hours and
featured ‘scores of singers’ but ‘not a single black man sang’ (Dobnik).
Recently, in a 2012 joint interview, the editors of Blackness in Opera,
Naomi André, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor, reiterated the on-going
nature of the problem: ‘A long-standing problem is that while black
women have had the most success as singers in opera (and it is not like
there is an over-abundance who have made it to the top at any given
moment), there are fewer black men who have been able to break into
this profession … There is much room for improvement here’ (empha-
sis in original). And, though the Metropolitan Opera was applauded in
2015 for presenting the first major production of Verdi’s 1887 Otello
that did not use blackface makeup on the lead singer (Latvian tenor
Aleksandrs Antonenko), no major opera house has ever seen a black
singer in the title role (André in Lunden).
Because of the limited performance opportunities afforded to black
male opera singers in the USA and at the Metropolitan Opera, having
Owens play Alberich, a central role in the Ring cycle, adds an incisive,
metatheatrical layer of meaning to the character’s position as an out-
cast (see Fig. 3.1). Tommasini writes, ‘his race lent an intangible depth
and complexity to the portrayal. This Alberich truly seemed an outsider,
someone who has been wounded by prejudice and is hungry for revenge’
(‘Casting’). This is representative of a gradual shift shaping contempo-
rary opera production:

Directors and conductors who make casting choices, along with opera
audiences, can truly never be ‘blind’ to a singer’s race. It is a major com-
ponent of any artist’s presence and personality. And productions these days
can take advantage, in a sense, of the racial makeup of cast members to
deepen our understanding of certain roles and stimulate new takes on a
complex opera. (Tommasini ‘Casting’)

Tommasini’s comments follow on Angela C. Pao’s work on race in

contemporary US performance; of an all-black Broadway produc-
tion of Guys and Dolls in 1976, she cites critic Mel Gussow in noting
that non-traditional casting itself can act as an adaptation of a text,
with ‘reinterpretation taking place on all levels’, including the particu-
lar meanings spectators ascribe to characters (193). Of course, casting
60  M. Poll

Fig. 3.1  Siegfried (Der Ring des Nibelungen) featuring Eric Owens (Alberich)
and Bryn Terfel (Wotan), 2011. Photo Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Eric Owens does not, in and of itself, subvert the anti-Semitism that is
at play in Wagner’s dramatic text and, arguably, traffics in another form
of racism, substituting one minority for another.10 Nonetheless, Owens’s
well-drawn and unique portrayal of Alberich, rooted in the distinct phys-
icality he crafted with Lepage, announced ‘the emergence of a new major
Wagner singer’ whose performance promises to become ‘part of the his-
tory of opera’ by helping to destabilize Alberich as a stereotypical, one-
dimensional caricature (Ross‚ ‘The Depths’ 2014).
A villainous dwarf who is debatably one of Wagner’s most anti-
Semitic caricatures, Alberich is powerfully re-appropriated here through
the evolution of his character’s physicality over the course of the cycle.
As described by Ring production manager Bernard Gilbert, during the
earliest rehearsals for the Ring, Lepage began immediately by focusing
on characters’ bodies and, as is his practice, built performances from the
outside in:
 3  MAKING MUSIC VISIBLE: ROBERT LEPAGE ADAPTS ASPECTS …  61

When rehearsal began on any given scene, he first placed entries, exits and
scenic movements for all characters. Scene by scene, he placed each singer
and directed all movements, explaining why as they went along, answering
the singers’ questions, etc. … Characters were built from there, i.e. moti-
vations, emotions, relationships appeared from the initial blocking. (‘Ring
Question’)

This focus on physicality was fruitful for Owens, who has said that he
learned ‘quite a bit’ from Lepage. As Alberich, Owens palpably summons
a complex inner power that is simultaneously strengthened by frustration
and cannibalized by loneliness and pain. When Alberich is challenged
in his attempts to navigate the mocking Rhinemaidens in Das Rheigold,
Owens is far from the muttering, hunched villain and, instead, blends
regal posture and status-asserting stillness with bursts of determined
and furious clambering up the set’s steep incline to pursue the gold.
Tommasini writes ‘Mr. Lepage deserves credit for coaxing vivid portray-
als from his cast … Mr. Owens’s Alberich was no sniveling dwarf, but
a barrel-chested, intimidating foe, singing with stentorian vigor, looking
dangerous in his dreadlocks and crazed in his fantasy of ruling the uni-
verse’ (‘New Ring’).
It is not until, Siegfried, however, that the breadth of Owens’s jour-
ney as Alberich begins to take hold. Here, Owens employs physicality
to demonstrate how years of building resentment towards Wotan have
taken a physical toll on Alberich. Now older, Owens’s Alberich remains
proud but there is a slight slump to his shoulders and his broad-chested
bravado is less prominent. Combined with an often-vacant gaze, this cre-
ates a powerful air of dejection. And yet, as his confrontation with Wotan
unfolds in Siegfried, Alberich’s unyielding appetite for what, in Lepage’s
production, seemed to be warranted revenge promptly re-emerges
(Tommasini ‘Casting’). Cohn notes, ‘When Wotan (Bryn Terfel) goaded
… Alberich (Eric Owens), the performers’ movements and reactions
gave a sense of the complex history that had provoked their mutual ani-
mosity. Their interactions now seemed determined by the issues at stake’.
In his interaction with Wotan, Alberich’s anger manifests itself in a ‘bil-
ious spite’ (S. Smith), revealing that beneath Mr. Owens’s controlled
but charged exterior, every muscle in Alberich’s body is vibrating with
rage. This brings new insight to the fact that Alberich is the last and only
being standing when the world of Wagner’s Ring implodes; rather than
the product of dumb luck (or forgetfulness on Wagner’s part), Alberich
62  M. Poll

remains, rendered indestructible by his unrelenting hate and conviction

to wield power. Owens’s ‘chilling and uncommonly dignified Alberich’
was viewed by The New York Times, among other publications, as des-
tined for ‘the annals of Ring greatness’ (Tommasini, ‘Spin Cycle’), an
indicator that the nature of the encounter with a canonical text can have
a number of outcomes, among them productive disruptions and pow-
erful reframings (Vînaver in Pavis 2008‚ 119). In this, Owens’s unique,
physical interpretation answers contemporary adaptation studies’ call for
an exploration of adaptation ‘not as a one-way transport from source to
result, but as a two-way, dialogic process’ as per the question: ‘Should we
not admit that the adaptive process is dialectical and that the source text
is changed in the process of adaptation as well?’ (Hanssen 2013, 9).
When approaching the equally problematic character of Mime, the
dwarf who steals and raises Siegfried, Lepage also turned to perform-
ing bodies to subvert the character’s usually one-dimensional, reduction-
ist rendering. During the first half of the overture for Siegfried, Lepage
has performers silently enact the action that, in his mind, has unfolded
between the final scene of Die Walküre and the first scene of Siegfried. As
the curtain rises, we see the dying Sieglinde laid out perilously on a rocky
cliff (created by another plank formation) with the infant Siegfried in
her arms. Suddenly, the dwarf Mime appears and snatches the baby from
Sieglinde, rushing off to let her die alone and childless. In the sequence
that follows, a young Siegfried (played by a child) emerges from the
wings and dashes across the stage, happily thrusting his sword at imagi-
nary monsters while a doting Mime shuffles after him.
Lepage’s use of these two physical sequences offers a characteriza-
tion of Mime that differs productively from usual interpretations. In
Siegfried’s libretto, Mime explains to the teenage hero that although
he is not Siegfried’s father, he nursed Sieglinde during childbirth and
through her final hours—this is Wagner’s only reference to Mime’s
history with Sieglinde and, in past productions, its status as a fact has
remained ambiguous. Through the added baby-snatching sequence and
subsequent scene featuring a playful, young Siegfried dashing across the
stage with his guardian in fretful pursuit, Lepage develops Mime’s char-
acter, emphasizing his malevolence but also adding a parental connec-
tion with a junior Siegfried in a way that acknowledges Mime’s status
as a kidnapper but also demonstrates the sense of absence leading to his
behaviour. Mime’s cruel act is tempered by his clear psychological motive
 3  MAKING MUSIC VISIBLE: ROBERT LEPAGE ADAPTS ASPECTS …  63

for taking the child—isolation. This complicates Wagner’s otherwise

one-dimensional, anti-Semitic characterization of Mime as a ‘hypocriti-
cal, cowardly, and repulsive’ Jewish dwarf (Coren 1982, 20). Though
Lepage’s Mime will still knowingly attempt to sacrifice Siegfried in
exchange for the ring, Lepage’s use of physical performances to estab-
lish a longstanding family bond between Siegfried and Mime works
towards crafting a complex human character out of Wagner’s otherwise
one-dimensional caricature. Moreover, Mime’s scene with Sieglinde
complicates Siegfried’s backstory, making his slaying of Mime a form of
retribution rather than a callous act. Of these scenic additions during the
overture, one critic writes: ‘Though the title character can seem like a
heartless bully who kills his surrogate father after dispatching the dragon,
the production’s prologue puts everything in perspective. I won’t spoil it
for you; just don’t be late’ (Stearns).
The Ex Machina/Metropolitan Opera co-production of Wagner’s
Ring was contentious on many fronts, be it the monstrous set or the
equally monstrous bill. For opera lovers, the source of the greatest disap-
pointment was the fact that Lepage’s bold re-envisioning of a classic text
seemed to ignore the original Bayreuth production. And yet, in doing
so, Lepage emancipated the Ring, particularly Siegfried, from the weight
of historicized fidelity narratives. Lepage’s adaptation of Siegfried repre-
sents the high point in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010–2012 Ring cycle,
seeing Ex Machina make a significant contribution to the high-tech evo-
lution of the music-made-visible aesthetic. Through the combination
of cutting-edge, interactive technology and an open, minimalist stage
space, Lepage and his design team have developed a way for the actor
to engage in an evocative dialogue with the music and the scenic space,
following on Wagner’s desire for an expressive aesthetic and Appia’s
view that the performer’s body should act as an intermediary between
the Ring’s score and its scenography. Moreover, Lepage’s scenogra-
phy advances Appia’s suggested aesthetic by crafting a meaning-making
exchange built exclusively on the relationship between the music and
the set. In doing so, Lepage solves one of the Ring’s greatest challenges,
establishing an effective and evocative solution to Siegfried’s many set-
tings and the constant atmospheric shifts they undergo to directly reflect
Wagner’s iconic leitmotifs. In addition, the physical scores created in this
production powerfully overwrite the opera’s problematic politics of rep-
resentation to offer multi-dimensional characterizations. Through all of
64  M. Poll

these scenographic choices, Lepage adapts Wagner’s iconic opera with-

out shifting a word.

Notes
1. My engagement with Siegfried includes a three-week ‘observership’ dur-
ing which time I audited rehearsals led by Lepage and the conductor,
Fabio Luisi, on stage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Siegfried
is the third opera in the Ring cycle. I also attended rehearsals for
Götterdämmerung, the final opera in the cycle, in January 2012.
2. My scenography-based theory of adaptation is also outlined in my arti-
cle ‘Adapting the “Le Grand Will” in Wendake: Ex Machina and the
Huron-Wendat Nation’s La Tempête’ in Theatre Research in Canada 35.3
(2014): 330–351.
3. Each of the set’s 24 planks ‘is 2 inches wide, 29 inches long, and weighs
726 pounds. The axis is 5 inches wide. The planks can revolve a full 360
degrees. The set, which sits directly upstage of the deck where most
of the action takes place, changes position every five to ten minutes
throughout Das Rheingold’ (Barbour 54).
4. Wagner’s use of musical themes is distinct as it constructs ‘the entire musi-
cal fabric of the score’ (Grey 88), making the appearance, reappearance,
and modulations of leitmotifs the opera’s central dramatic component.
Although instantly recognizable in any form (regardless of key or instru-
ment), leitmotifs would develop alongside the characters they repre-
sented, rising an octave in tender moments or moving into a minor key
to foreshadow trouble ahead (Metropolitan Opera). Wagner’s musical
themes were crafted to give the listener clues to the actions, thoughts,
and emotions of the scene (Metropolitan Opera).
5. For further reading on the early technological innovations that enabled
aspects of Appia’s Wagnerian theory to take shape on stage, see Brandin
Baron-Nussbaum’s chapter ‘Forgotten Wizard: The Scenographic
Innovations of Mariano Fortuny’ from Kara Reilly’s edited collection
Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology.
6. This is not to suggest that interactive technology can replace the per-
former on stage; instead, my argument simply highlights the fact that
Appia’s desire for interactivity can now be carried out through inter-
changes between three-dimensional scenic devices.
7. In the introduction to a series of letters for The Wagner Journal, the fol-
lowing question is succinctly posed: ‘Nobody denies that Wagner was
an anti-Semite. But was his anti-Semitism expressed in the works them-
selves?’ My chapter does not answer this question but instead flags the
problematics of established representations of Alberich and Mime and
 3  MAKING MUSIC VISIBLE: ROBERT LEPAGE ADAPTS ASPECTS …  65

looks at possible ways of subverting them in production. For a thorough

debate on the topic of anti-Semitism in Wagner’s operas, see the online
exchange between Barry Emslie and Mark Berry at: http://www.thewag-
nerjournal.co.uk/wagnerandanti-se.html.
8.  Ross, Alex. ‘The Met’s “Klinghoffer” Problem’. The New Yorker.
24 June 2014. Web. 1 July 2014.http://www.newyorker.com/culture/
culture-desk/the-mets-klinghofferproblem.
9.  Theories on why McFerrin was supplanted by Anderson include that
the Metropolitan Opera felt engaging a female African-American singer
would result in a smoother transition for its patrons (Cheatham 6). Other
sources cite the influence and power of persuasion of Anderson’s agent,
Sol Hurok (Keiler 419).
10. Moreover, as costumed in Lepage’s Ring, Owens appears wearing long
dreadlocks, a design choice that is arguably reductive.

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 CHAPTER 4

‘The Thrill of Doing it Live’: Devising

and Performing Katie Mitchell’s
International ‘Live Cinema’ Productions

Adam J. Ledger

As one of Europe’s most prolific directors, Katie Mitchell has a deserved

reputation for aesthetic experimentation combined with rigorous textual
analysis, and an interest in how the psychology of behaviour informs act-
ing process (Mitchell 2008).1 While Mitchell has at times been myopi-
cally labelled an ‘auteur’ in the UK because of her obvious vision and
textual interventions (Billington; Spencer), her innovations have met
with acclaim elsewhere.2 Alongside her other theatre work, Waves
(National Theatre, London, 2006), an adaptation from Virginia Woolf’s
novel, began a body of work now termed ‘live cinema’, whereby action
on stage is coupled with visible, roving film cameras, sometimes using
Foley or, often, extensive recorded sound, in order to realize the action
as a ‘live’ film projected above the stage level.3 Since then, Mitchell has
built up a significant oeuvre of live cinema productions in the German-
speaking theatre, where she continues to innovate the form she intro-
duced with her collaborators. For Mitchell, the use of cameras within

A.J. Ledger (*) 
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
e-mail: A.J.Ledger@bham.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 69

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_4
70  A.J. LEDGER

live action enables close-up observation of minute shifts in behaviour;

her aim is ‘to get the audience close enough to the face of the character
so that we believe the thoughts’ (2013), which are not, Mitchell claims,
detectable at the long-range of traditional theatre spaces (Siéfert, n.d.).
While only part of Mitchell’s prolific multimedia practice (and ignor-
ing her live cinema work in opera), the German-language productions
offer a new area for discussion since, as I suggest, they demonstrate iden-
tifiable shifts in process and performance choices, not only in relation to
Mitchell’s earlier work but also between each other.4 Here, I draw too
on my observation of rehearsal, as well as discussions with Mitchell in
order to offer the director’s insight into the making of live cinema.
Given Mitchell’s body of work as an original practitioner and the
complex live cinema making approach, which implicates text, actors, and
film crew, I suggest live cinema can be described as a devised genre. At
the beginning of rehearsal, no shot plan exists, nor knowledge of how to
move cameras in the live performance (there are typically three cameras),
nor how voice-overs match other elements; as Mitchell puts it, ‘day one
of rehearsals looks like a full tech’ (2013), and I have heard her use the
term ‘devising’ in rehearsal of the work herself. In the context of dis-
courses of adaptation, to discuss live cinema as a devised process, as well
as one that concerns how actors shift performance modes, expands pre-
occupations with the relationship between text and performance, author-
ship, fidelity, and change, since the intermedial adaptation is produced
through rehearsal only if, perhaps unusually for devising, some form of
script exists at the outset of the process.
With the exception of Birringer (2014) and briefly in Mitchell and
Rebellato (2014), commentators have primarily focussed on Mitchell’s
early, UK live cinema work (Clements; Friedman; Hadjioannou and
Rodosthenous; Jefferies; Rebellato; Sierz) particularly Waves and the
later …some trace of her (National Theatre, 2008).5 I concentrate on
Mitchell’s more recent German work, including an adaptation of Peter
Handke’s novella A Sorrow Beyond Dreams: A Life Story [Wunschloses
Unglück] (Burgtheater, Vienna, 2014) and Traveling on One Leg
[Reisende auf einem Bein], an adaptation of Herta Müller’s novel
(Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg, 2015). I also discuss Mitchell’s
version of Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper [Die Gelbe
Tapete] for the Schaubühne Berlin (2013) and, given the limits of space,
 4  ‘THE THRILL OF DOING IT LIVE’: DEVISING AND PERFORMING …  71

make only some reference to the version of Friedericke Mayröcker’s

Night Train [Reise durch die Nacht] (2012) for the Schauspiel Cologne.6
As well as its primary purpose to change perceptual proxemics, live cin-
ema—a term that prioritizes the overt making of the adaptive screen
image, rather than cinematic experience—clearly continues to be an
especially successful means to adapt novels for Mitchell, where she has
continued to refine and develop her approach by incorporating the latest
technology.7
As Katya Krebs (2013) points out, discourses of adaptation have
shifted from the notion of an established and definitive text versus ‘ver-
sion’ arrived at through varying degrees of (un)faithfulness. For Krebs,
the proliferation of adaption in contemporary theatre practice con-
cerns the ‘(re)writing, (re)construction and reception of cultural posi-
tions and ideologies’ (2013, 9; see also Krebs and Hand, 2007); in
Mitchell’s case, she seeks cultural (re)expression of the source content
through its resolute focus on the finesse of the projected film. On the
other hand, Mitchell’s live cinema is still ‘faithful’ to the novel in its
use of original passages as voice-overs, spoken live in performance. For
Mitchell, recorded cinema thus remains limited because ‘it is not really
happening’ (Mitchell and Rebellato, 220); as Mitchell puts it, ‘the thrill
of doing it live is a big thrill for everyone’ (2013). As I discuss here,
devising live cinema thus concerns two interrelated processes: creating
the form and content of the film, and producing what Mitchell and her
team call the ‘choreography’ of how to perform it live. In its clearly con-
structed nature, live cinema is, as Linda Hutcheon proposes, a ‘double
definition … as process and product’ (Hutcheon, 9), but where the pro-
cess remains part of each performance in which the film is re-made and
projected.

Cinema and Narrative
In his recent Contemporary Mise en Scène: Staging Theatre Today,
Patrice Pavis suggests the dominance of audiovisual technologies in
theatre, which are seen across a number of contemporary directors’
work, notably Frank Castorf, among several others (Pavis, 139). While
Mitchell is not the first to use video, her work concerns the cinematic
portrayal of psychology, rather than the use of media as a videographic
72  A.J. LEDGER

backdrop, as in Ivo van Hove’s Antigone (2015), or to reach an off-

stage location subsequently seen projected on stage (as in Declan
Donnellan’s Ubu Roi (2013), van Hove’s Roman Tragedies (2007),
and several of René Pollesch’s works). Instead, Mitchell emphasizes
the actuality of sometimes frenetic on-stage film-making, which subse-
quently renders the highly crafted, often consciously aestheticized real-
ism of the film.
In early work, an ensemble of actors both performed and operated
cameras; now there are separate operators and Foley artists, though
actors are also involved in shooting the film.8 A further key shift in
Mitchell’s later multimedia work is the focus on the psychology of a sin-
gle character in order to ‘represent consciousness and modes of percep-
tion on stage’ (Mitchell and Rebellato, 216), a significant shift from a
focus on the group of friends in the early Waves. Technical considerations
support these contemporary concerns; Mitchell explains:

It’s difficult to film highly complicated scenes with more than three char-
acters … as well as changing between temporalities. This is why we prefer
to concentrate on the thoughts of a single character … Secondly, I’m
also intrigued by the way in which our thoughts drive us to isolation.
(Siéfert)

Live cinema is, at its heart, concerned with single characters in crisis and
the account of their self-reflexivity. And despite Mitchell’s concern with
complexity, Night Train, The Forbidden Zone (Schaubühne Berlin, 2014)
(which, like Night Train, also has a set incorporating a constructed train
carriage) and the later Traveling on One Leg, are notable for their sheer
scale and technical ambition.
In an early discussion, Mitchell emphasizes how her burgeoning
multimedia practice also questioned linear narrative (National Theatre
Discover, 2015) and links the development of her experimental multime-
dia work in the German-speaking theatre with a rejection of ‘traditional
components because they were connected to the way in which Nazism
had unfolded itself’ (Mitchell and Rebellato, 217). Mitchell has enjoyed
in those theatre contexts the proliferation of opportunities to explore
instead individuals’ fragmented, looping psychologies. Discussing her
dramaturgical motivation to continue the live cinema form in combina-
tion with an approach to adaptation, Mitchell explains
 4  ‘THE THRILL OF DOING IT LIVE’: DEVISING AND PERFORMING …  73

it gives me greater freedom; I can choose the scenes I want to use. I love
selecting and arranging, putting together texts and visual elements. Being
close to texts that are as beautiful and complex as those written by Woolf,
Mayröcker, and Handke is a privilege. Also, at times novels manage to get
closer to what is going on in the characters’ heads, to, say, the metaphysical
element in our existence, than dramas do. (Mayer)

Mitchell clearly suggests her authorship of the adaptation here, which

re-makes and remediates the novel by allowing an audience to perceive
the implications of a character’s inner life on film. Helen Freshwater
similarly links adaptation with a montage or collage-like practice of
cutting up and rearranging text in devised work in her discussion of
Delirium by theatre O (2008). Theatre O’s treatment of Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov ‘owes something to such approaches in terms
both of the grand themes of the original and the liberties the company
feels entitled to take with it’ (Freshwater, 9–10), recalling not only
Mitchell’s treatment of Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot in … some trace of
her, but also her team’s ongoing aesthetic of filmmaking as a process
that creates something other than a straightforward rendition of the
novel.
If the live cinema aesthetic is stylistically one of realism, using pas-
sages from the novels that offer a dramaturgy of the individual, in prac-
tical terms close-ups abound as a cinematic vocabulary of psychological
scrutiny. Accompanying voice-overs of principal characters’ thoughts
are delivered by another actor and cued shot by shot. As Mitchell’s
practice has developed, multi-roomed sets have enabled swift move-
ment between multiple scenic locations. Although much of the appeal
of Mitchell’s live cinema still lies in its relationship between the machi-
nations of this stage-level work and the often eloquent screen images,
for Pavis there remains a ‘competition’ between live and projected
action, where, for Pavis at least, ‘the change of scale of an image,
which is a familiar procedure in photography and cinema can lead—
when that image is onstage—to a spatial and corporeal disorientation
for the spectator’ (134). But live cinema exploits our contemporary
ease with the filmic since the actors’ performances are only truly expe-
rienced on screen, even if, as I discuss, Dan Rebellato’s fine descrip-
tion of how the early work celebrated the ‘ocular movement between
screen and stage. … [t]he beautifully realised images above but also the
74  A.J. LEDGER

elaborately chaotic choreography of the actor-technicians work below’

(334–335) no longer always holds due to Mitchell’s later interventions.

Devising and Process
As Alison Oddey foregrounds in her early (and, for many years, virtually
the only) study of devising, choosing to devise quickly raises questions of
‘how and where to start’ (Oddey, Chap. 2). In the case of live cinema,
where to start is often a novel: either Mitchell chooses this or she will
take advice or recommendations from a dramaturg. For Traveling on One
Leg, the dramaturg Rita Thiele had recommended Müller and a deci-
sion was made to use Reisende auf einem Bein, although the production
also incorporates passages from her The Land of Green Plums [Herztier].
Typically, Mitchell rehearses for five weeks (her German-language pro-
ductions are initially rehearsed in London) before a further three-week
period moving the work into the theatre. Mitchell reports this final stage
can involve 12-hour working days, 6 days a week (2013). Since neither
Mitchell nor her regular Directors of Photography are German speakers,
the working language swaps (though, given the ability of the German
crew, English predominates) and the German-speaking actors initially
perform in English.
Although different emphases appear in different productions, it is pos-
sible to identify clear processual phases in devising live cinema. Mitchell
first stages scenes in a ‘stepping through’ period. As I discuss, this is
quite different from Mitchell’s rigorous process when rehearsing a play
(Mitchell 2008), and concerns placing the action into the relevant loca-
tions. The Director of Photography will respond with a basic pattern of
shots and a rough edit. Especially when rehearsing Traveling on One Leg,
this process is called ‘making the film’ (a term redolent of the contem-
porary ‘theatre making’; Radosavljević 12–13), and is run once, before
some finer tuning. Since all of the scene and shot sequences are inde-
pendent, a complex process of ‘threading’ next takes place, whereby
how cameras (as well as props or costume items) can be moved from
scene to scene and location to location is established. Another logisti-
cal element to be tackled when threading Traveling on One Leg was a
boom operator to pick up the live speech. Given Mitchell’s volume of
live cinema work, it is surprising to note that this production was the
 4  ‘THE THRILL OF DOING IT LIVE’: DEVISING AND PERFORMING …  75

first to incorporate dialogue (although dialogue appeared in The Yellow

Wallpaper, this was muffled and often underneath action, sound or the
relentlessness of voiceover). Another basic element to be considered
in threading is the movement of camera cabling (to avoid tangled wir-
ing, which camera must be moved first is determined by which camera
cable lies on top of which); this was made a little easier when the boom
operator in Traveling on One Leg was fitted with a wireless connection.
The sound track is also added in rehearsal rather than in a production
phase. Sequences are run, the German script is introduced and rehearsal
refines the action. When activity stops, there are busy discussions on set,
even without Mitchell, who may run over something with an actor else-
where. There are thus several linear yet simultaneous devising processes
involved.
Attempts to define devising often invoke the absence of script
before rehearsal, or at least trouble the relationship with text as a
basis of performance (Heddon and Milling, 6–7; Govan et al. 6). In
the early work on Waves, a text document of some 40 pages existed
before rehearsal, from which the company selected sections and iso-
lated voice-overs. Mitchell explains an initial devising process con-
cerned asking ‘what is the image we can have for the person who’s
thinking that?’ (Mitchell 2013) and that actors worked in groups to
produce performance proposals. Mitchell confirms ‘I proposed very
little—I set tasks’ (2013). This process has developed significantly: in
Mitchell’s recent work, the writer Duncan Macmillan has become a
particular collaborator, having created the preliminary script adapta-
tion of both A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Night Train, the latter in
collaboration with Lyndsey Turner, who worked alone on The Yellow
Wallpaper. While the Director of Photography—Mitchell’s principal
collaborator—would have read the draft, there is, crucially, no prelimi-
nary shooting script. As shots are slowly accumulated, they are cap-
tured by powerful servers and specialist computer software and a shot
list made up of several hundred computer screen grabs is created and
distributed. Simultaneously, the actors and operators create their own
notation of their ‘choreography’ around the stage space. It is thus the
realization of a progression of shots, not the script, that determines the
journey of all involved through the action (Photo 4.1).
76  A.J. LEDGER

Photo 4.1  Screenshot detailing ‘Secret’ from Traveling on One Leg, with per-
mission from Ingi Bekk and Lily McLeish

The ability of devising to question, or at least complicate, the author-

ity of the pre-existing, dramatically self-contained world of tradi-
tional playtexts, has fuelled a postmodern, contemporary performance
mode, exemplified in the UK for example by the fragmented, self-
conscious, challenging, and intertextual work of companies like
Forced Entertainment, and in the US by companies like Goat Island
or (especially in terms of textual deconstruction) The Wooster Group.
 4  ‘THE THRILL OF DOING IT LIVE’: DEVISING AND PERFORMING …  77

Yet Heddon and Milling warn against a too-easy elision of the criti-
cal complexities of postmodernism with stylistics and suggest that ‘the
identification of a shared “style” arising from the properties thought
specific to devising also implies a shared process’ (222, my emphasis).
In Mitchell’s work, the live cinema script and originary novel remain
simply starting points for devising with a regular team of collaborators
who understand both a process and the form and aesthetic of the film
to be made. To take just The Yellow Wallpaper and A Sorrow Beyond
Dreams, the Director of Photography (Grant Gee), Lighting Designer
(Jack Knowles), Sound Designers (Melanie Wilson and Gareth Fry)
and Camera Operators (Andreas Hartmann and Stefan Kessissoglou)
worked across both productions. Beyond this, designers (especially Alex
Eales), Foley artists, stage managers (often Pippa Meyer) and Mitchell’s
long-standing associate director, Lily McLeish, have been involved in
several productions. Mitchell has thus over recent years built an Anglo-
German/Austrian ensemble of what tend now to be called ‘creatives’,
as well as the actors she has long worked with (Julia Wieninger has
appeared in Night Train and Traveling on One Leg) and which comprises
some 20–30 people in the rehearsal room.9 The great advantage is one of
shared skill: it would also be near-impossible for a new team to learn the
complex process for each new project; moreover, as Heddon and Milling
suggest, shared training and skills, interests or experiences are funda-
ments that will inevitably resonate in the aesthetics of the work itself.
When attending rehearsal for Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,
my overwhelming first impression was how slow procedures are. The
basic script was some 39 pages long and by around two-thirds of this,
the company had amassed significantly over 600 shots. At one rehearsal,
to run over some five shots that were already more or less established
took around an hour. The first day of threading Traveling on One Leg
achieved less than six already short pages and assembled around nine
minutes of the film. At 4 pm on another day I was present, 19 shots were
run, which comprised less than four minutes of screen time. In some
productions, threading is interchanged with making the film: a clear dif-
ference I observed between Traveling on One Leg and A Sorrow Beyond
Dreams is that the former broke down the process into blocks of mak-
ing and threading, whereas the latter seemed also to be finalizing shots
during threading, a phase which also appeared especially difficult. I also
saw Mitchell direct precise action during threading of A Sorrow Beyond
Dreams, a period apparently with a different emphasis, and Gee change
shots during threading of Traveling on One Leg.
78  A.J. LEDGER

Such slippage is common in devising processes and phases over-

lap and loop, and sometimes go awry; Mitchell recalls too that her
early company were not able to get through a run through of Waves
(Mitchell 2013) and initial attempts at short sequences in the later
work still regularly break down. Sometimes the production is not final-
ized nor achieves a successful run through until the last few days of the
process. And even though Mitchell notes that ‘once you’ve got the
machinery of this work running, it’s a day’s work to change anything
… it’s such hell’ (2013) changes do happen. After threading the open-
ing sequence of Traveling on One Leg for example, it was decided that
the opening section concerning the Romanian part of the story should
be restructured. These changes meant that the cast and camera opera-
tors had to ‘unlearn’ their carefully notated choreography; those that
can follow scripts or cues (the Deputy Stage Manager, the online editor,
lighting, and sound) also had to reorder substantial paperwork. A key
to the process is of course time, but also a shared understanding and
acceptance of devising conditions.
Discourse around devising has sometimes troubled notions of author-
ity and the role of the director. That Simon McBurney, Complicite’s
director, ‘rips and trashes’ (Alexander, 72) through devised material
might seem far from the ‘leaderlessness’ (Proudfit and Syssoyeva, 4) so
desired by the idealism of some collaborative groups of the 1960s. In
other contemporary work, Harvie and Lavender usefully suggest how
‘negotiated leadership can facilitate group agency’ (4). As I perceive
it, one of Mitchell’s key skills as a director is the ability to manage a
rehearsal room and discern the needs not only of the work at hand, but
also those involved. Mitchell is also a great delegator. Threading is typi-
cally led by McLeish or, for Traveling on One Leg, the floor manager.10
This is at once a delegation of a task that Mitchell undertook in the early
days of the work, but also a sharing of work processes and significant
responsibility across the ensemble. In contrast to her early, hands-on
work when creating multimedia productions, a key process for Mitchell
now is to watch the screen—not the stage action—and give notes as well
as reworking where necessary. Overall, watching rehearsal does indeed
appear as a complex and slow technical rehearsal, as in traditional theatre,
punctuated by moments of director and actor collaboration, in a long
and complex process that devolves and cascades responsibilities as effec-
tive devising.
 4  ‘THE THRILL OF DOING IT LIVE’: DEVISING AND PERFORMING …  79

Adaptation
Handke’s novella A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972) offers a first-person
account of the writer’s attempt to understand his mother’s suicide. In
Mitchell’s version, the sister appears too, offering a further familial pres-
ence in the parental home at the time of the mother’s funeral. Mitchell
also re-enacts scenes from the mother’s past: in contrast to her earlier
view, the medium and language of film is, in this case, made to suit tem-
poral shifts, as scenes involving the mother’s life are shot in black and
white. Lack of colour also suggests Irene’s muted experience of the
world around her in Traveling on One Leg and, aesthetically, creates per-
haps the vintage, cold greyness of the former Eastern bloc. Similarly,
coded flashbacks also happen in Night Train, when the central fig-
ure’s memories of her father appear in monochrome. While offering a
cinematic vocabulary of storytelling, these strategies also usefully place
characters in relation to events in performance more actively than nov-
elistic reportage. But Mitchell takes her central interest in self-reflexivity
to extremes in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams as characters do not speak, and
their thoughts are almost incessantly spoken by another male and female
voice.
Although, as with all of the live cinema scripts, Macmillan’s adaptation
of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is written envisaging the filmed outcome, it
is clearly provisional and a proposition at the inception of the devising
process.11 Macmillan offered some of the script in a different font col-
our, either to indicate the difference between stage directions—which are
a very full narrative of action—and voice-over, or to signify possibilities
or potential cuts. Typically, all scripts have cinema-style markings such
as ‘Int’ and ‘Ext’ to designate interior or exterior locations; in Traveling
on One Leg, for example, one scene is precisely set up as ‘Interior. Irene’s
apartment, Berlin. Evening. 6.30 pm’ (Mitchell 2015a), accurately plac-
ing the action. In contrast to this detail, Macmillan’s rehearsal script
for A Sorrow Beyond Dreams offers potential alternatives to the opening
sequences; later footnotes offer possibilities too: p. 26, for example, sug-
gests ‘perhaps this paragraph is written on the notepad but not narrated?’
(Macmillan). Although an apparently simple question, this changes the
form from the force of voice-over to placing the spectator in the charac-
ter’s point of view. To return to Hutcheon, this is adaptation as ‘show-
ing’ not ‘telling’ (38–46), enabled not only by Macmillan’s familiarity
with the medium and its devising, but also temporal and formal shifts.12
80  A.J. LEDGER

The live cinema scripts should clearly be considered work-in-progress

screenplays.
While live cinema is a medium of adaptation and a discrete practice,
changes to original material have been criticized. The Yellow Wallpaper,
arguably the most well-known of recent novels, particularly invited
comparison with the re-rendered form. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
6000-word story of the same name was first published in 1892, but the
Schaubühne called for an updated version (Mitchell and Rebellato, 224).
Mitchell’s production thus takes place in contemporary Berlin, the hus-
band has a car and—rather at odds with her imposed isolation in the
original—the woman has a mobile phone and laptop. Later, the figure
imagined behind the wallpaper is freed—achieved through video special
effects to overlay images created in two locations at stage level—and, in
a significant change to Perkins Gilman’s work, aids the central woman to
commit suicide. One review criticizes, ‘for Mitchell, the woman behind
the wallpaper, that alter ego, is nothing but a beautiful personification
of fate, the Angel of death. After 120 years of being read, this is a curi-
ous conclusion for this classic text of feminist literature’ (Spreng, 2013).
Such a criticism exposes an understanding of adaptation as necessarily
preserving original content or worrying about fidelity, despite translation
of form, rather than, as Margherita Laera has boldly defined, 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?)’ (Laera, 5).
Returning to her role with Waves, Mitchell wrote the basic script for
Traveling on One Leg herself.13 Herta Müller’s novel centres on Irene,
who emigrates from the German speaking community in her native
Romania to Germany, where the action shifts across three locations, West
Berlin, Marburg and Frankfurt. The novel explores Irene’s fraught rela-
tionships with three men, Franz, Stefan and Thomas, and her sense of
not belonging to either her home or adopted countries. The novel ren-
ders this sense of removal stylistically, as dialogue tends to be reported
and is never in speech marks; for example:

Did you ever have anything to do with the secret service there before you
emigrated.
I didn’t, but they did. That makes a difference, said Irene. (Müller, 18)
 4  ‘THE THRILL OF DOING IT LIVE’: DEVISING AND PERFORMING …  81

Photo 4.2  Rehearsal for Traveling on One Leg, Deutsches Schauspielhaus

Hamburg. Note shot number on screen. Photo credit: Stephen Cummiskey

Müller’s slippage between reported and direct speech reinforces Irene’s

daily experience, as in the live cinema version, where, like her previous
choices, Mitchell is again drawn to individual isolation. The production
used a multi-roomed set, though one projection screen was incorporated
into the set as a section of the Berlin Wall, not, as so often, suspended
above the stage. These design features were, though, also subject to the
changes caused by ongoing devising: when I first attended rehearsal, a
photo-booth had been removed and abandoned stage left, but was later
re-included, and in contrast to the fixity of the main set, ‘pop up’ loca-
tions were added, often achieved through an actor moving in place tem-
porary screens or flats (Photo 4.2).
As with the changes Mitchell made to the ending of The Yellow
Wallpaper, there is, here, an evolving adaptation process of moving from
novel to script to film, nuanced through Mitchell’s response to the work
as initial author. In the case of Traveling on One Leg, the scripted re-ren-
dering is one of selection and emphasis rather than radical change; some
sections of the script remain narrative of action, very close to the novel
and look like long stage directions. But, like Macmillan’s work, the early
script was not definitive—nor even complete for around the first third
of rehearsal—and so offered somewhere reasonably definite to start; the
‘how’ of its progression would be to collaborate. The embryonic script
was emailed back and forth between Mitchell and Thiele, who both
82  A.J. LEDGER

translated and added elements based on her knowledge of the original

German novels. Mitchell also involved Wieninger in decisions around the
narrative of Irene, recalling at least something of the ensemble or actor-
centric ethos of some devising (Heddon and Milling, Chap. 2). These
strategies make collaborative some of what appears as Mitchell’s author-
ship and, like more permanent devising ensembles, benefit from the rela-
tive familiarity of an experienced company.

Acting
Even with an eight-week rehearsal period, little, if any, of Mitchell’s
approach to play rehearsal takes place in live cinema. Deriving in large
part from Stanislavski and outlined in her own book (Mitchell 2008),
Mitchell typically considers how characters are conditioned by their past
when working on a play. A precisely detailed biography of characters is
created, in which past events are sometimes invented in order to justify
behaviour in the present of the play. Improvisation often explores this
history. Defining ‘immediate circumstances’ reinforces the events of the
24 hours prior to a character’s first appearance. In terms of textual analy-
sis, Mitchell is especially interested in intention and events (how changes
in action shape characters’ shifting purposes and goals) and to establish
the time, place and temperature of the specific situation and location.
However, it is rare for these strategies to be employed in live cinema,
although the screenplay for Night Train incorporated events in a pro-
duction where ‘the Stanislavskian theatre work came together with the
multimedia work; it was so precisely played’ (Mitchell 2013). But usually
there is simply not time for Mitchell’s processual rigour amidst the devis-
ing of the means to produce a film.
If the extremely detailed work I have seen undertaken in other
rehearsal situations leads to psychologically dense, logical and, cru-
cially, repeatable performances, this would appear to be missing in live
cinema.14 Given the preponderance of live cinema in her work, some
reconsideration of what constitutes Mitchell’s ‘normative’ practice
seems warranted too. In Mitchell’s early multimedia work, when only
actors operated cameras, sub-characters were created in order to moti-
vate their work as camera crew who also acted: in Mitchell’s multimedia
version of Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life for example (National
Theatre, 2007), characters were created who might wish to create a
 4  ‘THE THRILL OF DOING IT LIVE’: DEVISING AND PERFORMING …  83

televisual version of the text and could speak the various languages
within it. Mitchell asserts that this has not been necessary when work-
ing with German casts, since she has found them particularly adept at
taking on theatrical form without the need for its psychological justifica-
tion (Mitchell, 2012). In A Sorrow Beyond Dreams especially, with lit-
tle interaction between characters, it is instead an intensity of focus that
characterizes live cinema acting; as Mitchell puts it, actors must ‘prac-
tice the text as a thought, not spoken, not like a monologue’ (2015),
where a fixity of a key moment is often explained by the accompanying
voice-over.15
If acting in live cinema is part of a total theatrical montage, an issue is
that it is rarely logical since actors have to switch between filming tasks,
near instantaneous acting in short scenes, and shifting location both
within the set and jumping time and place in the chronology of events.
In rehearsal for A Sorrow Beyond Dreams Liliane Amuat, as the daughter,
operated a camera, then was in shot as the daughter trying to make a
telephone call, and next moved a tripod, all in the space of a handful of
shots. In rehearsal of one sequence of Traveling on One Leg, Achim Buch
moved a camera ready for a shot yet to happen, and then just about
reached the voice-over booth in time to deliver the disembodied voice
of the photographer, which another actor played having moved there in
preparation. In this overall sequence, Wieninger, as Irene, is in a hotel
room, where she remembers the earlier event of having her passport
photo being taken, yet also has to move from the interrogation room
location back to the hotel. Nevertheless, Mitchell warned against ‘not
doing it automatically, but really joining things up in your thinking—
there are hard jumps’ (2015). In contrast to her play rehearsal technique,
Mitchell suggests here the nature of the problem, not the precision of
a solution towards the necessary ‘internal’ logic actors should find.
Some central actor-characters are, then, able to develop something of a
throughline to performance, especially in the case of the woman in The
Yellow Wallpaper as her situation unfolds; and in Night Train, the hold-
ing framework of the train journey provides a (meta)chronological con-
sistency. For Weininger too, logic can be found in the above example as
the interrogation and passport photo events are memories borne out of
her location in the hotel room, creating some degree of psychological
weave to what, at stage level, is urgent activity.
Even if it is the shots, both in aesthetic and practical terms, that
establish the actors’ journey through the performance, great attention
84  A.J. LEDGER

to detail in acting is still preserved. In rehearsal for A Sorrow Beyond

Dreams Mitchell researched carefully in order to determine exactly how
many pills and of what type should be swallowed in which order by the
mother (Dorothee Hartinger) in order to commit suicide. In the suicide
sequence, Handke’s description of how his mother had put on inconti-
nence pads and several pairs of underwear is heard. As in Mitchell’s wider
practice, such on-stage items are not referred to as ‘props’, but ‘objects’,
endowing them with a reality or instrumentality, which can be related
to credibly by the actor. Mitchell thus advised Hartinger, ‘if there’s any
uncertainty with objects, I don’t believe you’ve planned it beforehand’,
and ‘we mustn’t see any adjustment in order to sit on the bed, since she
would know her room very well’ (2014). Here, acting is made more
secure when linked to a set of environmental or situational touchstones.
I have also heard Mitchell take time at least to speak through a situation
and past events. In both cases, Mitchell must find precise acting points
amidst the labour and slowness of shot making and the absence of long
rehearsal focused on character.
What the actors develop in rehearsal is more like a score, which has
to be learnt and practiced as an oscillation between diegisis and techni-
cal rendition of the performance. Even if actors are missing (and, in the
case of Traveling on One Leg, the need emerged to replace an actor who
became unavailable), stand-in actors are hired so that the mechanics of
the action needed to produce the shots might still be established and
rehearsed. Mitchell’s long-standing collaborator, Kate Dûchene, stood in
for Hartinger during rehearsal of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, and a drama
school student was hired for a period of Traveling on One Leg to play
roles in initial rehearsal. Given Mitchell’s prolific work, coupled with a
desire to work with a set of principal collaborators who may be engaged
elsewhere, the devising and rehearsal processes must of necessity some-
times focus on the development of the means to achieve the film, not the
finer points of individuals’ performances.

‘Live Cinema’
As Heddon and Milling note, the growth in devising has usefully shifted
the relative balance between process and product (175), where pro-
cess concerns attention to a performance outcome, not an ideological
position. Like much of Mitchell’s work, live cinema is fundamentally
 4  ‘THE THRILL OF DOING IT LIVE’: DEVISING AND PERFORMING …  85

psychological realism; the choices of which stories or novels to adapt are

predicated on central characters with strong inner monologues, around
which to grow the technical complexities of the filmic form. Relying
on actors to fill out their thought process in performance goes some
way toward actor-centric devising approaches, as does, in the case of
Traveling on One Leg, having the actors move their own props and cos-
tume around the set as part of their scores. In my wider discussion, a tax-
onomy of devising process in live cinema suggests threading is a key step,
since it is at this stage that performative action is created. As I have often
observed, the ensemble works in a patient and professional manner dur-
ing the sometimes arduous task. An interim outcome of threading is that
an assessment of how the material plays out on screen can be made; that
there will be narrative changes is mutually understood since the ultimate
arbiter of choice is how the film functions. Like all devising, there is in
live cinema a process of testing, assembly and cutting, yet—with what-
ever degree of collaboration and devolution of skill—it is ultimately for
Mitchell and the Director of the Photography to determine what appears
on screen.
If devising is a practice that simultaneously makes and rehearses
a performance, live cinema is the devising of a film adaptation and the
learning of the means to shoot and show it in real time. In its growth
in personnel, scale, complexity and aesthetic aims, the live cinema tech-
nique has clearly developed, attesting to Mitchell’s reputation for formal
innovation. Yet even with technological advances, Mitchell has sug-
gested that the quality of the live film is sometimes limited and relies
on its alignment with the stage action (Dramaten, 2012). In discus-
sion, Mitchell described too that a sequence where the bed in The Yellow
Wallpaper is physically shifted at speed from one room to the other is
thrilling as ‘a big theatrical event supporting a big change in the film’
(2013), thus the effect of live cinema still sometimes relies on the simul-
taneous screen images and the evident production of the cinematic
image through the moment of live action.
Despite her interest in the effect of stage-level action, a significant
development in Mitchell’s contemporary live cinema work is the use
of design choices whereby action is periodically visible only on screen.
Preventing a direct view of some of the actor and camera operators’
action is embedded in the scenography for A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
and Traveling on One Leg as some of the labyrinth of rooms cannot
86  A.J. LEDGER

be seen by spectators without the roving cameras. And in some pro-

ductions, a wooden flat, like a shutter, is dropped in, creating what
is in effect a real ‘fourth wall’ to the rooms, a strategy that masks the
setting up of a later shot. Devoid of any real opportunity to witness
the live machinations of the means to produce shots (when shutters
first fell in The Yellow Wallpaper my immediate response was to won-
der if actors and operators were really continuing behind the walls;
they are), the illusionistic aspect to the older work has depleted. Part
of the pleasure as a spectator of Waves or …some trace of her was the
complicity in the clear construction of shots by actors, often using
rough and ready items, and the beautifully crafted images on screen.
Even if Mitchell’s later scenographic developments paradoxically draw
attention to the liveness of performance through its invisibility, in the
competition (to return to Pavis) between stage and film, here film
prevails.
As an oeuvre, Mitchell’s work has shifted from multimedia theatre, as
in the case of the early productions at the National Theatre, to a more
accurate designation as live cinema in the contemporary productions; I
have suggested too that the filmic vocabulary has increased, emphasiz-
ing a spectatorial engagement via the screen only. Since at least three
cameras are used (rather than typically one as in traditional cinema), I
would further suggest that both the acting and filming task is closer to
multi-camera television, a technique that enables the playing of relatively
long sequences without stopping; in television, this makes for quicker
recording and, in live cinema, for what has been devised to be continu-
ally projected.
While Mitchell’s multimedia practices do not neatly fit regular defini-
tions of devising or création collective, one way of appreciating the work
is as collective labour, in which matters of authorship and production are
devolved through pockets of expertise as a simultaneous or temporally
defined process (the creation of the script at the outset, for example, in
contrast to the interweaving work of ‘threading’). In a recent collec-
tion on performance and labour, Klein and Kunst identify ‘new modes
of working [and] the potentiality of performance practice … to chal-
lenge the established orders of the production and dissemination of artis-
tic products … labour has become visible in performance work’ (Klein
and Kunst, 1). As a set of clearly made cinematic adaptations, The Yellow
Wallpaper exemplifies Laera’s definition of ‘intertemporal’ adaptation,
 4  ‘THE THRILL OF DOING IT LIVE’: DEVISING AND PERFORMING …  87

whereas A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is ‘intratemporal’ in that its presenta-

tion maintains the time setting of the original (Laera, 7). But, given the
broader processes and personnel in Mitchell’s oeuvre, matters are more
complex, since both are intermedial adaptations; the adapted product in
the case of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams also employs a complex stage tech-
nology clearly not around in the 1970s: it is an intratemporal content
realized through an intertemporal treatment.
As an aspect of devising and as the basis of performance, live cinema
can be seen as a technology of movement. The labour of each perfor-
mance aside, I have also seen camera operators ‘mark through’ their
moves in rehearsal breaks in order to learn their particular choreography.
This labour, required to render the work primarily as an ultimately cin-
ematic encounter, remains an obvious part of the performative nature
of the experience for spectators. The adaptation is laboured upon in real
time before our eyes (and ears), yet ultimately must be appreciated as a
film.

Notes
1. Mitchell’s work averages some six to eight new productions a year in both
theatre and opera; she also oversees transfers.
2. I also find the Spencer review misogynistic.
3. Mitchell has also incorporated live music; for Wunschkonzert (2008,
Schauspiel Köln, Cologne) for example, a string quartet played in a vis-
ible glass booth.
4. After Dido (Young Vic, London, 2009), is one example of Mitchell’s live
cinema opera work.
5. Mitchell’s Schaubühne Berlin production, Fräulein Julie, discussed by
Birringer, Fowler (this volume) and in Mitchell and Rebellato, toured to
the Barbican, London, in 2013.
6. Throughout, I use the English translations of the titles, although, of
course, the productions are known in the original German. Following
discussion with Mitchell, I have not included her production of W. G.
Sebald’s Rings of Saturn [Die Ringe des Saturn] (Schauspiel Köln,
Cologne, 2012) as this is a somewhat different piece of work, focusing on
the creation of a sound world, as if a staged radio play, nor The Forbidden
Zone (Schaubühne Berlin, 2014) since it is not an adaptation as such,
but incorporates texts from several sources in a screenplay by Duncan
Macmillan.
88  A.J. LEDGER

7. Mitchell and her collaborators continue to explore the use of the latest
high definition and 3D cameras (see 59 Productions, n.d.).
8. For example, in The Yellow Wallpaper, Tilman Strauß, playing the hus-
band, films; in Night Train, the actors playing the father, the sleeping-car
attendant and the husband operate cameras.
9. Wieninger has worked with Mitchell at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus,
Hamburg, on Beckett’s Happy Days [Glückliche Tage] (2015) and Martin
Crimp’s Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino [The Rest Will Be Familiar
to You from Cinema] (2013).
10. McLeish is a bilingual German-English speaker.
11. Mitchell (2013) reports that for The Yellow Wallpaper, the order of scenes
and voice-overs were ready before rehearsal; for Night Train, the order of
scenes, most of the dialogue and most voice-overs were in place.
12. Macmillan confirms that the text was a constantly changing part of the
devising and was never finished as such, and that the process for each
live cinema production he has worked on has been different (Macmillan,
2017).
13. See Mitchell and Rebellato, where Mitchell also reports how she produced
the basic rehearsal document for Rings of Saturn. A production of Waves
[Die Wellen] was also staged at the Schauspiel Köln (2011).
14. As well as other productions, I observed some rehearsal of Mitchell’s pro-
duction of The Cherry Orchard for the Young Vic, London (2014), where
her approach was most in evidence.
15. Lily McLeish confirms that, while actors are not necessarily instructed
to think the thoughts expressed in the accompanying voice-over, this is
implicit, and recounts that, unusually, in The Yellow Wallpaper, the voice-
overs performer learnt the voice-over text so as to align her delivery
closely with her fellow actor’s thought process.

Works Cited
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Billington, Michael. “Don’t let auteurs take over in theatre.” theguardian.com/
uk. 14 April 2009. Web. 22 Oct. 2015.
 4  ‘THE THRILL OF DOING IT LIVE’: DEVISING AND PERFORMING …  89

Birringer, Johannes H. “The Theatre and Its Screen Double.” Theatre Journal
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———. Email correspondence with author. 29 Jan. 2017.
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90  A.J. LEDGER

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———. Unpublished interview with author. Three Mills Studios, London. 13
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———. Comments in rehearsal of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. Three Mills Studios,
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———. “Screenplay for Traveling on One Leg.” Unpublished. 2015a.
———. Comments in rehearsal of Traveling on One Leg. Three Mills Studios,
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Oddey, Alison. Devising Theatre: a Practical and Theoretical Handbook.
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Pavis, Patrice. Contemporary Mise en Scène: Staging Theatre Today. London and
New York: Routledge, 2013.
Proudfit, Scott and Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva. Eds. Collective Creation in
Contemporary Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Radosavljević, Duška. The Contemporary Ensemble. Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 2013.
Rebellato, Dan. “Katie Mitchell: Learning from Europe.” Contemporary
European Theatre Directors. Eds. Maria M. Delgado and Dan Rebellato.
London and New York: Routledge, 2010. 317–38.
Siéfert, Marion. Trans. Chris Campbell. “Entretien avec Katie Mitchell.”
Theatre-Contemporain.net. n.d. Web. 22 Oct. 2015. Unpublished English
translation by Tom Boddy.
Sierz, Aleks. “Some Traces of Katie Mitchell.” Theatre Forum, 34 (2009): 51–59.
Spencer, Charles. “Women of Troy: Euripides all roughed up.” Telegraph.co.uk.
30 Nov. 2007. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.
Spreng, Eberhard. “Postnatale depression als bühnen film.” Deutschlandfunk.de.
17 Feb. 2013. Web. 6 Aug. 2013.
 PART II

Re-mediating the Book to the Stage,

Introduced by Frances Babbage

The theatre is inherently a site of repetition. Its work unfolds live, over
and over, night after night, production upon production. Audiences
attending the riotous A Midsummer Night’s Dream staged to launch
Emma Rice’s tenure as director of the Globe (2016) may set that experi-
ence mentally alongside other Dreams, directly witnessed or only heard
about: Robert Lepage’s production for the National Theatre, memorably
set in a swamp (1992), for example; or Peter Brook’s legendarily acro-
batic staging for the RSC (1971). Marvin Carlson’s influential study The
Haunted Stage signals this quality of repetition vividly through its title:
as Carlson shows, the theatre is unavoidably populated by the ‘ghosts’ of
previous productions, past actors, past audiences, alternative soundings
of famous lines. In the theatre, practices of recycling, retelling, and reen-
acting are expected and welcomed; indeed, they are fundamental to the
pleasure that the art affords.
Since remaking has always been central to the theatre’s raison d’être,
adaptation in this context is differently characterized and weighted than
in other arts. Of course, adapting a novel for performance is not at all
the same as staging texts preconceived as drama. Plays, almost invaria-
bly, contain the embedded invitation to collaborate; they anticipate not
one but multiple realizations; their authors effectively write their work
into other hands. Novels, by contrast, appear already full and finished.
92  PART II  RE-MEDIATING THE BOOK TO THE STAGE, INTRODUCED ...

The critics’ old hostility to, and denigration of, dramatizations of litera-
ture should not surprise us, therefore; the adaptor’s attempt on the life
of such work can read as a type of arrogance, a boast that he or she can
mould this into something more than was managed by its originator.
Yet somehow, for the most part, the reception of literary adaptation in
the theatre has been kinder and less immediately judgemental than, for
example within film and television. In the theatre, the most ambitious,
borderline hubristic undertakings are anticipated with more eagerness
than scepticism. For example, the RSC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s
monumentally successful historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the
Bodies—together amounting to well over 1000 pages, seventy-odd char-
acters, and spanning thirty-six years—was keenly awaited by public and
press alike; the sheer weight of the challenge posed by the source stirred
the anticipation and the will that the theatre should produce not a slavish
illustration of Mantel’s books but something sufficiently extraordinary to
match these. They were not disappointed. The much-praised production
of Mike Poulton’s adroit adaptation, directed by Jeremy Herrin, ran to 6
hours; it required a significant investment of time, attention, and money
from its audiences as well as from its multiple creators.
The extreme example of the Mantel staging points to qualities
uniquely attached to adaptation in the theatre, making this context quite
distinct from that of film, despite the challenges—most obviously, visual
dramatization—faced by both forms. A theatrical event is experienced on
several levels simultaneously, whether or more or less consciously. First,
spectators must ‘read’ the dramatic action, the fictional world that is
being represented; second, they cannot fail to recognize the operation
of theatrical action, that is, the mode of performance used to convey
that fiction in the physical space; third, spectators are affected by, and
themselves affect, the action of attendance, the sense of occasion and col-
lectivity of this (which is at times profound, if at other times forced or
superficial). These characteristics mean that when audiences attend an
adaptation in the theatre, they are witnessing not just an adaptation, as
it were a finished product, but adaptation itself, in process: the actors
conjure their telling of the source into being for each performance and
the very labour of that enterprise enriches the experience of the whole.
Where film may be unsurpassed in its ability to capture the sweep and
detail of scenic richness, the theatre by contrast has always sought to do
much with little: a bare stage, few props, merely indicative costumes, all
 PART II  RE-MEDIATING THE BOOK TO THE STAGE, INTRODUCED ...  93

these readily signal a productive poverty that only makes more room for
the imagination.
These qualities in theatre as a medium help to explain what makes it a
potentially fertile and welcoming space for adaptation. Because however
daunting the adaptive challenges posed by a novel, however impossible
might seem its effective translation to the stage, we know that the thea-
tre can tell any and every kind of story. That ‘tell’ is crucial: there is no
‘suspension of disbelief’ so absolute that spectators are duped into see-
ing its fictions as real. Theatre always declares the gap between what it
presents, and how it does this, albeit more explicitly at some times than
at others. The proposal that theatre is an art surprisingly well equipped
to adapt ‘impossible’ literatures is well supported by the chapters in
this part. Benjamin Fowler, for example, explores precisely this ability
in his critical revisiting of Katie Mitchell’s treatment of Virginia Woolf.
Mitchell’s increasing incorporation of intermedial technologies alongside
live action gave rise to a new term, ‘live cinema’, to describe her work.
Fowler argues that Waves’ adoption of techniques drawn from radio and
cinema—the creation of aural soundscapes by the actors, the feeding in
of live-streamed film—were, for Mitchell, necessary tools to tackle the
demands posed by Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness modernist novel. In
Woolf, Mitchell had found ‘a text that would force [her] to make bet-
ter theatre’: Fowler argues that the experience of adaptation obliged
Mitchell to readdress the question of how far and by what means sub-
jectivity could be stageable; consequently, he suggests, it may be more
accurate to understand these experimental live cinema aesthetics not as a
rejection of naturalism’s project, but a vital extension of this.
Discussions of adaptation are never quite able to shake off the spec-
tre of fidelity, even while it is widely understood, first, that a relationship
of source to adaptation in which the latter did not depart from the for-
mer would not be an adaptation at all; second, that fidelity could hardly
be established where disagreement proliferates about what in any text is
‘essential’ to retain; third, that an adaptation that attempted above all to
mimic a literary source could not satisfy an audience in the theatrical
context; and fourth, that it is actually possible and legitimate to exam-
ine adaptations—should we choose to do so—without any reference to
the novels on which they are based. Nonetheless, the question of fidelity
returns over and over—perhaps because in the end it is as good a term as
any to describe not a duty of adaptation’s intertextual relationship, but
94  PART II  RE-MEDIATING THE BOOK TO THE STAGE, INTRODUCED ...

more straightforwardly the expectations, frustrations, and rewards of this

dynamic.
Two chapters in this part revalue the notion of fidelity, demonstrat-
ing that this is not a term that must be erased from the discourse but
rather one that bears scrutiny for the meanings it can carry in differ-
ent contexts. Jane Barnette’s commentary on her own co-adaptation
with Michael Haverty of Stephen Crane’s 1895 novel The Red Badge of
Courage proposes that it may be possible, and valuable, to talk about the
‘spirit’ of a source text. As Barnette shows, ‘spirit’ can be understood not
as some unarguable essence inherent in the original, able to be sustained
or betrayed, but rather as the numinous energies that an adaptation can
uncannily unleash. In this example, adaptation’s distinctive ability to
speak in (at least) two voices at once, to be simultaneously strange and
familiar, is deployed to rearticulate an authorial voice which for Barnette
is marked by patriotism and an ironical cynicism. Questions of fidelity
and authenticity are likewise considered by Edmund Chow in his chapter
on the Birmingham Repertory Theatre’s The Kite Runner and its con-
certed attempt to build an Afghan ‘aura’. As Chow explains, the goals of
authenticity and accuracy pursued by Matthew Spangler, the US author
of the adaptation, in some ways reflect the dynamic already played out
in Hosseini’s novel. The Kite Runner relates the struggle of the narrator
Amir to come to terms with his treachery towards his homeland, evident
in his betrayal of Hussan, his childhood friend, and his own abandon-
ment of Afghanistan for the USA; the novel demonstrates the necessity
that Amir now return to Afghanistan, not in a futile attempt to undo
the past, but as an act of reparation in the present. Chow describes how
the stage adaptation’s conscious courting of fidelity—through the incor-
poration of researched visual and aural detail, the use of Dari language,
and references to specific historical and political events—are offered and
received as a welcome corrective for the ‘Afghanistan’ constructed by the
news media in the context of the ‘war on terror’. Here, adaptation in
the theatre serves as a conscious remediation in which the efforts to get
closer to a source are part of an acknowledged duty to be ‘good again’ to
Afghanistan.
By contrast, Kara Reilly’s chapter on stage versions of Cleland’s Fanny
Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure explores the ways in which adap-
tors may exercise the right, even the necessity, radically to step away
‘unfaithfully’ from their source texts. Reilly sets out the problems for
adaptation, and for readers, inherent in Cleland’s novel: in particular,
 PART II  RE-MEDIATING THE BOOK TO THE STAGE, INTRODUCED ...  95

the male author’s ventriloquism of female sexual experience, a fantasy

of prostitution into which the reader is able to ‘project him or herself
[…] without consequence’. The two adaptations Reilly discusses, by
April de Angelis and TheatreState, adopt contrasting means by which to
deny spectators any such detachment. For the former, this means setting
Cleland’s fictional account of prostitution into dialectical relation with
historical and material realities; for the latter, the critique is effected by
foregrounding the contemporary autobiography of the actor-devisor,
presenting this not as an equivalent for Fanny’s experience but as starting
point from which to develop a critical exchange.
Samantha Mitschke tackles issues of remediation and fidelity with a
quite different order of source text in her chapter on stage adaptations
of Anne Frank’s diary. Mitschke explains how initial plans to adapt the
diary, a deeply cherished document from perhaps the most famous vic-
tim of the Holocaust, sparked passionate controversy in the mid-1950s: a
legal dispute ensued in which the ‘Jewish Anne’ of the author originally
intended for the project was rejected in favour of the seemingly more
‘universal Anne’ of the eventual adaptators. Mitschke examines the rival
adaptors’ joint claims to an understanding of Anne manifestly shaped by
the writers’ self-identifications and frames of concern. For Mitschke, the
‘real Anne’ thus eludes both versions, the chapter noting how each dif-
ferently manipulates and sentimentalizes the historical figure they pur-
port to present authentically. The 2014 adaptation by Jessica Durlacher
and Leon de Winter, Mitschke proposes, shapes an ‘Anne’ much closer
to the author of the diary, even while the adaptors retain only fragments
of the source text, incorporate new scenes and project attitudes on the
material after the fact; in place of the empathetic projection of the 1950s
versions, this twenty-first-century adaptation, Mitschke argues, substi-
tutes an ‘advisory projection’ that establishes an overtly dialogic relation-
ship with the source material, valuing the historical text while exposing
the gaps in engagement that cannot be bridged by empathetic or other
means.
 CHAPTER 5

(Re)Mediating the Modernist Novel: Katie

Mitchell’s Live Cinema Work

Benjamin Fowler

In 2010, Katie Mitchell staged a production of Fräulein Julie for the

Berlin Schaubühne that was advertised as ‘after August Strindberg’
(‘frei nach Strindberg’), making clear its debt to and distinction from
his play of the same name. In her adaptation, Mitchell cut 80% of the
text and filtered its events entirely through the prism of the maid Kristin,
Strindberg’s peripheral third character whom the author himself in his
preface to the play described as ‘without individuality’ (111).1 While
Mitchell’s interest in a female consciousness lingering in the margins of
a canonical text reveals a decisively feminist gaze, the production’s most
visible and immediate innovation stemmed from its intermedial strategy.
Mitchell gave form to Kristin’s consciousness through techniques bor-
rowed from cinema and radio, created live and enacted in full view of the
audience, and used to evoke the character’s subjective perceptual field.
In order to understand this ‘Live Cinema’ treatment of a theatre clas-
sic we have to address the genesis of the technique in Mitchell’s adap-
tations of novels, a strand of work begun in 2001 that first reached
audiences in her 2006 production of Waves.2 This chapter explores the

B. Fowler (*) 
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
e-mail: B.Fowler@sussex.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 97

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_5
98  B. Fowler

formative influence of the modernist novel on the Live Cinema genre

and examines how Mitchell’s exposure to the techniques of The Wooster
Group in 2002 disclosed alternatives to what she perceived as the nar-
rowing horizons of conventional naturalism, informing her work on
adapting Virginia Woolf’s writing for the stage. By understanding their
grounding in Mitchell’s search for pragmatic solutions to theatricaliz-
ing the novel form, Live Cinema’s innovative digital techniques become
tools for realizing what Woolf described as the ‘luminous halo’ of con-
sciousness. Indeed, with Waves, a theatre language emerged that put
technology to surprising uses, offering spectators the means of exploring
subjective experience on two fronts—that of the character, but also their
own, inviting them to participate in a perceptual encounter akin to that
Woolf’s novel affords its reader.
The under-examined link between the novel form and Mitchell’s Live
Cinema work is thus crucial to an understanding of this radical trans-
formation in her aesthetic, which before 2006 had been associated with
exquisitely detailed fourth-wall naturalism. Although in these works
technology fragments the stage and lays bare the processes of cinematic
representation, Mitchell’s methods oblige her audience to discover con-
nections between the work’s separated elements, which cohere around
‘consciousness’ as their organizing principle. Indeed, Mitchell has com-
pared this work to Cubism in its ability to show simultaneously ‘all
the planes and the perspectives of the construction of character’ (“Om
Teatern”). This chapter draws other links between Live Cinema and the
dynamic and subversive strategies that energized modernist experimenta-
tion as early analogue recording technologies altered the perceptual fields
of its key artists. Ultimately, in stressing its relation to subjectivity and
consciousness I argue that this technique is most meaningfully viewed
as an extension of Mitchell’s work on naturalism, rather than its radical
deconstruction.

Novels Vs. Plays: Putting ‘Thought’ on Stage

Of the 12 productions thus far created by Mitchell (in collaboration
with 59 Productions)3 that bring radio and film techniques into colli-
sion with live theatre practice, three have been based on dramatic lit-
erature, two have applied the technique to opera, and seven have used
novels or novellas as their primary source material. These numbers reveal
how constitutive novels have been to the Live Cinema format, whose
 5  (RE)MEDIATING THE MODERNIST NOVEL: KATIE MITCHELL’S …  99

emergence—as Mitchell told an interviewer in 2013—wholly resulted

from the challenge of staging Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: ‘We owe it to
her exquisite writing. And, since then, novels have been a better source
of inspiration for us’ (qtd. in Hogan).4
Novels sit at the heart of Mitchell’s interrogation of the relation-
ship between subjectivity and stage practice for a number of reasons.
Selecting novels that focus on a first-person perspective, or in which the
author experiments with formal and stylistic means of disclosing per-
ceptual experience, Mitchell has located literary material that circum-
vents drama’s traditionally logocentric procedures. When I asked her
what novels offered her that plays didn’t, she responded, ‘Thought’:
‘Perception, experience, subjectivity. […] That’s what we’re in a lot of
the time. We’re not in language, we’re in thought’. Novels thus facili-
tated Mitchell’s concentration on the internal dimensions and dynamics
of character experience, prompting her to realize through tangible and
technological mechanisms what she has described as ‘facets of conscious-
ness’ (“Om Teatern”). Adapting novels for live performance re-routed
Mitchell’s exploratory quest away from interpersonal relationships, the
staple unit of conventional drama, allowing her to travel inwards.
Mitchell seized upon Woolf’s 1931 novel in reaction to the bore-
dom and frustration she had begun to experience with ‘mainstream
theatre’ and its method of ‘organising narrative with consecutive scenes
and a lot of words’ (qtd. in Grylls). For her, this conventionalized form
failed to express subjective experience. Mitchell had reached the limits
of her exploration of a theatre whose focus on corporeality relied on the
communication of a character’s inner life through outwardly expressed
behaviour within a concrete social domain. In order to transcend the
body’s barrier, and the tyranny of the spoken word as an index of inte-
riority, she turned to a highly literary source material. Although such a
decision may appear counterintuitive, Mitchell had selected a modernist
text exhibiting a similar refusal to submit to representational norms.
Woolf’s poetic counterpoint of the interior thoughts of six characters,
structured around significant episodes in their lives spanning six dec-
ades, proved generative for a director seeking to ‘find a text that would
force me to make better theatre’ (qtd. in Jackson).5 Plays required that
Mitchell approach character ‘as a documentary film maker would,’ and
even in a character’s solitary onstage moments, soliloquy pressed for
‘everything [to be] mediated by language’ in such a way that actor,
director, and spectator could ‘never really get inside [a character’s] head’
100  B. Fowler

(“Om Teatern”). Woolf’s novel demanded that Mitchell put ‘thought’

on stage, giving form to supple subjectivities reshaping themselves
around shifting physical, temporal, and emotional realities. Significantly,
the reasons behind Mitchell’s interest in The Waves rehearsed Woolf’s
own frustrations with the novel form almost a century earlier.
In “Modern Fiction”, a 1925 essay in which she sought to refresh
prevailing literary trends, Woolf lamented the fact that ‘life or spirit,
truth or reality, this, the essential thing’ now refuses to be contained in
the ‘ill-fitting vestments’ of the British realist (or, as she termed it, ‘mate-
rialist’) novel (160). Attempting to represent that ‘essential thing’ (i.e.
subjective experience) in language, she described the myriad impressions
continuously received by an individual mind as an ‘incessant shower of
atoms’ (160) coming from all sides.
Her spatial metaphor establishes what Sarah Bay-Cheng discerns as
the ‘modernist temporality,’ a temporality ‘rooted in individual subjec-
tivity’ (“Temporality” 88) where linear-successive time is displaced, or
even supplanted, by the simultaneity that characterizes our continuous
perceptual bombardment. Mitchell’s interest in subjective temporality
is everywhere in evidence, from her favourite poem—T.S. Eliot’s Four
Quartets6—to the temporal manipulations she has explored in her natu-
ralistic work since Three Sisters (NT 2003), which include the subjective
interventions into the flow of ‘real’ time through extreme slow-motion
sequences. Many media theorists link modernist investigations of subjec-
tive experience with technological disruptions of time and space—what
Klemens Gruber calls ‘an encounter with the new conditions of the pro-
duction of signs’ (247) unleashed by the telephone, telegram, radio, and
early cinema, and reflected in scientific theories such as Einstein’s inves-
tigation of quantum mechanics, which characterized time and space as
dynamic, flexible structures. The relationship between perception, tem-
porality, and technological representation that so fascinates Mitchell is
one with a strong modernist lineage.
In theatricalizing Woolf’s literary experiment the director raided dis-
ciplinary borders, absorbing the techniques of radio and cinema in order
to achieve a live performance language able to move between interior
thoughts, locations, and temporal zones at great speed—in Chap. 7
alone, Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness prose flows freely between char-
acters in locations as far apart as a café in Rome, a farm in Lincolnshire,
Piccadilly tube station, a London club, an attic room, and the side of a
mountain in Spain. In 2001, Mitchell organized the first in a series of
 5  (RE)MEDIATING THE MODERNIST NOVEL: KATIE MITCHELL’S …  101

four workshops exploring a theatrical language capable of overcoming—

via Woolf—the limitations of conventional naturalism, limitations which
the reviewer Paul Taylor summed up, in an aptly cinematic metaphor, as
‘the theatre of permanent long-shot and crisply defined roles’.
Radio and cinematic techniques offered pragmatic solutions to the
challenge of realizing Woolf’s modernist text within the limited stage
resources of the National Theatre’s 400-seat studio space, the Cottesloe.
Mitchell, with sound designer Gareth Fry, began by investigating
with actors how the live creation of complex aural soundscapes could
‘instantly, effectively—and economically—transport the audience from
one location or historical period to the next’ (Kerbel 4). This line of cre-
ative enquiry led them to the techniques of radio drama—specifically the
methods of the Foley artist who creates sound during the post-produc-
tion phase in order to enhance a listener’s sense of location.7 Resonating
with Woolf’s sea metaphor, the use of microphones to capture and iso-
late live aural effects made sound waves the dominant, fluid medium
through which Mitchell transcended theatre’s fixity, materializing the
flux of perceptions, anxieties, and desires caught in Woolf’s prose.8
Mitchell and her team combined literal and abstract approaches to
sound, exploring methods designed to work on the intellectual and emo-
tional responses of the audience. The actor Liz Kettle recalled experi-
menting with techniques following a rehearsal workshop led by Foley
artist Jack Stew: ‘Peeling a potato is running a knife along the seam of a
cricket ball. Tearing up a polystyrene plate is for when emotions become
more jagged’ (qtd. in Jackson). Kettle’s account reveals the dual tech-
nical and creative application of the technique, used to score realis-
tic activity as well as emotional states, but it also suggests a surprising
consequence of performing Foley artistry in a live theatrical context.
Spectators constantly saw the unusual objects used to create realist sound
effects including the potato peeling, or a startled bird taking flight from
a tree (achieved by flapping a leather glove away from a microphone).
As Mitchell’s performers raided objects from stacks of freestanding
shelves either side of the playing space, these curious combinations set
up a dynamic poetic interplay between physical action and aural effect
that, although subverting a naturalist fidelity between object and sound,
induced a heightened sensory awareness.
As actors took turns voicing extracts from Woolf’s stream-of-con-
sciousness narrative directly into microphones placed on a long black
table centre stage, the rest of the company moved between various Foley
102  B. Fowler

stations. Throughout the performance they used roving props or sta-

tionary elements like gravel trays to underscore narration. Each of the
seven sections of Woolf’s novel begins with an italicized description of
a seaside scene witnessed by an omniscient narrator at various points
over the course of a single day; as an actor read out these interpolated
descriptions of waves and sea a performer drew a violin bow across the
rim of a bell, creating an ambient metallic scrape that supplemented the
pre-recorded audio of waves washing back and forth against the shore.
Gareth Fry’s sound design enhanced the live effects throughout with
pre-recorded drones and thuds as well as period music, compiled by
music director Simon Allen and used, like the Foley effects, to evoke and
shift location and period. Paul Clark’s original composition provided a
final acoustic element, played live by an offstage string quartet and writ-
ten in the style of Beethoven’s experiments with counterpoint. Having
learned that Woolf listened to Beethoven’s late quartets as she wrote The
Waves, Clark inferred the importance of counterpoint to the novel, offer-
ing Mitchell a composition whose lines of melody could separate and
combine in response to Woolf’s orchestration of the six subjectivities the
novel intertwines (Kerbel 8).
Mitchell and her team discovered film later in the process. She and
designer Vicki Mortimer quickly abandoned the idea of constructing a
series of masking screens on stage, with open sections through which the
audience could glimpse actors’ body parts (an arm or a head); nonethe-
less, the principle of visual fragmentation remained crucial. The novel’s
fragmentary prose stimulates, for Mitchell, a particular mode of reader
engagement that she intended to replicate in her stage adaptation. As
assistant director Lucy Kerbel recalled:

Katie discussed with the company how our imaginations do most of

the work when we read novels, visualising the world of the story. The
author has laid down a framework that our brains flesh out by filling in
all the gaps and turning the words on the page into a living, breathing
360-degree world. (4)

For Mitchell, gaps invite readers (and spectators) to fill them in, raising
their consciousness of entire ‘living, breathing’ worlds that aren’t limited
by external naturalism’s tendency to over-signify its referents. By map-
ping the reader’s cognitive mode, the company discovered a basis for
generating performance that invites a similar exchange. Over the course
 5  (RE)MEDIATING THE MODERNIST NOVEL: KATIE MITCHELL’S …  103

of these exploratory workshops, they settled on film as the most suc-

cessful strategy for cropping and projecting visual fragments to accom-
pany their work on the aural soundscape, leading Mitchell to invite Leo
Warner to join the company as video designer.
Before the eight-week rehearsal period that led up to the first per-
formance in 2006, Mitchell streamlined Woolf’s 228-page novel into
a 40-page document.9 Rehearsals consisted of working methodically
through this document, exploring Foley techniques and devising vis-
ual imagery to create dynamic sections of performance that solved the
challenges of Woolf’s prose paragraph-by-paragraph. Like the acous-
tics, this visual imagery combined realist and abstract approaches. Tiny
environments were quickly assembled and disassembled across the stage,
at times as simple as a handheld board that provided a realistic back-
drop (covered, for example, in a William Morris wallpaper). One actor
would stand in front of it as his face was projected in close-up on the
suspended screen, while another voiced his thoughts. Technology iso-
lated and separated the body of the character from the various voices, both
male and female, interchangeably used to narrate his or her stream of
consciousness.
The cameras also generated poetic and abstract visual imagery. Small
tanks and fishbowls brimming with water allowed a performer-operator
to capture footage through their transparent sides, distorting the image.
Repeated visual sequences of Rhoda’s (Anastasia Hille’s) submerged
head, her floating hair tangling with petals or blanketweed, provided a
recurring visual motif. Occasionally, an abstract effect would be applied
to the digital video itself; when Jinny was filmed frantically dancing after
having burned the telegraph announcing Percival’s death, the output was
rendered with a halting black and white effect that caught the body of
the actress (Liz Kettle) in a series of frozen jagged shapes.
Mitchell’s experiments with technology were thus pragmatic attempts
to generate dynamic staging solutions in response to Woolf’s text, rather
than an avant-garde strategy aimed at deconstructing a source novel.
While spectators were consistently able to assess the projected out-
put against its means of construction—just as the aural effects could be
related visually to their inventive origins in mundane objects—the aim
was to stimulate creative perception, and to work directly on the audi-
ence’s emotions, rather than to unmask representational illusion.
Although Mitchell’s use of technology clearly challenges orthodoxies
of naturalistic theatre praxis, her intermedial methods sought to deepen
104  B. Fowler

spectators’ immersion in character and subjectivity rather than provoke

their critical distance from events. Surprisingly, a means of clarifying this
intent is available if we analyse Mitchell’s response as a spectator to the
work of an experimental theatre troupe, famed for deconstruction and
frequently labelled postmodern, who similarly used technology to bisect
their stage.

Learning from The Wooster Group

In 2002, Mitchell was invited to watch The Wooster Group’s produc-
tion of To You, The Birdie! (Phédre) when it played at London’s LIFT
festival,10 and to offer her response at a symposium discussing the
Group’s work at London’s Cochrane Theatre. The symposium was titled
‘Working over the Classic Text—Adaptations and Interpretations’, and
Mitchell’s reflections on The Wooster Group’s multi-sensory techno-cor-
poreal adaptation of Racine’s play, which combined live with recorded
elements shuttled across the stage on mobile screens, offers keen insights
into the mind of a director already one year into her investigation into
adapting The Waves. This touring production from a celebrated avant-
garde New York company both inspired Mitchell and fuelled her frus-
tration with British mainstream representational habits, as was evident in
her closing remarks:

The Wooster Group is transcendentally inspiring. But I do feel that it

should be normal. I feel that really passionately. I feel trapped by not being
able to play with the written word. (qtd. in Heathfield et al.)

Mitchell was responding positively to the formal innovation and inven-

tion of a production that eschewed naturalism, although Racine’s text
appeared largely intact. The Woosters uncovered the possibility of escap-
ing naturalism’s trappings while remaining committed to the written
word in playful, and meaningful, ways. Unlike the detailed social real-
ism of Mitchell’s own work on Chekhov up to this point, the mise en
scène of this adaptation of Phédre was organized around striking visual
metaphors—most noticeably the badminton court on which the play was
staged, demanding enormous athleticism of the actors as their characters
batted a shuttlecock back and forth during key scenes. This distilled the
play’s emphasis on social and formal rules into a concrete situation that
obliged actors—literally and metaphorically—to play. Most pertinently,
 5  (RE)MEDIATING THE MODERNIST NOVEL: KATIE MITCHELL’S …  105

however, The Wooster Group forced technology into collision with

Racine’s neoclassical text, using microphones and projection screens to
separate voices from bodies (as well as pre-recorded projections of bodies
from their live counterparts).
The actor Kate Valk was responsible for embodying Phédre, lending
her a neurasthenic intensity pushed to an extreme in her consistent need
to evacuate her bowels (with considerable assistance provided by numer-
ous attendants who helped her mount a mobile commode). Valk’s body,
however, was divorced from Phédre’s voice and thoughts, which were
spoken through a microphone by a male reader (Scott Shepherd). As
Mitchell expressed, ‘every piece of text was technically mediated, [which
is] a cultural taboo in the [British] mainstream’, but ‘it was in the sepa-
ration of word and action […] where the deeper radicalism lay’ (qtd. in
Heathfield et al.). Not only was Racine’s protagonist divided between
two performers, the audience was invited to attend to both simultane-
ously in the theatrical space. Mitchell’s reflections on these methods
reveal the germination of ideas that visibly emerged in her own work
four years later. After watching The Wooster Group, she reflected on the
implications of this separation of elements from two points of view—
the actor’s, and the character’s. In her talk, Mitchell asked Group actors
directly if it was hard to be the body and be denied the voice, holding
such precise psychological and physical intensity as someone else spoke
their characters’ words. She also identified their technique’s propensity
for helping actors avoid the dangers posed by words in conventional
drama, suggesting that dialogue lures actors towards performances that
assume characters are able to say precisely what they mean and think,
thus reducing their complexity:

In theatre, words [often] tend to lead us to think of character as a fixed

unchanging entity, which is certainly not how we experience ourselves as
people, however much we might like to. So for me, the device of dividing
the voice and the body of one character between two performers started to
chip away at this simplification and approached an idea of character which
is probably closer to how we experience ourselves. (qtd. in Heathfield
et al.)

The Wooster Group, then, liberated Mitchell to conceptualize character

as portrayed by multiple labourers and multiple techniques within the
frame of a unified production style. Mitchell seems to suggest here that
106  B. Fowler

a separation of elements held the potential to outdo the subtle synthesis

achieved by an individual actor working in a naturalistic mode, appropri-
ating technology as a way of surmounting the simplifications that essen-
tialize character without abandoning character as a category. Although
suggesting that such fragmentation made multiple spectatorial responses
available—‘No-one owned the words and therefore we were free to play
our own tunes on those words’—Mitchell was adamant that, for her, this
strategy led her deeper into character, and deeper into the play. As she
asserted in the Q&A afterwards, ‘this production revealed Racine’, even
as others argued that it deconstructed, distanced, and objectified the play
and the playwright.11 Rather than experiencing To You, The Birdie! as a
postmodern riff on a neoclassical text, Mitchell was attracted to a fresh
aesthetic style that she perceived to be revelatory of that text; she also
saw in the Group’s methods the formal means of realizing on stage an
experimental investigation into subjectivity akin to that crystallized in
Virginia Woolf’s writing.

Living in Looking: The Continuous Present

Indeed, Mitchell used Woolf’s autobiographical volume Moments of Being
for additional textual material, including an extract at the beginning of
Waves that worked as a kind of epigraph for the whole performance.12
Before the production launched into the novel’s first section (the inner
thoughts of the six children as they played in the school grounds), a
female narrator switched on her desk lamp, picked up a smouldering ciga-
rette in a holder, and read the following extract from Woolf’s diary:

If I were a painter I should paint these first impressions of childhood in

pale yellow, silver, and green. I should make a picture of curved petals; of
shells; of things that were semi-transparent. Everything would be large and
dim; and what was seen would at the same time be heard; sounds would
come through this petal or leaf—sounds indistinguishable from sights.
Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of these first impressions.
(Mitchell Waves 7)

These words established a connection between Woolf’s consciousness

and her writing in a way that maps directly over Mitchell’s production
and its representational methods. Woolf’s imaginative visualisation of
childhood memory as an artistic process employs synaesthetic metaphors
 5  (RE)MEDIATING THE MODERNIST NOVEL: KATIE MITCHELL’S …  107

that crash through the borders separating perception from creation, har-
nessing the sonic reverberations of objects as tools with which to ‘paint’
pictures of her earliest impressions. As Evelyn Ender notes, ‘the text of
Woolf’s early memories grants us access to a universe of sensory percep-
tions “in the making”’ (51), in which perception and artistic produc-
tion are fundamentally intertwined. However, as Ender also notes, the
painterly style evoked by Woolf isn’t that of a realist but rather a mod-
ern expressionist painter, creating ‘a universe endowed with phenomenal
features that are initially devoid of clearly defined referential qualities’
(52). Like the polystyrene plates that Liz Kettle tore through in order to
‘score’ jagged emotion in Mitchell’s Waves, Woolf’s tuneful petals, pale
colours, and semi-transparent objects, despite their abstraction, are full of
affective resonance, intensified through their dynamic interplay.
In contrast to the use of mainly pre-recorded footage in The Wooster
Group’s production, the live construction of elements has proven fun-
damental to the Live Cinema form. For Sharon Friedman, the emergent
quality this facilitates marked the significance of Mitchell’s Waves, which
used technology to generate ‘visual and aural impressions simultaneously,
and in the process, evoke a sense of immediacy in the viewer that is inte-
gral to subjective experience’ (156). The ability to combine camera and
microphone outputs in real time is contingent on digital technologies
that convert image and sound input into code, which is fed instantane-
ously through a computer media server where any additional processing
occurs. In response to the cueing of an offstage programmer, that aggre-
gated digital content is sampled from and routed through a projector
and speakers according to a pre-determined cueing sequence—nothing is
recorded; rather, it is streamed. Digital streaming offers a neat analogy for
‘stream-of-consciousness’ here, foregrounding a continuously renewing
present tense that absorbs the audience in subjective experience.
Indeed, in this theatricalization of cinematic representation, produc-
tion, post-production, projection, and reception all become simultane-
ously available for spectatorial scrutiny. Friedman’s description of the
implications for ‘the viewer’ signals the two levels at which this symbio-
sis of creation and perception impacts—engaging spectators in their own
creative and subjective encounter with the production’s representational
techniques leads them further into a character subjectivity that, rather
than being embodied by a unified stage presence, emerges out of visual
and aural traces dispersed across a vast network of performers and tech-
nological apparatus. Digital tools thus facilitate a ‘modernist temporality’
108  B. Fowler

(Bay-Cheng “Temporality” 88), allowing us to perceive Live Cinema

as fulfilling Lev Manovich’s promise that, through the language of new
media, ‘directions that were closed off at the turn of the century when
[cinematic realism] came to dominate the modern moving-image cul-
ture are now again beginning to be explored’ (308). In exploring those
closed off directions, Sarah Bay-Cheng’s work on Gertrude Stein offers
material for a fascinating comparison between Mitchell and another key
modernist literary experimenter for whom early cinema and literary strat-
egies of representing subjectivity became deeply aligned.
Bay-Cheng foregrounds the importance of a ‘continuous present’
(Mama 30) in Stein’s modernist experiments with linguistic repeti-
tion, particularly with reference to her ‘early textual portraits’ of friends,
which ‘attempted to capture the essence of a person in language’, both
‘as an individual and as the product of artistic creation’ (29). Crucially,
Bay-Cheng demonstrates the link between Stein’s ‘continuous present’
and the cinema: ‘Stein recognised that in film the eye has no memory of
the individual frame, seeing only the images run together in movement’
(30). Repetition was, as Stein expressed in her consciously guileless style,
a linguistic strategy that replicated the temporal quality of cinema where
‘by a continuously moving picture of any one there is no memory of any
other thing and there is that thing existing’ (qtd. in Bay-Cheng Mama
29). The quick succession of stills running through a projector, each sub-
tly different from the one it follows, gave Stein direct access to the repre-
sented subject in what Woolf might have described as its very moment of
being.
Stein’s fascination with the archetypal film she described perhaps
sounds odd following the twentieth-century’s suspicion of mediation and
spectacle in moving image culture. Additionally, she remains dislocated
temporally and spatially from the persons or objects recorded in the light
dancing on early cinema’s projection screen. However, Mitchell’s digi-
tal tools recover the possibilities that inhere in Stein’s analysis of cinema.
They bring all elements—including the spectator—into a single moment
of temporal simultaneity. The ‘thing existing’ finally merges with the
thing looking, and the significance of this temporal symbiosis illus-
trates how integral seeing the making of is to the meaning of this work.
Counter-intuitively, Mitchell’s use of mediating technologies actually
rejuvenates Peggy Phelan’s promise that ‘performance’s only life is in the
present’ (146).
 5  (RE)MEDIATING THE MODERNIST NOVEL: KATIE MITCHELL’S …  109

Cinema as a Metaphor for Subjectivity

Alongside ‘liveness’, the cinematic has emerged as the second crucial
context within which this genre operates. More recent productions have
included extensive film sets at stage-level that facilitate complex camera
set-ups, allowing continuous visual output to be captured. In each case,
the screen has become a portal into the subjective experience of its cen-
tral protagonist in subtly different ways, manifesting memory, desire, or
psychosis. Inspired by Woolf, the use of mirrors in an early sequence
embedded within Mitchell’s Waves foregrounds what since has become
a preoccupation—the reflexive interplay of representational surface and
subjectivity. The mirror, then, is Mitchell’s screen in metaphorical guise.
Laura Mulvey noted, in her seminal 1975 essay on ‘Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema’, the ‘extraneous similarities between screen and
mirror’ (836), fusing the site of cinematic representation with a trope
of identity formation common to the theories of both Freud and Lacan.
Lacan had famously theorized the mirror-stage of development as a
child’s formative gaze into a reflective surface, allowing the fragments of
a nascent consciousness to achieve integrity and wholeness (albeit predi-
cated on an illusory sense of mastery). Mulvey identifies the screen of
mainstream narrative cinema as a mirror in which the male ego ideal
gains his coherence, primarily through watching objectified female sub-
jects depicted as passive objects alternately used to arouse, and help con-
stitute, the male viewer. At the end of her analysis, Mulvey feared that
female subjectivity would never emerge as the subject of cinematic explo-
ration given the unacknowledged patriarchal bias of mainstream narrative
cinema. In Mitchell’s work, however, it is the mirror itself that reveals a
means of challenging that bias.
In staging three short sections of text from part two of Woolf’s
novel, Mitchell’s company devised a sequence in which Jinny, Susan, and
Rhoda stared into the ‘small looking glass on the stairs’ of their board-
ing school, revealing surprising possibilities in this primitive representa-
tional frame. A freestanding board with a mounted two-way mirror was
positioned on a table at stage level. Jinny (Liz Kettle) knelt before it, lit
by angled floor lamps, and a camera stood behind her, streaming output
directly to the screen above where Jinny appeared to be standing before
a mirror hanging on a wall. She examined her face as her thoughts were
voiced by another: ‘I hate the small looking glass on the stairs […] It
shows our heads only. And my lips are too wide, and my eyes are too
110  B. Fowler

close together’ (Mitchell Waves 31). Once Jinny had passed on to experi-
ence the comforts of the full-length mirror, Susan (Kate Duchêne) took
up Jinny’s former position; but as her stream-of-consciousness voiced
nostalgic memories of home and her father leaning upon a stile smoking,
another actor moved the light source behind the mirror to reveal Susan’s
father interposed between this freestanding board and a second covered
in replica wallpaper. The mirror suddenly became transparent, but the
effect on screen was of Susan’s reflection giving way to a memory that ‘I
always see, as I pass the looking-glass on the landing, with Jinny in front
and Rhoda lagging behind’ (31). Next came Rhoda (Anastasia Hille). As
she focused intently on her reflection the same trick was repeated; this
time, however, nobody knelt in the void between mirror and replica wall.
As Rhoda’s thoughts ran on (‘I am not here. I have no face’ (32)), the
projected visual showed a girl eerily unable to locate her image in the
mirrored surface.
Following Woolf’s cue, Mitchell’s mirror offered a window onto the
psychology, memory, and fantasy structures shaping the subjectivity that
stood before it. In its surface, protagonists temporarily perceive persons
and objects triggered by the neurodynamics that constitute one’s expe-
rience of selfhood.13 A matrix of cognitive and psychological processes
(imagination, recognition, misrecognition, identification) determine that
which is articulated in the looking glass, but also on the Live Cinema
screen. Even failed identification generates a strong sense of an iden-
tity, albeit experienced by the character as fragmentation. In the case of
Rhoda, for instance, Mitchell staged the very invisibility that Mulvey’s
essay on cinematic representation sought to render visible. For Rhoda,
the mirror-stage literally and metaphorically won’t happen; her inabil-
ity to achieve identification, wholeness, and selfhood actually makes
her fractured subjectivity the very subject of the representation (and in
this differs from the repressive tendencies of narrative cinema). Mitchell
exposes the female subject’s compromised identity by making her into a
protagonist.

Fräulein Julie
I end this chapter with an account of Fräulein Julie that shows how the
above techniques work to raise spectator and character consciousness,
representing new areas of perception and experience than those fitting
mainstream narrative patterns—patterns which Mulvey, writing about
 5  (RE)MEDIATING THE MODERNIST NOVEL: KATIE MITCHELL’S …  111

cinema, associates with a patriarchal order. Here, the idea of adaptation

arrives full circle, with a dramatic text adapted to facilitate a cinematic
exploration of a single consciousness in a live performance context,
heavily informed by Mitchell’s work on the modernist novel. Using her
screen to hold a mirror up to a subjectivity in flux, Mitchell extended her
exploration of a theatre language able to realize the chaotic processual
quality that constitutes subjectivity. The result was a poetic montage rev-
elatory of inner thought that broke free from narrative conventions and
expectations surrounding ‘dramatic’ action.
The production opened with a close-up of Kristin’s hands (Cathlen
Gawlich) picking flowers. Julie Böwe, who would provide Kristin’s
onscreen face, sat gently humming in a sound-proof booth, her power-
fully amplified melody resonating throughout the auditorium. Over at a
Foley station, Lisa Guth and Maria Aschauer used props to create the
noise of the flowers being picked, as depicted on screen, and the sound
of Kristin’s footsteps over gravel and on grass. Through this leisurely
paced introductory sequence, these various women, tracked by a series of
camera operators, moved Kristin from outside into the kitchen of a large
nineteenth-century manor house, where she hung the flowers from a
hook to dry and turned to scrutinize her reflection in the kitchen mirror.
For the first time, Kristin’s face (Julie Böwe) appeared on screen—
mediated by both camera and mirror. Mitchell playfully suggested
the futility of seeking the original form amid this series of reflections
within reflections, not least because Julie Böwe herself was well clear
of the kitchen set that occupied centre stage. Positioned instead in the
foreground, with a replica mirror and a freestanding camera capturing
her reflection in close-up, the ‘real’ Kristin was displaced by a stand-in
(Cathlen Gawlich) in the ‘real’ kitchen. Although the consistent use of
Böwe’s face on screen lent helpful continuity for spectators, it became
clear that no one element (aural, visual, corporeal) was the privileged
site of authenticity. Rather, Kristin’s consciousness would emerge from
the interplay of all of these elements, generated by a multiplicity of stage
labourers working in a continuous present.
As a blank Kristin examined her features in the mirror, in the sound-
proof booth another actor read text that functioned as her stream-
of-consciousness—the first four stanzas of Inger Christensen’s poem
Alfabet (1981). Using the Fibonacci sequence as a formal engine, the
incremental growth of each stanza (moving through the letters of the
alphabet from a-n) accommodates repetition, association, and surprising
112  B. Fowler

juxtapositions of commonplace objects to reveal the metaphysical in the

mundane. Like Stein’s repetitive textual portraits, and the Live Cinema
form itself, formal constrictions generate a highly individual conscious-
ness of the world:

cicadas exist; chicory, chromium,

citrus trees; cicadas exist;
cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum

doves exist; dreamers, dolls

killers exist; doves, doves;
haze, dioxin and day; day
exists; death day; and poems
exist; poems, day, death
(132–5)14

Importantly, this modernist Scandinavian poet also acted as a counter-

weight to Strindberg’s casual nineteenth-century misogyny, evoking
a complex inner life for a character whose emotions and processes of
decision making are given scant attention in the play.15 By incorporat-
ing poetry into her adaptation of Strindberg’s drama, Mitchell found the
means of rendering dramatic character in a novelistic first-person mode
of expression.
This opening section also introduced audiences to dominant vis-
ual imagery that would recur throughout. Underscored by more of
Christensen’s poetry, Kristin prepared the abortion potion that Fräulein
Julie would later request for her pregnant bitch. The screen showed
Kristin lighting a candle with a match; passing a vase of yellow flowers on
the kitchen table; pouring water into a basin and staring at her reflection
as the water settled; and making the potion itself in a saucepan (using
dried flowers hanging on the wall, as well as chopped offal), then pour-
ing the distillation into a small brown glass bottle that she uncorked with
a ‘pop’. In addition to visual imagery, the Foley artistry foregrounded
sounds that would be used to creative effect throughout. The sound
of running water was particularly prominent—from the jug pouring its
contents into the basin (replicated simultaneously in three zones of the
stage) to the gushing tap under which Kristin washed a dirty cloth.
These myriad visual and aural impressions would later swirl together
to form the subjective matter from which Kristin’s three dreams were
 5  (RE)MEDIATING THE MODERNIST NOVEL: KATIE MITCHELL’S …  113

fashioned. When Strindberg’s play has her fall asleep on stage, Mitchell’s
screen opened a portal into her subconscious in an extended visual
departure from the play’s narrative. The kitchen—now suffused with
a ghostly white light—is suddenly inhabited by Kristin alone. She sees
herself reflected in a pane of glass as she looks out of a window. Water
drips down its reflective surface and it seems to be lightly raining. This
image gives way to a shot of hands on a wet mirror. Cutting back to
the window, that screen now shows Kristin positioned outside, taking the
place of her reflection and peering in. A vase has fallen, leaving a pool
of spreading water across the kitchen table’s surface in which the yellow
flowers are strewn. Kristin appears back in the kitchen and picks up one
of the stems, but a POV shot establishes that it pricks her fingers and she
bleeds. Gradually, muffled snatches of Jean and Julie’s dialogue (medi-
ated by microphones) and blurred visual distortions create the impres-
sion of Kristin rising out of deep sleep as the kitchen set is returned to
its pre-dream state. From the vantage point of Kristin’s sleeping head, a
camera finally settles on Julie picking petals from one of the yellow flow-
ers. Then, just as Julie moves to kiss Jean, Kristin stands up, alerting the
pair that she’s now awake.
As in Christensen’s poetry, a subjective logic supplanted linear tempo-
rality. Mitchell’s favourite filmmaker, Andrey Tarkovsky, shows us how
responsive this organizational strategy is to Mitchell’s frustrations with
mainstream naturalism. He writes in his memoirs of the value of poetic
links over ‘traditional theatrical writing which links images through the
linear, rigidly logical development of the plot’ (18–20) and thus ‘rest
on a facile interpretation of life’s complexities’ (20).16 Dream logic, in
this production, became a synecdoche for Tarkovsky’s poetic strategies.
The production led audiences into a second dream once Kristin had
found her way upstairs through a warren of corridors. The potion bottle,
sounds of water running and dripping, reflections (in water, in windows,
in mirrors, in the contents of a spilled vase), all these were again the
associative landmarks that anchored Mitchell’s exploration of Kristin’s
consciousness. But in this more surreal iteration reflections distorted;
Kristen’s troubled face morphed into Jean’s and then Julie’s.
In exploring the gaps and absences in Kristen’s journey through
Strindberg’s play, Mitchell refused to bend character experience into
a coherent narrative arc. Like Kristin herself, striving to make sense of
events based on her limited visual and aural access to Jean and Julie,
Mitchell’s audience were invited to gather, process, and connect images,
114  B. Fowler

sounds, and events whose relationship was not immediately apparent. In

presenting its audience with fragments, Fräulein Julie enacted a theory
of spectatorship articulated eloquently by Tarkovsky. For him, associative
linking invites the spectator’s ‘affective as well as rational appraisal’ (20),
showing great respect for spectators as it invites them to become partici-
pants ‘in the process of discovering life’ and sharing in the ‘misery and
joy of bringing an image into being’ (20).17 As we saw earlier, Mitchell
conceived of the creative relationship between Woolf’s novel and its
reader in similar terms. As Ben Brantley found when Mitchell’s first Live
Cinema show toured to New York, and in line with Tarkovsky’s levelling
of producer and receiver, ‘Waves turns us all into everyday artists, accom-
panying Woolf as she puts the pieces together once again’.
Mitchell’s Fräulein Julie ended with a third dream. As in Strindberg’s
text, Kristin last saw Jean and Julie as she left for church on Sunday
morning. Exiting the play, she overheard Julie asking Jean to show
her a way out of her predicament. This overheard exchange didn’t, as
it might in conventional naturalist theatre, cue blackout; rather it trig-
gered a replay. Mitchell took her audience back into Kristin’s first dream,
although with some significant differences. This time, light drizzle was
transformed into heavy rainfall, and the auditorium filled with a harsh
sound like nails falling onto a corrugated tin roof. Kristin stands outside,
looking into the kitchen. The table is covered with water spilt from the
vase—but now the water flows over the table’s edge, and more drips into
its pool from an undisclosed source. A camera, in a slow-pan, shows the
brown glass bottle lying uncorked in the pool of water. It continues pan-
ning, revealing Kristin, now in the kitchen, picking up from the soaked
table a yellow flower which once again pricks her finger. This time, how-
ever, the dream runs on. Kristin drops the stem back into the pool of
bloody water, and places her hands on the back of a kitchen chair. A
camera captures her face in a tight close-up from below, and Kristin tilts
her head down to look directly into the camera’s lens. For the first time,
she is looking directly at us, the audience, through the screen.
The screen itself, hanging above the stage, has suddenly transformed
into a giant mirror. Böwe’s eyes confront us directly, and we as spectators
find ourselves positioned as Kristin, staring straight back as if at our own
reflection. If we are to look for a politics in this work it is here that it lies;
the collective labour of 8 actor-technicians over the course of 90 minutes
has all led up to this moment, culminating in an experience of identifica-
tion rather than the fulfilment of a conventional narrative trajectory. We
 5  (RE)MEDIATING THE MODERNIST NOVEL: KATIE MITCHELL’S …  115

are in Kristin’s head, seeing through her eyes. Böwe’s eyes widen and the
screen flares white.
When I asked Mitchell what kind of impact theatre could have, one of
her answers was to get people ‘imagining other people a bit more gen-
erously’. Regardless of whether this was her aim in Fräulein Julie, Live
Cinema’s invitation to spectators to inhabit the very mind of its subject
worked its powerful effect; it made us finally unable to dismiss a woman
such as Kristin as ‘without individuality’.

Notes
1. In this instance Mitchell adapted Strindberg’s play herself, preparing
the textual edit in advance of rehearsals. She also prepared the heav-
ily condensed edits of the novels that inspired Waves (NT 2006) and …
some trace of her (NT 2008), issuing these to actors as rehearsals began.
Mitchell has since delegated this work. For Reise durch die Nacht (Köln
2012), Lyndsey Turner acted as the dramaturg and Duncan Macmillan
wrote the dialogue, which was based on Friederike Mayröcker’s novel.
Turner also adapted Die Gelbe Tapete (Schaubühne, 2013) from the
novella by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Macmillan adapted Peter Handke’s
Wunschloses Unglück (Vienna 2013), and wrote and compiled text for The
Forbidden Zone (Schaubühne/Salzburg 2014).
2. ‘Live Cinema’ is the term by which Mitchell and her frequent collaborator
Leo Warner have come to describe these productions (See Oltermann;
59 Productions). Although instigated and conceptualized by Mitchell,
Live Cinema works are the product of collaborative creation, with signifi-
cant contributions from a dedicated team of sound and video designers.
My frequent references to ‘Mitchell’s’ Live Cinema work seek in no way
to diminish the crucial role of Leo Warner (or Grant Gee in those pro-
ductions where he replaced Warner as Director of Photography). They
merely reflect the focus of this chapter on Mitchell’s artistic trajectory.
3. This is the name of the video design company of which Leo Warner is
Creative Director. Its website documents the Live Cinema shows that
59 Productions realized with Mitchell. See: http://59productions.
co.uk/?s=katie+mitchell.
4. Mitchell has now discontinued her intermedial experiments in opera. This
is, in part, because the flexibility of the musical tempo plays havoc with
the precision required in cueing live film, but also because Mitchell has
come to learn that the form is fundamentally ‘about the ear, not about
the eyes’ (“Om Teatern”).
116  B. Fowler

5. The novel had long been on her radar; Mitchell had studied Woolf’s text
at university in the late 1980s. See Kerbel (9).
6. As well as including extracts of the poem in her Three Sisters programme,
Mitchell also included a large chunk of Four Quartets within the final
section of her 1999 staging of Ted Hughes’ version of The Oresteia at
the National Theatre. She worked on a staged reading of this poem with
the actor Stephen Dillane in 2005, and paired it with Beethoven’s String
Quartet Opus 132, which she had learned influenced Eliot as he wrote
the poem.
7. The practice emerged in response to the challenge of joining moving pic-
tures together with sound, and took its name from one of the original
practitioners of the technique (Jack Foley) who worked in Hollywood in
the early twentieth century.
8. See Halliburton: ‘Theatre’s not a naturally fluid medium, which is why it’s
so clever that Mitchell sets up a framework based on soundwaves [sic].’
9. See Jefferies (403).
10. Elizabeth LeCompte’s production visited the Riverside Studios as part of
the London International Festival of Theatre from 9 to 23 May 2002.
After 18 months of rehearsals and work-in-progress showings, the first
public performance took place in Paris in November 2001.
11. Another panel member responded by saying: ‘No, I think it objectified
him. I don’t think it tried to make connections, or say they’re just like
us. It dropkicked this stuff into the long grass. It’s barbaric.’ (qtd. in
Heathfield et al.)
12. The first-person narratives Mitchell selects exhibit complex ties between
author and character (or narrator). Peter Handke’s 1972 novel
Wunschloses Unglück (A Sorrow Beyond Words), staged by Mitchell in
Vienna in 2013, blurs lines between fiction and reality in its account of
the suicide of the novelist’s own mother. Mitchell carefully attends to
the author’s biography in her preparation, often discovering details that
influence her productions. After learning that Charlotte Perkins Gilman
wrote The Yellow Wallpaper after a sudden onset of psychotic symptoms
following childbirth, Mitchell included a young baby and a nanny in her
2013 adaptation (Die Gelbe Tapete, Schaubühne), forging an explicit link
between the protagonist’s behaviour and postnatal depression.
13. Indeed, mirrors have featured in a vast number of Mitchell’s productions.
In Wunschkonzert (Köln 2007), Fräulein Rasch spends considerable time
scrutinizing her face in the bathroom mirror, often to the accompani-
ment of Anne Sexton’s poetry. The protagonist Regine strains to recover
a childhood memory in Reise durch die Nacht (Köln 2012)—at a key
moment she sees her abused mother in the mirror of the train’s toilet
cubicle instead of her own reflection; in Die Gelbe Tapete (Schaubühne
 5  (RE)MEDIATING THE MODERNIST NOVEL: KATIE MITCHELL’S …  117

2013), the wallpaper itself functions as a distorted version of a mirror,

in which the protagonist sees her own psychosis embodied as a phan-
tom woman trapped in the wallpaper pattern. She eventually recognizes
the woman in the wallpaper as herself, and scratches it off in an effort to
release her.
14. This is Susanna Nied’s English translation of Christensen’s Norwegian
original, which was spoken in German in Mitchell’s production.
Christensen’s poem contains 14 stanzas each based on one letter of the
alphabet (a–n). The words for ‘day’, ‘death’, and ‘poetry’, for instance, all
begin with the letter ‘d’ in Norweigan.
15. In his preface to Miss Julie, Strindberg describes Kristin as ‘a female slave’
and a ‘subordinate figure’ who only receives abstract characterization
because of her position in a servile class who are ‘without individuality,
showing only one side of themselves while at work’ (111).
16. Although Tarkovsky rejects linearity, he does so in order to achieve a
deeper realism. As Sitney argues, he ‘saw cinema as a means for the acute
observation of a complex temporality that fluidly spanned duration,
memory, and dreams; for him, to “sculpt in time” was to unveil the truth
of lived time, not to invent imaginatively new temporal structures’ (211).
17. See Tarkovsky: ‘The method whereby the artist obliges the audience to
build the separate parts into a whole, and to think on, further than has
been stated, is the only one that puts the audience on a par with the artist
in their perception of the film’ (21).

Works Cited
59 Productions. “The making of a Live Cinema Show – Forbidden Zone –
directed by Katie Mitchell.” Online video clip. Vimeo, 23 Jul. 2014. Web.
23 Dec. 2014.
Bay-Cheng, Sarah. Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theatre. New
York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
———. “Temporality.” Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Eds. Sarah
Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, & Robin Nelson. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam UP, 2010. 85–90. Print.
Brantley, Ben. “Six Lives Ebb and Flow, Interconnected and Alone.” Rev. of
Waves, dir. Katie Mitchell. The New York Times, 17 Nov. 2008. Web. 5 Feb.
2014.
Christensen, Inger. “Alphabet.” Trans. Susanna Nied. I’ll Drown My Book:
Conceptual Writing by Women. Eds. Caroline Bergvall et al. Los Angeles: Les
Figues Press, 2012 [1981]. 132–7. Print.
Ender, Evelyn. Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science, and Autobiography.
Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Print.
118  B. Fowler

Friedman, Sharon. “‘Sounds Indistinguishable from Sights’: Staging Subjectivity

in Katie Mitchell’s Waves.” Text & Presentation. Ed. Kiki Gounaridou. The
Comparative Drama Conference Series 6, 2009. 154–66. Print.
Gruber, Klemens. “Early Intermediality: Archaeological Glimpses.” Mapping
Intermediality in Performance. Eds. Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt,
Andy Lavender, & Robin Nelson. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010.
247–57. Print.
Grylls, Pinny. “Katie Mitchell on Directing Multimedia Productions.” Online
video clip. YouTube, 6 May 2011. Web. 3 Mar. 2013.
Halliburton, Rachel. Rev. of Waves, dir. Katie Mitchell. Time Out, 22 Nov. 2006.
Print.
Heathfield, Adrian (Chair), Katie Mitchell, Hugh Denard & Deborah Levy.
“Working over the classic text—adaptations and interpretations.” Recording
of a symposium on The Wooster Group. Cochrane Theatre, Central
St. Martins, London, 15 May 2002. British Library Sound Archive.
Hogan, Emma. “Double Vision: Multimedia Theatre.” Economist.com (Prospero
Blog). 1 May 2013. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.
Jackson, Tina. “Take a Daring Plunge into the Waves.” Rev. of Waves, dir. Katie
Mitchell. Metro, 29 Sep. 2008. Print.
Jefferies, Janis. “‘…some trace of her’: Katie Mitchell’s Waves in Multimedia
Performance.” Women: A Cultural Review 22.4 (2011): 400–10. Print.
Kerbel, Lucy. “Waves Education Workpack.” Nationaltheatre.org.uk. 2006. Web.
1 Feb. 2013.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001.
Print.
Mitchell, Katie. Waves. London: Oberon Books, 2008. Print.
———. “Om Teatern om tekniken.” Katie Mitchell in discussion at the
Bergmanfestivalen 2012, Online video clip. YouTube, 28 May 2012. Web.
9 Aug. 2013.
———. Personal interview with the author. 4 Sep. 2012.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and
Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy & Marshall Cohen. New
York: Oxford UP, 1999 [1975]. 833–44. Print.
Oltermann, Philip. “Katie Mitchell, British theatre’s true auteur, on being
embraced by Europe.” The Guardian, 9 Jul. 2014. Print.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked, The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge,
1993. Print.
Sitney, P. Adams. “Andrey Tarkovsky, Russian Experience, and the Poetry of
Cinema.” New England Review 33.3–4 (2014): 208–41. Print.
Strindberg, August. Eight Famous Plays. Trans. Edwin Björkman & N. Erichsen.
London: Gerald Duckworth & Co, 1953. Print.
 5  (RE)MEDIATING THE MODERNIST NOVEL: KATIE MITCHELL’S …  119

Tarkovsky, Andrey. Sculpting in Time. Trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin:

University of Texas Press, 2003 [1986]. Print.
Taylor, Paul. “National’s gamble on this experimental Woolf adaptation pays
off.” Rev. of Waves, dir. Katie Mitchell. Independent, 17 Nov. 2006. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 4: 1925
to 1928. Ed. Andrew McNeille. London: The Hogarth Press, 1994 [1925].
157–64. Print.
 CHAPTER 6

The Spirit of the Source: Adaptation

Dramaturgy and Stephen Crane’s The Red
Badge of Courage

Jane Barnette

In 2014, Michael Haverty and I developed a new adaptation of Stephen

Crane’s 1895 novel The Red Badge of Courage for Kennesaw State
University and 7 Stages theatre in Atlanta. The following year, I directed
our adaptation for Auburn University’s new black box theatre. In this
chapter, I reflect on these two productions to demonstrate some of the
practical ways in which dramaturgical awareness is critical to the task of
adapting literary works for the stage. There are several scholars who have
written about theatrical adaptation, using case studies and interviews
as evidence for their analysis. When these scholars address dramaturgy,
though, they usually reference the kind of dramaturgy that signals tex-
tual analysis, or the structure (and sometimes process) of (arriving at)
the adapted script.1 The sort of dramaturgy I indicate here is practice-
based, with representation from the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs
of the Americas (LMDA). Typically, this dramaturgical practice falls into
one of two categories: new play or production dramaturgy—wherein

J. Barnette (*) 
University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA
e-mail: jane@ku.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 121

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_6
122  J. Barnette

the dramaturg works primarily with playwrights (or adapters) to shape

and improve a new script. Production dramaturgs work with directors
and the creative team, with the ultimate goal of communicating with
the audience via program notes, lobby displays, websites, and/or study
guides.
Adaptation dramaturgy (or adapturgy, as I call it) combines the prac-
tices of new play dramaturgs with those of production dramaturgs: the-
atrical adaptations require dramaturgs to have a dual focus on both the
relationship between the source-text and the adapted script and the pro-
duction choices that transform the adaptation into the languages of the
stage. By outlining the specific processes we found helpful in bringing
Crane’s novel to life, this chapter demonstrates how vital such a drama-
turgical sensibility can be to the adaptation process—indeed, as I argue
elsewhere, dramaturgy is the very lifeblood of stage adaptation.2
There were several factors influencing our decision to adapt this
novel.3 For one, the fact that Crane’s novel was in the public domain was
essential for us—our earlier attempts to secure rights to other literature
had been unsuccessful, so we embraced the freedom such a source-text
offered. Because our source-text was not managed by an estate or liv-
ing author, we could take creative risks and liberties that might not have
been possible otherwise. For this reason, as well as the financial real-
ity of royalties, experimental theatre companies often gravitate towards
adaptations of public domain material. 7 Stages is one such experimental
theatre, located in the historically ‘hip’ Little 5 district of Atlanta. The
Department of Theatre & Performance Studies (T&PS) at Kennesaw
State University (a public university with a history as a commuter school
serving a culturally diverse population) supplements its permanent cur-
riculum and season offerings with courses and productions led by profes-
sional theatre-makers from the Atlanta area; however, this was the first
partnership of its kind for T&PS. Michael and I had the opportunity of
a ‘soft opening,’ as part of the T&PS season—then, after two weeks off
(during which time we revised the script), we had one week to rehearse
the production in the studio theatre of 7 Stages, before our professional
run began.
In addition to material concerns about public domain, producing Red
Badge of Courage during a season that coincided with the 150th anni-
versary of the Kennesaw Mountain battle of the Civil War appealed to us
for the possible publicity this might generate as well as the dramaturgical
energy upon which we hoped to capitalize—if the city of Kennesaw was
 6  THE SPIRIT OF THE SOURCE: ADAPTATION DRAMATURGY …  123

going to spend time and devote labour to commemorating this battle,

our cast and crew could benefit from their research and outreach activi-
ties, we reasoned. These incentives alone would never motivate us to
undertake such a challenge, however—there were also several aesthetic
and personal reasons we wanted to adapt Red Badge. For Michael, who
is a Civil War devotee, Crane’s novel had burned a psychic imprint on
his soul: he loved the language and the spirit of the Youth’s story, and
had long been fascinated with the prospect of making theatre about the
Civil War. In my case, I was unfamiliar with Red Badge and Crane, but as
I encountered Crane’s poetic language and recognized the dissociative
patterns of trauma he was describing, I found myself drawn further into
the literary and historical world the author had conjured.
In US public schools, The Red Badge of Courage is often a required
text in junior high or early high school, and the basic story is fairly sim-
ple: a young man—Henry Fleming, first identified as ‘a youthful pri-
vate’—joins the Union army during the height of the American Civil
War, leaving his mother behind.4 He doubts that he will have the cour-
age to face the enemy in battle and indeed he does run away, eventu-
ally getting a head wound that others assume is his ‘red badge’ earned
in combat. Paradoxically, Henry is both a coward and a hero: he allows
his peers to believe he has honourably fought and survived a shot to the
head, but also comes to see the refined, more subtle ways of demonstrat-
ing courage, and the final lines of Crane’s novel suggest the Youth has
reached a peaceful resolution, that all is right with the world: ‘Over the
river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds’.
Most of the scholarship surrounding The Red Badge of Courage
focuses on interpretive strategies used to assess whether (and how)
Henry is a hero, and if he is not, whether (and how) he matures over
the course of the novel. Because Crane is deliberately ambiguous, the
novel ultimately ‘tests us nearly as much as it does Henry Fleming, elicit-
ing judgments that in turn judge us more than is true of most fictional
texts’.5 Mixing detailed naturalistic descriptions with a knack for ‘the
landscape of hysteria’, the author invites the reader to experience the
confusion and trauma of war.6 His great innovation, and what drew us to
the text, is the way Crane presents war ‘as a system of violent insatiabil-
ity’, emphasizing the perspective that combat ‘does not produce heroes;
it produces mangled bodies’.7 Thus, it is an ironic vision of war: on the
surface it appears to uphold heroism and manly battles, but upon reflec-
tion Crane’s tone is unmistakably wry, even sarcastic.
124  J. Barnette

How, then, might we adapt this text? How could we honour the
bloody ‘crimson blotches on the pages of the past’, while also embod-
ying the irony in the author’s voice?8 At the heart of these adaptation
decisions is a slippery concept that calls for greater attention, especially
when considering the process and product of adaptation: ‘the spirit of
the piece’. This notion—that a text has a spirit, and that we might arrive
at agreement about what the nature of that ‘spirit’ is—is crucial to the
approach I take as adaptation dramaturg. Above all else, it is this idea
that becomes the decisive factor in my desire to collaborate on any pro-
ject, but especially new adaptations like the one Michael and I created
with Red Badge. What I call spirit others might call ‘essence’—insofar
as they also seek to communicate the most vital part of the source-text.
While essence and spirit are both useful concepts to help articulate what
guides the creative work of adapting literature for the stage, my choice
of spirit stems from the word’s meaning of ‘the animating or vital prin-
ciple in man (and animals); that which gives life to the physical organ-
ism, in contrast to its purely material elements; the breath of life’.9 ‘The
breath of life’ can be seen as the transformation of a story from the sin-
gular experience of reading it on the page to the communal one of expe-
riencing it performed live—by adapting it for the stage, we give breath
and embodiment to stories. Also, unlike essence, spirit conveys a kind
of numinous energy—an encounter with something beyond the mate-
rial world (or things that might be experienced with the five senses) that
both fascinates and terrifies the reader. In The Idea of the Holy (1923),
Rudolf Otto coined the word numinous to refer the quality of a sacred
encounter. Otto defined numinous as that which evokes mysterium tre-
mendum et fascinans, or an ineffable experience to which we are power-
fully drawn and of which we are simultaneously terrified. The paradox
of being both attracted and repulsed suggests that this is an uncanny
encounter, that perhaps it registers as familiar and wholly unknown at
once, adding to the push–pull sensation of discovering the numinous.
In my experience as dramaturg of numerous adaptations, it is fre-
quently this numinous/uncanny quality that adapters target for trans-
formation into live performance. As others have argued, the stage is a
place of disappearance, surrogation, and ghosts—so it makes sense that
adapters would be drawn to these aspects when considering how to give
breath to literature for theatrical purposes.10 The centrality of breath
becomes even more visible in adaptations (like ours) that use puppets, as
the actors bring an inanimate object to life, making the puppet appear to
 6  THE SPIRIT OF THE SOURCE: ADAPTATION DRAMATURGY …  125

breathe. As Dassia Posner argues, ‘every puppet performance is, to some

degree, a performance of the ür-narrative of life’.11 That is, by choosing
to use puppetry (or to give life to an object), adapters emphasize the ani-
mating quality itself, an experience that is frequently uncanny for specta-
tors. Add to this the ephemeral nature of the stage, combined with the
collective memory of all who have walked the boards before—these fac-
tors might influence adapters’ inclusion of numinous scenes. Or perhaps
the nature of adaptation itself invites a focus on the uncanny—either way,
my research has suggested that by looking for the mysterium tremendum
et fascinans, we can better see the dramaturgical research undergirding
theatrical adaptations.
In the case of Red Badge of Courage, both Michael and I were par-
ticularly intrigued by the manner in which Crane narrates the introspec-
tion of the Youth (Henry Fleming)—the way that his imagination and
inner monologues transform through his experience with the ‘fog of
war’, through encounters with death and the dying, and what we came
to understand as a dissociative pattern not uncommon to survivors of
(natural and man-made) trauma. Whereas other adapters have cho-
sen to depict this inner life through monologues and character speech
(including narration), we decided not to include word-based narration
in our staging. Most extant theatrical adaptations of Red Badge are tar-
geted for young audiences, a genre that often employs narration and
storytelling techniques. In addition, these theatre for young audiences
(TYA) adaptations are frequently penned with the expectation of tour-
ing, meaning that the scenic designs for these tours are minimal.12 Not
only does Crane avoid using first person (with the exception of dialogue)
throughout the book, but the descriptive passages about the landscape
are so vivid that nature virtually becomes a character. Recognizing the
primacy of image and sound for Crane, we sought to capture the spirit of
this piece through three visual/aural narrative approaches: the portal, the
projected animation and musical score, and the puppet.
Our earliest conversations about the novel began with sharing the
impressions that stuck with us the most—while we had slightly differ-
ent examples, Michael and I both remembered the moments when the
Youth encountered death as our pivotal images. This organizing princi-
ple—the perception that, when boiled down to its core, Red Badge is
about the Youth’s terrifying yet mesmerizing experience of facing mor-
tality—influenced our scenic design with our inclusion of a portal. We
knew we wanted this portal to function metaphorically in addition to
126  J. Barnette

serving as an actual entrance or exit: we wanted to signal a threshold

between the world of the living and the dead, between the world that we
experience with our five senses and what lies beyond.
Because we kept referring to the ‘hell of war’, as well as the ‘fog of
war’, we decided to nudge those metaphors into the design—in early
discussions, I brought into the mix images of the medieval hellmouth,
as depicted in artwork as well as on vernacular religious drama stages,
as inspiration. Hellmouths, usually crafted as gaping beast mouths with
sharp teeth, featuring the scent of rotting animal flesh and filled with var-
ious (actors costumed as) demons, reminded audiences that hell is repul-
sive and terrifying, and coincided with the church-based message of this
type of medieval theatre: to repent and be saved from everlasting damna-
tion. While neither of us considered the source text particularly religious
(much less Christian), we were intrigued by the possibility of salvation
that we saw in the Youth’s encounters with death.
In our script, the earliest description of this portal states that it ‘is a
large hole [about four feet diameter, raised about three feet from the
floor] in the center of sheet [of fabric that stretches from the back wall
over the heads of the spectators] through which set pieces and perform-
ers may come and go’.13 In consultation with our student set designer
(Alyssa Brosy), the portal became a giant barrel of a gun, big enough for
actors to crawl through.14 The unnaturally large gun barrel, along with
the use of miniature muslin tents in the opening scene, establish a warp-
ing of scale that unmoors the audience from what is ‘natural’ or ‘real’.
By making the portal a larger-than-life rifle barrel, we absorbed the con-
cept of the feudal hellmouth into an industrial capitalist vision of life and
death. This coincided with other parts of our early conversations about
‘the spirit of the piece’, insofar as it represented a machine in the gar-
den, mirroring Crane’s consistent juxtaposition of the man-made world
of firearms and war with the challenges of the natural world, which often
prove to be just as inhospitable to the Youth.
Even so, the oversized barrel still functions as a sacred portal, and
its selective use underscores how it can be seen as a threshold space of
significance. For example, the first entrance through the barrel is made
by the puppet, manned by three puppeteers standing behind the barrel
(see Fig. 6.1). The sound effect is one of ‘distant rumbling’, meant to be
‘like birthing, the BIG BANG’.15 The next entrance through the barrel
is of another uncanny object—‘paper trees with tops shaped somewhat
like bullets, so that as they enter through the hole they seem like bullets
 6  THE SPIRIT OF THE SOURCE: ADAPTATION DRAMATURGY …  127

Fig. 6.1  The first entrance through the barrel is made by the puppet, manned
by three puppeteers standing behind the barrel. Photo credit Chris Burk of
Stungun Photography

exiting a gun barrel’.16 From the audience perspective, this moment first
seems familiar (a bullet coming out of a gun), before the entire prop is
seen. Once the objects are outside of the portal, they are recognized as
trees (or tree-like items), a transformation that is both surprising and
disquieting, as something that once appeared to be man-made (a bullet)
has been understood to be a (prop representing) a living natural thing
(a tree).17 The next use of the barrel as portal is when the Youth has
been wounded, when the puppet guides him through the barrel, as an
exit rather than an entrance. Following this, the lights rise on him sleep-
ing within the barrel after he has been discovered by his fellow soldiers.
In the black rage section, the Youth turns his back to the audience, faces
the barrel, and continues to reload and shoot at the screen animation.
The way the Youth processes those challenges was of particular inter-
est to us, insofar as it was both crucial to the source-text and (arguably)
potentially the most difficult part of Crane’s novel to dramatize. How
do you stage a journey of the mind, in the midst of a story about the
128  J. Barnette

Civil War? In the medium of literature that is typically read individually

and silently, the mental diversions and struggles of the Youth are immer-
sive, even against the backdrop of the battleground scenes and his close
encounters with death. But on stage, it is different. We could choose
to have the Youth tell the audience what he was thinking, in a series of
monologues, but since we had chosen to omit all other narration, this
felt out of place. We wanted the experience of watching the play to be
intense and visceral, a theatre of cruelty immersion into the terrible truth
of war that took inspiration from Antonin Artaud. Thus, we decided to
privilege image and sound over language, and depicted the Youth’s inner
thoughts through projected animations, supported by original music
composed by Damon Young.
While there are also instances where animation supported the mise en
scene more generally (e.g. establishing the time of day, weather, or loca-
tion), its primary purpose with regard to the adaptation dramaturgy was
to represent the Youth’s dreamlike and nightmarish thoughts. The first
time this occurs in our script is when the Youth daydreams about the
circus, while the army waits for their marching orders. ‘What did they
march us out here for?’ he asks. ‘The battle’s somewhere else. We’re
just a demonstration. I want to see some action!’18 As if queued by his
demand for action, on the screen we begin to see circus imagery and we
hear the barker say, ‘If it’s action you want, well then my boy, join the
circus parade!’ (see Fig. 6.2) The barker is played by the same actor who
plays the Lieutenant as well as Tall (or Jim Conklin), the soldier who
becomes a father-like mentor to the Youth. The fact that one actor plays
these three roles helps relay our intention that the advertisement of the
circus acts sound much like the pitching of the military—that buying
tickets is like signing up to join the army, that playing a shooting game is
like being in glorious battle, and so on. The frenetic energy of the circus
is matched by the chaotic rush to battle that follows on the tail of this
divertissement, as the images on the screen transform from circus activi-
ties like a magician and animals playing instruments to a large red rep-
tile—‘the swollen red animal’, in Crane’s words. At this point, the music
also changes from a circus parade to a war march, and the Lieutenant
rushes onstage, saying ‘You’ve got to hold’em back!’19 In the following
sequence, as the Youth encounters his first actual battle, the animation
continues to display his terror by morphing the red animal (a snake in
the Atlanta shows and a dragon in the Alabama production), so that it
eventually ‘vomits red bullets’ (see Fig. 6.3).
 6  THE SPIRIT OF THE SOURCE: ADAPTATION DRAMATURGY …  129

Fig. 6.2  The youth daydreams about the circus. Photo credit Robert Pack,
Widescreen Video Productions

The next symbolic use of the animation occurs near the end of the
play, but before I turn to that moment, I want to zero in on how the
music helps establish the pivotal death of the Tall soldier, who dies
before the Youth’s eyes in what Crane describes as a ‘hideous horn-
pipe’ of a macabre dance that almost resembles a grand mal seizure.
This encounter deeply affects the Youth, not only because he witnesses
the gruesome death of his closest friend but also because Tall dies the
way a soldier should die: from the wounds he has received during war,
130  J. Barnette

Fig. 6.3  Youth encounters his first actual battle, the animation continues to
display his terror by morphing into the red animal. Photo credit Robert Pack,
Widescreen Video Productions

because he stayed on the battleground and fought, rather than running

away from the danger (as the Youth has done). This extended death
scene stood out to us in the source-text as an event that lent itself quite
well to theatre: it is already dramatic and spectacular in the novel when
described by language alone—when embodied in live performance, it is
mesmerizing yet terrifying. Consider the theatricality of Crane’s descrip-
tion of Tall’s downward spiral (which we used as stage directions):
 6  THE SPIRIT OF THE SOURCE: ADAPTATION DRAMATURGY …  131

There is a resemblance in Jim to a devotee of a mad religion, blood-suck-

ing, muscle-wrenching, bone-crushing. […] Suddenly his form stiffens
and straightens. Then it is shaken by a prolonged ague. For a moment
the tremor of his legs causes him to dance a sort of hideous hornpipe. His
arms beat wildly about his head. His tall figure stretches itself to its full
height. Then it swings forward, slow and straight, in the manner of a fall-
ing tree. The body bounces on the earth.20

Dramaturgical research revealed that the hornpipe is a folk dance of

Celtic descent, with active legwork and folded or otherwise non-active
arms, sort of like a jig. The hideous (or grotesque) version of this might
exaggerate the disconnect between the legs and the rest of the body, as if
they were convulsing of their own accord, quite apart from the rest of his
wounded body.
The music for this section supports the frantic pace of the hornpipe,
with a forward-driving beat punctuated by a chord-playing fiddle. The
chords increase in intensity throughout the song, played during the stage
directions quoted above. Young’s ‘Hornpipe’ is surprisingly upbeat for
a swan song, but fits the bizarre explosive dance that accompanies Tall’s
strange death. For those who have read Crane, this passage was probably
memorable and yet seeing it in a live performance, with an actor mim-
icking those spasms accompanied by such agitating music, is likely more
extreme of an experience. The result is a dance that is both spellbinding
and horrific (see Fig. 6.4).
The Youth also gets wounded later in the story, but his injury comes
from an exasperated soldier who bashes him in the head with his rifle
butt, not from fighting the enemy in an honourable way. Nevertheless,
when he is discovered and nursed back to health by the Loud soldier,
the Youth never corrects his assumption that the wound was sustained
in battle, instead basking in the misplaced respect that his peers pay him.
This pride boils over into the next symbolic animation sequence, of the
Youth’s ‘black rage’, that rises when he and Loud charge the enemy and
seize the flag. Because our adaptation pulled in parts of the lost manu-
script from Crane’s earlier draft of Red Badge, featuring what we per-
ceived to be a complete loss of moral compass, this moment of rage was
important to symbolize as part of the Youth’s descent into madness. By
definition, rage is an uncontrolled and violent variant of anger—to sym-
bolize this loss of control, the animation imagery gets chaotic, as does
the music. For the Auburn production, the animation designer Matt
132  J. Barnette

Fig. 6.4  Bryan Mercer as ‘Tall’ in his death dance, the ‘hideous hornpipe’.
Photo credit Robert Pack, Widescreen Video Productions
 6  THE SPIRIT OF THE SOURCE: ADAPTATION DRAMATURGY …  133

Kizer created a swirling hypnotic effect for the black rage section that
suggested a blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy, as if the
Youth were undergoing (or spectators were invited to take part in) a
surreal expansion of consciousness.21 In so doing, the images projected
on the screen encouraged a psychedelic experience—not in the modern
sense of mind-altering drug usage, but from the Ancient Greek, meaning
to make the soul visible.22
Crucial to our understanding of the Youth’s journey was an analysis
that his quest for courage is about more than physical or mental bravery.
The Youth wants enlightenment, or to become his highest/best self, and
the war provides a convenient topos for an extraordinary experience that
might lead to this higher self. The puppet, therefore, became a physi-
cal manifestation of the Youth’s heightened consciousness. The puppet,
built with long rods and meant to be operated by two to three puppet-
eers, is costumed identically to the Youth and resembles him with the
striking exception that it has no facial expression or fully recognizable
face. Our request to puppet designer Tanner Slick was to build a ‘face-
less’ puppet; the resulting design achieved our goal by including eyes
(with what appears to be a concerned expression on the puppet’s fore-
head) but no mouth. The absence of a mouth allowed the puppet to
mirror the facial expression of the Youth, to morph more easily with a
spectator’s imagination. This detail became so important that when Slick
was commissioned to build another puppet for the Auburn remount of
Red Badge, we ultimately chose to use the original puppet, because the
newly designed one was too expressive—not only did he have a mouth,
but his eyes were chiselled out and there were deep nasolabial folds that
indicated age/wisdom, ultimately making the new puppet not functional
for the spirit of our production (see Fig. 6.5). In complement to this
design, the costume design in both productions featured a Kepi hat that
could be pulled low on the actors’ brow bones to hide their eyes, so that
only their mouths were visible. Thus, when functioning as puppeteer, the
half of the actor’s face that remained visible completed the part of the
puppet’s face that was absent.
The simultaneous presence of the puppeteer and the puppet brings
attention to the theatricality of the action in Red Badge, heightening
the visual meta-narrative onstage. By virtue of having a puppet onstage,
before even considering the role the puppet plays in the adaptation, the
audience is encouraged to consider the ‘spirit of the piece’, insofar as ‘a
puppet is by its very nature dead, whereas an actor is by her very nature
134  J. Barnette

Fig. 6.5  Two puppet designs by Tanner Slick; Photo Credit Parker Stripling

alive. The puppet’s work then … is to strive towards life’.23 Our adap-
tation, both in script and staging, further emphasizes this ür-narrative,
adding to it the quality of striving towards heightened consciousness.
The puppet appears four times in our stage adaptation: first, dur-
ing a dreamlike memory/premonition sequence at the top of the play,
 6  THE SPIRIT OF THE SOURCE: ADAPTATION DRAMATURGY …  135

then when he encounters the corpse in the ‘chapel of trees’, again

when the Youth is injured accidentally, and at the end of the play, when
the puppet carries a folded flag (see Fig. 6.6). While the initial and
final appearance of the puppet function primarily as framing devices
to establish the disconnect between the Youth’s imagination or visions
and his reality, the middle two appearances are tied directly to the pup-
pet as a visible object that stands in for the concept of the Youth’s
enlightened self, as well as his very survival.

Fig. 6.6  At the end of the play, the puppet carries a folded flag, marching
through the portal. Photo credit Robert Pack, Widescreen Video Productions
136  J. Barnette

By directing the puppeteers to make the Red Badge puppet float in

mid-air, we further emphasized the numinous quality of the puppet.
This aspect, in addition to the fact that only the Youth interacts with the
puppet, helps spectators recognize that the puppet is a figment of the
Youth’s imagination, or that the puppet can be seen only by the sixth
sense, as a ghost or spirit of sorts.
In the first of these midpoint instances, the Youth has just run away
from battle for the first time—in fear for his life, he does what he has
been contemplating doing for some time: he escapes the carnage to
protect himself, and in so doing abandons his fellow soldiers. He justi-
fies this cowardly act by telling himself (and the audience) that ‘I done
good saving myself, just a little piece of the army … if none of the lit-
tle pieces were smart enough to save themselves, why, where would the
army be then?’24 Although his words appear to justify the actions, inside
he remains torn (‘his brain in a tumult of agony and despair’) and he
retreats further into a forest, which Crane describes as featuring a ‘reli-
gious half-light’, and containing a ‘chapel of trees’. This experience is
meant to be numinous, and offers the Youth an opportunity for redemp-
tion through an encounter with his own mortality when he finds the
corpse in short order. To guide him along this extraordinary path, the
puppet appears and hovers over the Youth’s shoulder. Within the forest,
represented on stage by two actors embodying trees, the Youth happens
upon the corpse of a fallen soldier.25 This dead man, in Crane’s words
(used as stage directions in our script), ‘is dressed in a uniform that had
once been blue, but is now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes,
staring at the Youth, are the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish.
The mouth is open. Its red has changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray
skin of the face run little ants’.26 The puppet reaches out to the Youth
and turns his head to face the corpse, at which sight he nearly faints,
falling to the ground in shock. Once more the puppet approaches the
Youth, with the intention of having him look death courageously in the
face. The Youth cannot stomach the sight, and pushes the puppet away,
keeping his gaze shielded from the corpse. In defeat, the puppet exits,
and the encounter is incomplete—the opportunity for numinous wisdom
is thwarted.
In this scene, there are two puppets—the corpse and the primary pup-
pet, but only the latter moves.27 Still, the design of the corpse puppet
matters here, as it stems from our adaptation vision, or what we inter-
preted as ‘the spirit of the text’. Without question, we intended for the
 6  THE SPIRIT OF THE SOURCE: ADAPTATION DRAMATURGY …  137

corpse puppet to evoke shock, to make spectators feel some of the same
push–pull energy that the Youth feels upon seeing this dead man. To
achieve this, in both productions the designers created puppets that were
uncanny in their likeness to a skeletal human figure, with ample decom-
position of the ‘flesh’ made apparent by the black light that we used to
illuminate the portal in which the corpse sat. By using ultraviolet paint
on the corpse-puppet, the designers could draw attention to the fig-
ure immediately, as it was dark elsewhere on stage and this was the only
instance of black light used, emphasizing how unique this encounter was.
The next time the puppet appears is when the Youth sustains his con-
cussion, and falls dizzily to the ground. Helping him to his feet, the
puppet checks on the Youth with concern, but when the Youth reaches
out to grab the puppet, hoping to cradle him in his arms, the puppet
dodges him, maintaining a close distance. As the Youth stumbles across
the stage, the puppet gently guides him upstage toward the portal/gun
barrel, and nudges him to enter it. He crawls through the hole and the
lights fade out; when they come back up we see the Youth’s silhouette
on the projection screen, staggering about.
Throughout both of these middle puppet sequences, because the pup-
pet appears when the Youth is alone and in need, the audience associ-
ates the puppet with the Youth, even if spectators remain uncertain as
to the exact nature of the puppet’s being (is he real or imagined?) or the
purpose of his visits. While they may have different ways of describing
it, most spectators also recognize that the puppet represents a numinous
creature, in part because of the uncanny nature of puppets as animated
dolls, though here this is further emphasized by the times the puppet
appears onstage as well as its specific design—to resemble the Youth in
small scale, but without a mouth or fully designed face.
By animating the more enlightened part of the Youth’s conscious-
ness as a puppet, this adaptation uses primarily the visual language of the
stage to articulate what we saw as the ‘spirit of the piece’. The specta-
cle of puppetry, combined with the projected animations, original music,
and live silhouette work, give breath to both the Youth’s inner mental
state and the disquieting irony of war that we understood as Crane’s
vision in Red Badge. The frame of the adaptation—a brief opening and
closing chorus of sorts—shows where we took the most liberty in depart-
ing from the familiar novel’s dialogue, in service to our overall vision.
In particular, the ending to our Red Badge demonstrates the merge
between new play and production dramaturgy that is adapturgy in two
138  J. Barnette

distinct but related ways. First, our closing choral scene refracted our
opening one, by including key lines from the script, but assigning them
to different characters. For example, while the Youth originally says ‘Yeh
ain’t at all like yeh was’ to Loud, in the last choral section (which takes
place directly after the ‘black rage’ scene where the Youth erupts in a
shooting mania, continuing to shoot well after the threat is gone), it is
the Sarcastic Soldier who says this line to him, as he leaves the stage.
Perhaps the most noticeable bookend is the repetition of the haunt-
ing Victory song that occurs at the top of the show, in this final choral
moment, and in the middle, just before Tattered’s scene with Youth:

Sing a song of Victory

Pocket full of bullets
Five and Twenty dead men
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened
The dead began to sing
Wasn’t that a dainty dish
To set before the King.

The repetition of these lines along with their placement highlight how
adapturgy shaped our directing concept for staging Red Badge—the rec-
ognition that war warps the way soldiers perceive reality.
Thus, rather than ending on a hopeful note (as the published novel
does), Michael and I chose to honour the ambiguity and irony that
we most admired in Crane’s voice. As part of the process of creat-
ing the script (that is, within the framework of new play dramaturgy),
I researched the publication history of The Red Badge of Courage.
Serendipitously, the version of the novel I first encountered included
chapters and sections that were not in the book as it is commonly
known.28 Several pages from his original manuscript, including the
entirety of Chap. XII, never made it into the Appleton publication of
1895, probably because they could be read as blasphemous.29 According
to Henry Binder, who made the reestablishment of the missing text his
personal academic mission, the omission of these pages makes the final
chapter of the published Red Badge ‘erratic and confusing [as it] termi-
nates on an inappropriate note’.30 In the deleted sections, especially in
the original Chap. XII, the Youth positions himself above nature, as a
‘prophet’ who philosophizes a ‘new world modeled by the pain of life’.31
 6  THE SPIRIT OF THE SOURCE: ADAPTATION DRAMATURGY …  139

Michael and I decided to reclaim several passages from this lost chap-
ter, adding them to the finale, so that the Youth’s last words are: ‘I am
entirely different from other men. I am the prophet of a new world. The
laws of life are useless. I abandon the world!’32
As he spoke these lines to the audience, the actor playing the Youth
climbed up on top of the gun barrel with the flag he captured, waving it
aloft as he opened his eyes abnormally wide.33 The image was one of a
man who has lost his grip on reality, a man who is hallucinating and who,
in his passionate commitment to these visions, is terrifying in his egoma-
niacal power. Directly following this proclamation, the puppet begins to
march slowly through the portal, holding a folded flag. The final image
is of the faceless puppet looking up into the audience, as the lights dim.
The result of these adapturgy interventions was an adaptation that
fully utilized the possibilities of live performance, by focusing on spec-
tacle and unmooring the tidy resolution that poetic justice offers in the
published novel. Our use of the portal, projections, and the puppet to
articulate visually the daydreams, terror, and dissociation that Crane
describes with the written word honoured the spirit of the piece without
spoken narration. In so doing we highlighted the numinous possibilities
of stage adaptation, creating a Red Badge that was uncanny for spectators
with either experience of war or with Crane’s novel. For those audience
members especially, watching our adaptation was simultaneously familiar
and strange, nostalgic, and horrible.

Notes
1. Recent books on theatrical adaptation include Theatre and Adaptation:
Return, Rewrite, Repeat, edited by Margherita Laera (Bloomsbury,
2014), Page to Stage: the Craft of Adaptation, by Vincent Murphy (U of
Michigan P, 2013), and Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film,
edited by Katja Krebs (Routledge, 2014). The December 2014 issue of
Theatre Journal was also dedicated to Theatre and Adaptation. For more
on adaptation dramaturgy, see my book Adapturgy: The Dramaturg’s Art
and Theatrical Adaptation (Southern Illinois UP, 2017).
2. My reference to the “dramaturgical sensibility” is a nod to the ground-
breaking book, Towards a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and
Journey, by Geoffrey S. Proehl, with Kugler, Lamos, and Lupu (Farleigh
Dickinson UP, 2011). For more about adapturgy, see my essay, “Literary
Adaptation for the Stage: A Primer for Dramaturgs”. in The Routledge
Companion to Dramaturgy, edited by Magda Romanska (2014).
140  J. Barnette

3. A common critique of adaptations is that they serve material needs, rather
than aesthetic ones. Both Linda Hutcheon and Julie Sanders address
this concern in their books on adaptation (A Theory of Adaptation and
Adaptation and Appropriation, respectively). For a sociological analysis
of the machinery behind book-to-film adaptations, see Simone Murray’s
The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary
Adaptation (Routledge, 2012).
4. Most Crane scholars agree that the likely setting for the events that
occur (from the Union’s perspective) in The Red Badge of Courage is the
Battle of Chancellorsville, a surprising victory for the Confederacy that
included the second bloodiest day of the Civil War (2 May 1863). While
the Union outnumbered the Confederates by 2 to 1, their leader (Joseph
Hooker, a Union Army Major General) was not as decisive as General
Robert E. Lee. Among the wounded was Lt. Gen. Thomas ‘Stonewall’
Jackson, who was accidentally hit by friendly fire and ultimately died of
his wounds in this battle.
5. Lee Clark Mitchell, “Introduction.” New Essays on The Red Badge of
Courage, ed. Mitchell (Cambridge UP, 1986), 20.
6. David Weimer, The City as Metaphor (Random, 1966), 52. Qtd. in Robert
Butler, “Richard Wright’s ‘Between the World and Me’ and the Chapel
Scene in Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage”; A Literary Relationship.
CLA Journal 53.4 (2010): 375.
7. Adam H. Wood, “‘Crimson Blotches on the Pages of the Past’: Histories
of Violence in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.” War,
Literature & the Arts 21 (2009), 50.
8. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (Signet Classics, 2011 reprint), 5.
9. Oxford English Dictionary, 1a.
10. I refer to Joseph Roach’s theory of “surrogation,” Peggy Phelan’s empha-
sis on ephemerality, and Marvin Carlson’s notion of ghosting. See:
Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (Columbia
UP, 1996), Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge,
2004), and Carlson’s The Haunted Stage: the Theatre as Memory Machine
(U Michigan P, 2001).
11. Dassia N. Posner, “The Dramaturg(ies) of Puppetry and Visual Theatre,”
in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, 337. Posner references Basil
Jones, “Puppetry an Authorship,” in Jane Taylor’s Handspring Puppet
Company (Krut, 2009), 255.
12. See, for example, the TYA adaptations by Kathryn Schultz Miller (1990)
and Joe Sutton (2005). Both of these adaptations use narration (in
Sutton’s version it is an old man remembering his experience with war;
Miller’s take has an outright narrator character). A more recent TYA
adaptation by Eric Schmiedl uses hip–hop lyrics rapped by ‘The Voice’
 6  THE SPIRIT OF THE SOURCE: ADAPTATION DRAMATURGY …  141

to give life to Henry’s conscience (2013), to mixed reviews. One excep-

tion to the young audience storytelling approach is Catherine Bush’s
take, which does not include a narrator; instead, her play uses flashbacks
and dream sequences to move fluidly between the battlefield and Henry’s
memories of home (2011).
13. Michael Haverty and Jane Barnette, adapters, Red Badge of Courage (ver-
sion 2), 2.
14. Haverty and Barnette, adapters, Red Badge of Courage (version 6), 1.
For the Auburn production, Fereshteh Rostampour (a professor in the
department of Theatre) was the lighting and set designer.
15. Ibid., emphasis in original.
16. Ibid., 11.
17. In the Auburn production, this sequence was different: instead of trees
that appeared to be bullets, we used real tree branches, carried by actors
who entered from either side of the projection screen.
18. Haverty and Barnette (version 6), 5. Catherine Bush’s adaptation
also uses memories of the circus as a flashback sequence in her stage
adaptation.
19. Haverty and Barnette (version 6), 6.
20. These sections are taken virtually verbatim from Chap. IX in Crane’s
novel. 60.
21. For the Atlanta-area productions, Kristin Haverty was the animation
designer.
22. The etymology of psychedelic, according to the Oxford English
Dictionary, is ‘a borrowing from Greek, combined with an English ele-
ment,’ wherein ‘psyche’ means mind, soul, or spirit, and ‘del’ comes from
a Greek word that means ‘to make manifest, reveal’.
23. Basil Jones 254, qtd. in Posner 337.
24. Haverty and Barnette (version 6), 10.
25. Here I refer to the Auburn production, wherein the actors used real tree
branches to signify their transformation into trees. As aforementioned, in
the Atlanta productions, the trees were large props, designed to look like
bullets as they entered through the portal.
26. Haverty and Barnette (version 6), 11. See Chap. VIV in Crane.
27. In the Atlanta version of this production, there were actually three pup-
pets—the third was a worm puppet, designed to crawl out of the corpse’s
mouth when the Youth first encounters him.
28. Because this was my first encounter with Stephen Crane altogether, I did
not initially realize that the novel I read was so different from the one
Michael knew and loved.
29. The blasphemy stems from the fact that in these excised passages, Henry
proclaims his dominance over all things, as if he himself were a god.
142  J. Barnette

30. Henry Binder, “The ‘Red Badge of Courage’ Nobody Knows.” Studies in

the Novel. 10.1 (1978), 25.
31. Crane, qtd. in Binder 12.
32. Haverty and Barnette (version 6), 29.
33. In the Atlanta-based productions (at KSU and 7 Stages), Josh Brook
played the Youth. Other cast members included: Bryan Mercer (Tall/
Lieutenant/Tompkins), Devon Hales (Mama/Tattered), Laura Driskill
(Loud), and Megan Jance (Sarcastic/General). In the Auburn produc-
tion, David Tourtellotte played the role of the Youth, and in this scene he
stood (waving a flag) atop a fallen tree trunk that was our primary scenic
design object for the Auburn production. Other cast members included:
Steven Hatcher (Tall/Lieutenant/Tompkins), Tara Folio (Mama/
Tattered), Michael Sanders (Loud), and Alexander Horn (Sarcastic/
General).
 CHAPTER 7

Have We Found Anne Frank? A Critical

Analysis of Theater Amsterdam’s Anne

Samantha Mitschke

In Adaptation and Appropriation, Julie Sanders states that an adapta-

tion ‘signals a relationship with an informing sourcetext [sic] or origi-
nal’; a version of the said text that, despite various and/or fundamental
changes (such as a cinematic version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet), remains
‘an ostensible and recognisable rendition’ of it (2006: 26). Such a defi-
nition echoes that of Patrice Pavis, who in his Dictionary of the Theatre
(1998) offers a total of three definitions for ‘adaptation’. In very basic
terms they are as follows: ‘The re-casting of a work from one genre into
another’; ‘dramaturgical work based on the text to be staged’; and ‘trans-
lation or a more or less faithful transposition’ (1998: 14). Of primary
interest in the context of this chapter is the assertion of both Pavis and
Sanders regarding the ‘infidelity’ of an adaptation towards its source text.
Pavis declares that ‘To adapt is to entirely rewrite the text, using it as
raw material’ (ibid, 14), while Sanders concurs that ‘it is usually at the
very point of infidelity that the most creative acts of adaptation […] take
place’ (2006: 20).

S. Mitschke (*) 
Independent Scholar, London, UK
e-mail: sxm553@alumni.bham.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 143

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_7
144  S. Mitschke

If to adapt is to ‘rewrite the text’ in such a manner as to be deemed

‘unfaithful’ to it, then, what are the ramifications of adapting a histori-
cal document for the stage—specifically, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young
Girl? Frank is the most famous victim of the Holocaust and her diary
continues to be read by millions throughout the world, having been
translated into over 60 languages. The Diary exists in multiple forms,
including plays, films, artwork, cartoons, and musicals; as Ian Baruma
(1998) sardonically remarked, ‘About the only thing we haven’t seen
so far is Anne Frank on Ice’. In this chapter I am going to address
three stage adaptations of the Diary: The Diary of Anne Frank (1956)
by American husband-and-wife Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett,
arguably the most famous piece of Holocaust theatre in the world;
Anne Frank: A Play (1952/1967) by American writer Meyer Levin1;
and Anne (2014), by Dutch husband-and-wife Jessica Durlacher and
Leon de Winter. I will begin with a brief examination of the Levin and
Goodrich and Hackett adaptations, with a particular focus on their
respective emphases on ‘Jewish’ and ‘universal’ perspectives brought
about by highly-specific readings of the Diary. I posit that the ‘real’
Anne Frank has been obfuscated through these readings, most notably
in view of the fact that the Goodrich & Hackett adaptation has had a
huge influence in shaping how Anne Frank is perceived in popular con-
sciousness—particularly in the sentimentalising of her story. I suggest
that the inherent problems with each adaptation—the loss of Anne
Frank behind the playwrights’ projections of her—have arisen from the
playwrights’ attempts to stay ‘faithful’ to the original text. In a critical
analysis of Anne, the Durlacher and de Winter adaptation, I will explore
how it differs from the other two adaptations through Durlacher and
de Winter’s use of imagination and, at times, outright infidelity to the
text. Key aspects of the adaptation which I will interrogate are: the set-
ting of the opening scene in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen;
the change of location throughout the play between post-war Paris and
wartime Amsterdam; the development of Peter Schiff 2 into a full char-
acter and active participant in driving the story forwards. Finally, I will
examine the play’s conclusion, which does not have a definitive ending—
or more specifically, an ending which does not finish with a conclusive
statement from the character of Anne regarding her beliefs, hopes, or
ideals. Ultimately, I posit that the Durlacher and de Winter adaptation
successfully enables the spectator to ‘find’ an Anne Frank who is relevant
to the contemporary moment, specifically through its infidelity and the
 7  HAVE WE FOUND ANNE FRANK? A CRITICAL …  145

‘empathic projection of the adapters’: that is, their ability to place them-
selves in Anne’s situation and to view it through Anne’s eyes.

The History of the Diary and Controversy Surrounding

Its Adaptation
In 1933, following Hitler’s rise to power and increasing anti-Semitism,
the then-four-year-old Anne Frank, her parents Edith and Otto and
older sister Margot emigrated from Frankfurt to Amsterdam. After the
Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the Franks were eventually
forced into hiding in the so-called ‘Secret Annexe’ above Otto’s busi-
ness premises in July 1942, along with Hermann van Pels (van Daan)—a
friend of Otto’s—his wife Auguste, and their son Peter. (Anne gave pseu-
donyms to everyone in her diary. When editing it Otto chose to use the
real names of his family and Anne’s pseudonyms for the others.) Anne
began keeping a diary, recording her hopes and fears as well as accounts
of life in hiding. The two families were aided by Otto’s Dutch employ-
ees, and in November 1942 Fritz Pfeffer (Albert Dussel)3 joined them.
On 4 August 1944, the occupants of the Secret Annexe were discovered
and arrested by the Nazis. Anne’s diaries—comprising various notebooks
and loose sheets—were gathered up for safekeeping by one of the fami-
ly’s helpers. Anne died at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945; out of the eight
people who had gone into hiding, only Otto Frank survived. Liberated
from Auschwitz in January 1945, Otto returned to Amsterdam where
Anne’s diary was given to him by Miep Gies, Otto’s employee and one
of the family’s Christian helpers. Through Otto’s efforts the diary was
finally published in Dutch in June 1947; British and American edi-
tions were published in 1952 by Vallentine, Mitchell and Doubleday
(Lee 1999: 217–225). The Diary became an instant bestseller upon its
American release, attributed in part to an ecstatic review by Meyer Levin
in the New York Times Book Review (Levin 1973: 58–59).
Levin, then a forty-four-year-old writer, first read the Diary in August
1950. As a battle correspondent during the war he was one of the first
Americans to see the newly liberated concentration camps and, trans-
formed by what he had witnessed, felt an urgency to tell the story of the
Holocaust (Lee 2002: 187). Simultaneously, he felt that only those who
had suffered from the Holocaust directly had the right to do so: ‘Some
day [sic] a teller would arise from amongst themselves’ (Levin 1950:
146  S. Mitschke

174). After reading the Diary Levin ‘fell in love with it’4 and wrote to
Otto Frank, suggesting the possibility of adapting it into a play and/or
film, and Otto eventually agreed.5 In 1951 Otto accepted a publishing
deal with Doubleday (Lee 2002: 196), and in March 1952 Levin was
assigned to write the aforementioned review of the Diary. He ‘was con-
fident the diary would find someone to transfer it to the stage […] and
[…] felt he could write the adaptation.’ (Ibid, 198) When the Diary
was published days after Levin’s review, every copy of the five thousand
printed had been sold by the afternoon, with a further fifteen thousand
being rushed through (Ibid, 201); Broadway producers had already
begun calling Doubleday about dramatic rights (Levin 1973: 59).
Levin told Otto that his sole wish was to write the adaptation and
Otto concurred, wanting Levin to work on it in order to ‘guarantee
[the] idea of [the] book’ (Lee 2002: 202). However, while Levin wished
to use Anne as a ‘Jewish’ example of the results of hatred and persecu-
tion, Otto wanted a ‘universal’ Anne and made his views clear: ‘It is not
a Jewish book […] though Jewish sphere, sentiment and surrounding is
in the background. […] It is (at least here) read and understood more
by gentiles than in Jewish circles.6 […] So do not make a Jewish play out
of it!’7 Levin replied that his emphasis was ‘on the lack of opportunities
open to Jewish writers’ rather than the ‘Jewish quality of the material’8;
yet his determination to write a ‘Jewish’ Anne persisted.
After conversations with Otto, Cheryl Crawford was chosen as a pro-
ducer for the adaptation in June 1952, which Levin was to write on
condition that, if his adaptation was not ‘right’, another writer would
be hired for ‘extra work’.9 Levin began work but, after talks with
Doubleday, Otto—in a bid to prevent Levin from becoming fixated
upon a ‘Jewish’ Anne—told him that he should work with another writer
(Lee 2002: 203). Crawford read Levin’s first draft and pronounced in
its favour, but days later changed her mind and announced that she did
not like it and that it did not have enough potential for Levin to con-
tinue working on it. At Crawford’s suggestion Levin approached Kermit
Bloomgarden, who had successfully produced major Broadway plays
such as the premiere of Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) (Graver
1995: 43). Bloomgarden also rejected Levin’s script and Levin wrote
to Crawford, asserting that as she had not opposed the script on the
grounds of ‘dramatic technique’ the agreement between them there-
fore did not apply, and he asked her to step aside as producer, with-
out involving Otto, to allow his work to be staged.10 However, Otto
 7  HAVE WE FOUND ANNE FRANK? A CRITICAL …  147

had already concluded that Levin was not the right adapter—‘From
this moment on, my confidence in Levin’s script was vanishing’ (Otto
Frank in Lee 2002: 211)—and Otto’s lawyer wrote to Levin in October
1952, urging him to observe the original agreement with Crawford.11
After protracted negotiations, on 21 November Levin signed an agree-
ment ‘under protest’ which allowed him one month to find a producer
from a list approved by Crawford and Otto’s lawyer (Graver 1995: 47).
After that time Levin would have to relinquish his adaptation rights and
Otto could engage any writer and producer that he wished (Lee 2002:
213). However, for various reasons—from rejection to doubts over the
play’s suitability—Levin’s adaptation was not accepted; Levin was forced
to renounce his rights and Crawford, foreseeing trouble to come, with-
drew from the project (Graver 1995, 46–49; 69). Kermit Bloomgarden
made an offer to Otto to produce the as yet unwritten adaptation and
was accepted. After having read that a non-Jewish writer might adapt the
diary, Levin wrote to Otto: ‘I will not stand for this. I will write about it
wherever I can’ (Graver 1995: 52). Levin’s obsession with the idea of a
non-Jewish writer adapting Anne’s diary grew. While Otto sympathized
with Levin and was even unsure as to how fairly he had been treated, he
remained unconvinced that a Jewish writer was necessary or even desira-
ble (Lee 2002: 214–215). In November 1953 husband and wife Frances
Goodrich and Albert Hackett were hired to write the new adaptation.
They had started their respective careers in theatre before writing com-
edies and musicals for the big screen and generated commercial success
in films such as The Thin Man (1934) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).
They had no definitive religious or political views and were renowned
for their social pluralism and liberal standpoint; concurring with Otto’s
beliefs, the pair created a ‘universal’ Anne for the stage.
Subsequently Levin perceived that both his own and Anne’s Jewish
identities were being stifled and denounced the new adaptation at every
opportunity; Otto ultimately ceased all personal communications with
him (Graver 1995: 80–83). In December 1954 Levin attempted to sue
Crawford, alleging that she had fraudulently induced Otto to break the
contract of March 1952; he also attempted to sue Otto, asserting that
he was fighting for the right to have Anne’s voice (and so that of the
Jewish people) heard. Goodrich and Hackett’s adaptation previewed in
1955, and Levin instigated a new lawsuit against Otto and Bloomgarden
for plagiarism (Graver 1995: 94–104). In an out-of-court settlement
Levin received ‘$15,000 for agreeing to give up all claims’ (Goodrich
148  S. Mitschke

2001: 237). Yet Levin continued with his campaign, including send-
ing out various petitions; continually attempting to present his case in
the American and British press; and even querying if Otto had survived
Auschwitz at the cost of his family’s lives.12 His fight continued for the
ensuing twenty-nine years following Crawford’s rejection of his script
until his death in July 1981, with his reputation as a writer tarnished by
the decades-long controversy. While Anne Frank was finally produced at
Boston’s Lyric Stage in 1983 by Mordecai S. Kaplan, and again in 1991,
it has not been staged since; Goodrich and Hackett’s The Diary of Anne
Frank is regularly performed by amateur and professional theatre compa-
nies throughout the world.

Empathic Processes and ‘Fidelity’ to the Text

But what does any of this controversy have to do with ‘fidelity’ to the
original text of the Diary? Primarily, it shows just how much interpreta-
tion is involved in adapting a text. A key example can be found within
Levin’s continued assertions that Anne’s Jewish identity was being sup-
pressed. While Levin’s own Jewish identity and wartime experiences led
him to read the Diary in terms of its Jewish context, the secular and apo-
litical Goodrich and Hackett saw the Diary through a ‘universal’ lens.
The playwrights thus identified more with those aspects of the origi-
nal text that corresponded with their own beliefs and identity politics.
Moreover, I suggest that such aspects were additionally influenced by
empathic processes. Broadly speaking there are two main forms of empa-
thy: ‘affective empathy’, in this instance constituting an ‘appropriate’
emotional response to the situation of another (Baron-Cohen 2011: 11),
and ‘cognitive empathy’ or ‘perspective-taking’, which involves placing
oneself imaginatively in the position of another person (Zillmann 1994:
90). Affective and cognitive empathy are not usually mutually exclusive
and take place concurrently, resulting in a ‘complex imaginative pro-
cess’ (Coplan 2004: 143). Levin’s response in terms of affective empathy
towards Anne—through the medium of her diary—was distress at the
realization of her fate, coupled with a desire to tell her story (coincid-
ing with Anne’s own wishes in relation to the publication of her work).
Goodrich and Hackett underwent similar responses in the context of the
aspiration to tell her story and sorrow over Anne’s death: for example, in
January 1954 Frances Goodrich recorded: ‘Terrible emotional impact. I
cry all the time’ (Goodrich 2001: 207).
 7  HAVE WE FOUND ANNE FRANK? A CRITICAL …  149

In the context of cognitive empathy, Goodrich, Hackett, and Levin

deployed perspective-taking in a number of ways. For example, Levin
had visited Bergen-Belsen during his time in liberated Europe and sub-
sequently was able to envisage what Anne’s experiences would have been
like before her death. While adapting the Diary Goodrich and Hackett
travelled to Amsterdam and visited places such as the Secret Annexe
(Goodrich 2001: 214). As well as viewing pertinent geographical spaces
from Anne’s perspective, the adapters likewise sought to imaginatively
place themselves in Anne’s position. I suggest that this imaginative
standpoint, especially in terms of aspects such as Anne’s feelings towards
those whom she was in hiding with, was made significantly easier by
the fact that Anne herself recorded those feelings in detail. However, as
stated by Peter Goldie (2011), individuals are not able to entirely sepa-
rate themselves and their experiences from the person whose perspective
they seek to take. Goldie defines two types of perspective-taking. The
first is ‘empathetic perspective-shifting’, which is ‘consciously and inten-
tionally shifting your perspective […] to imagine being the other person,
and thereby sharing in […their] thoughts, feelings, decisions’ etc (Ibid,
302). The second is ‘in-his-shoes perspective-shifting’, which is similar
to the definition above but involves ‘shifting your perspective […] to
imagine what thoughts, feelings, decisions and so on you would arrive
at if you were in the other’s circumstances’ (Ibid, 302) These definitions
are similar to two concepts developed by Lakoff and Johnson: ‘empathic
projection’ and ‘advisory projection’ (Ibid, 281). ‘Empathic projection’
occurs when an observer places themselves in the situation of another
person and views it with that person’s values (Ibid, 281). ‘Advisory pro-
jection’ takes place when the observer perceives the situation of someone
else but imposes their own values upon it (Ibid, 281). As I have stated,
the perspective-taking of Levin and Goodrich and Hackett was shaped
by their experiences and beliefs, and these are demonstrated by the mes-
sage that the respective adapters declared that they wanted their work
to convey. For Levin, Anne’s story was about the struggle of Jewish
identity and the consequences of racism and prejudice in the context
of the fate of Europe’s Jews. For Goodrich and Hackett, Anne’s story
was a ‘universal’ warning against hatred and prejudice, told through the
medium of an archetypal teenaged girl. On one hand the adapters were
‘faithful’ to the original text in that they reflected these views and events
surrounding them—at various points expressed by Anne throughout
her diary, and ranging from her questioning of God and the fate of the
150  S. Mitschke

Jews (2002: 261–262) to her quarrels with her mother (41) and grow-
ing feelings for Peter van Daan (205). At the same time, the playwrights
were not entirely ‘faithful’ to the source text: for example, both adapta-
tions include entirely fictional scenes in which Anne removes the Star of
David from her clothing, and Goodrich and Hackett invented a scene
in which Mr van Daan steals bread from the communal cupboard (2.3).
While such scenes demonstrate the innate creativity of the adapters, I
suggest that such ‘creativity’ is, in this case, inherently problematic. The
‘unfaithful’ scenes are created in such a way as to lay further emphasis on
to the ‘Anne’ that the playwrights envisioned and identified with—not
as she really was in her diary. For instance, in the bread-stealing scene
Goodrich and Hackett endow Anne with adult sensibilities in a situation
that Mrs. Frank reacts to with near-hysterical anger; Anne tearfully urges
her mother to reconsider her demand that Mr van Daan and his fam-
ily be expelled from the Annexe (2.3). However, Anne probably would
have reacted differently; commenting upon the greed of Dussel at meal-
times, she wrote: ‘I […] feel like […] knocking him off his chair and
throwing him out of the door’ (2002: 169). The playwrights therefore
conceived a notion of who Anne was and moulded their readings of the
Diary to fit this conception, not the other way around, building a frame-
work from elements of the original text and fleshing this out with their
own creations. While they are perhaps ‘faithful’ to the text in terms of
their specific readings of it, and ‘unfaithful’ in terms of their creation of
new scenes, overall they are ‘unfaithful’ to the historical figure presented
in the Diary in that they present a skewed and at times false image of
her. At the beginning of the Diary Anne is spoilt, self-centred, and dom-
ineering, jealously craving of her father’s love and attention, dismissive
and critical of her mother, and petulant towards her sister. These atti-
tudes did change as Anne’s diary and life in hiding continued. Yet Anne’s
egocentric traits are lessened in Goodrich and Hackett’s adaptation, and
any negative behaviour that she does display is excused through being
attributed to the whims of a child. The child-like nature of Goodrich and
Hackett’s Anne is accentuated through moments such as her removing
her underwear in front of strangers (1.2), trying on Margot’s bra, walk-
ing in high heels for the first time, and experiencing her first kiss (2.2).
Goodrich and Hackett’s adaptation is therefore largely responsible for
the sentimentalizing and romanticizing of Anne’s story and Anne herself.
This is deeply ironic given that Goodrich and Hackett’s impression of
Anne is the most central one in popular consciousness today and is often
 7  HAVE WE FOUND ANNE FRANK? A CRITICAL …  151

believed to be a ‘translation’ in Pavis’ sense of the word: a ‘more or less

faithful transposition’ (1998: 14).
If the figure of Anne Frank and the ‘message’ of her diary are so
securely fixed in public perception via Goodrich and Hackett’s adapta-
tion, then, to what purpose was the creation of a new adaptation—
particularly one which, as I shall discuss shortly, aroused criticism in
the press for its apparent presentation as part of a ‘nice evening out’
(Liphshiz 2014)?

Durlacher and de Winter: Updating Anne Frank for a

New Generation
In a 2013 article, Jessica Durlacher describes being ‘touched and scared’
when she and her husband, Leon de Winter, were approached by the
Anne Frank Fonds (Foundation) in Basel to write a new stage adaptation
of the Diary (Durlacher 2013). Buddy Elias, Anne’s cousin and presi-
dent of the Anne Frank Fonds, felt that the Goodrich and Hackett play
was ‘good’ but that a more up-to-date adaptation would engage younger
generations (Aaronovitch 2014). Plans for a new script were initiated as
early as 2009 by the Fonds board (Jewish Herald Voice, 2014). Durlacher
explained that both she and de Winter secretly questioned the necessity
of telling such a well-known story again, referring to Anne as an ‘icon’
and her diary as a ‘bible’. This changed after a conversation with some
younger acquaintances—who thought that Anne had hidden on a farm,
and when corrected were unable to remember ‘how she got out’—high-
lighting an evident and pressing need for another adaptation (Durlacher
2013).
Durlacher and de Winter are prominent authors in Holland and both
are children of Holocaust survivors: de Winter’s parents survived in hid-
ing, while Durlacher’s father survived Auschwitz (Jewish Herald Voice
2014). As such Durlacher and de Winter explain that they have been
‘preoccupied with the Holocaust’ in their ‘work and lives for as long as
we can remember’ (Durlacher 2013). In terms of adapting the Diary,
the pair carried out extensive research. They were granted full access to
archival documents held solely by the Anne Frank Fonds (Jewish Herald
Voice 2014), and alongside these they read written testimonies and litera-
ture that had not been available to Levin or Goodrich and Hackett; their
adaptation is the only one in existence to draw upon all extant versions
152  S. Mitschke

of the Diary (Durlacher 2013). In their re-telling of Anne’s story, the

pair sought to ‘show the girl behind the symbol’. As Theu Boermans,
the artistic director of Theater Amsterdam has observed, ‘Everyone has
their own image of Anne, everyone projects feelings onto [sic] Anne,
and the girl herself disappears’ (AFP 2014). In many ways Durlacher and
de Winter combine the best attributes of Levin, Goodrich and Hackett
in relation to their status as adapters: both are world citizens, having
lived in America as well as Holland (Levin travelled extensively during
his time as a journalist, while Goodrich and Hackett took long vacations
in Europe); both are Jewish; and they are parents to a teenaged daugh-
ter (Levin had children, while Goodrich and Hackett did not), allowing
them to see the perspective of both Anne and the adults in the Annexe.
During the adaptation process Durlacher reported that she and de
Winter felt a ‘huge responsibility to keep Anne’s story […] as touching
and big as it should always be’ (Durlacher 2013). The resulting adap-
tation, simply entitled Anne, is in Dutch with a scattering of German,
reflecting the languages spoken in Anne’s own household. It premiered
at Theater Amsterdam, a 1100-seat purpose-built theatre, in May 2014
and, due to overwhelming demand, the run was extended several times
until the end of January 2016.13 Foreign visitors able to use a multilin-
gual translation system in languages ranging from English and German
to Spanish and Russian. The total production budget was fourteen mil-
lion Euros and the space combined state-of-the-art technology and dig-
ital media with three life-sized sets that move around the audience on
tracks (Mitschke 2014: 70). The production used projection as a key
aspect: images were projected on to huge screens at either side of the
stage, ranging from contemporary footage of Hitler and triumphant
Nazi parades to pages of the original diary, specially-created moving
images of a rooftop view of Amsterdam being bombed and even, later
in the play’s run, close-ups of the actors within the confines of the apart-
ment and the Annexe, courtesy of a live feed from tiny video cameras
installed around the set.
Interestingly, Anne attracted some criticism in the media—not for
its content, but because it was perceived as offering ‘tragedy and fancy
dinners’ (Liphshiz 2014). The new theatre’s amenities include a restau-
rant where patrons can have lunch or dinner before the show, and the
Theater Amsterdam website offers package deals of a meal and a ticket.
There are also options to purchase a snack box in advance. Criticism
included comments from the director of the Anne Frank House museum
 7  HAVE WE FOUND ANNE FRANK? A CRITICAL …  153

in Amsterdam, Ronald Leopold, in reference to ‘the commercial set-

ting in which this production is steeped’: ‘Anne Frank should not be a
nice evening out […] I can’t help but frown when I see arrangements
with a glass of wine, a box of snacks, dinner with a nice view and then a
night out’ (Ibid). Such remarks were used in the press to highlight the
ongoing conflict between the Anne Frank Fonds, the sole owner of the
diary copyrights and thousands of other documents, and the Anne Frank
House. De Winter, however, was forthright in his response about the
clash between the House and the Fonds: ‘I didn’t and still don’t care
about this conflict […]. I only cared about […] what has been done to a
family of Jews.’ (Ibid) Subsequently, even the Anne Frank House admit-
ted that Anne “gave ‘more justice to the history of Anne Frank’ because
it ends with her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, unlike
the original 1955 play, in which she declares that ‘people are really good
at heart’” (Carnvajal 2014)

Coming Closer Through Infidelity: Durlacher and de

Winter’s Anne
There are three particular areas in which Durlacher and de Winter have
been ‘unfaithful’ to the text: alongside wartime Amsterdam, the adapta-
tion’s additional settings in post-war Paris and the concentration camp of
Bergen-Belsen; the development of Peter Schiff into a fully-blown char-
acter; and the adaptation’s ending, which, in direct contrast to the Levin
and Goodrich and Hackett versions, does not conclude with a defini-
tive statement from Anne herself. What makes these particular aspects so
interesting, and why I have chosen to discuss them here, is that they are
magnified creations from comparative snippets of the original text. While
Levin and Goodrich and Hackett adapted longer extracts, Durlacher and
de Winter have done likewise but also focused on small details, allow-
ing them to ‘adapt’ in the truest sense of Sanders’ definition (creating
a version of the source text that, despite changes, remains an ostensible
and recognizable rendition of it): they achieve a masterful act of creativ-
ity through a heightened and well-executed use of imagination, sourced
from relative minutiae within the Diary. As I shall now discuss, the pri-
mary example of this is the setting in post-war Paris.
On 8 May 1944 Anne, dismissive of what she termed the ‘bourgeois
life’ that her mother and sister desired, expressed a wish to ‘spend a
154  S. Mitschke

year in Paris and London learning the languages and studying art his-
tory’ and to be surrounded by ‘gorgeous dresses and fascinating peo-
ple’ (Frank 2002: 286) If one sets aside the fact that Durlacher and de
Winter worked from all extant versions of the Diary, this reference to
Paris is the only one to be found in the commonly available (English-
language) editions of the text. While the play begins in Bergen-Belsen,
the second scene is a flash-forward to Anne’s fantasy life in post-war Paris
and these continue throughout the play.14 Anne’s ability to ‘leave’ the
Annexe for short periods additionally functions as an effective metaphor
for her being able to ‘escape’ through her writing/imagination.
When the audience enter the auditorium, a vast cyclorama depicts the
motionless greys of a bleak and apparently featureless landscape. Upon
closer scrutiny the hazy but sinister outline of a guard tower can be
seen, with others stretching away into the distance. The opening lines
are a voiceover spoken by Anne and Margot, incarcerated in the camp
and recounting what they dreamt while sleeping. Anne talks of Paris and
the cyclorama splits to reveal the popular image of a typical Parisian café-
restaurant: red velvet, chandeliers, lush green plants, white tablecloths,
and uniformed waiters abound. Anne’s university friends are waiting for
her, discussing professors and lectures, until Anne arrives late—sporting a
new jacket—and chooses to eat alone rather than go to the cinema with
them to see a film about the war. It is at this point that she meets a man
at another table who tells her that he is a publisher, and he gradually
persuades her to tell him about the book that she is writing—a version of
her diary. In this manner Durlacher and de Winter’s adaptation is inher-
ently unfaithful to the text, illustrating a combination of imagination,
empathic projection, and advisory projection. Their conceptualization
of a sumptuous eatery populated with ‘fascinating people’, and Anne’s
appearance in new clothing, are evidence of their placing themselves in
Anne’s position in the hypothetical situation and viewing it with Anne’s
standpoint in mind (empathic projection): in the Annexe she was con-
tinually hungry due to chronic food shortages and, as she stated herself,
wished to experience fashions and people. Yet I posit that Durlacher and
de Winter also frame the scene in terms of advisory projection, or view-
ing the situation from their own perspective, in the context of Anne’s
refusal to see the film; it is reasonable to assume that Anne, or indeed
anyone, would rather eat than see a war film if they had suffered the pri-
vations and terrors that she had.
 7  HAVE WE FOUND ANNE FRANK? A CRITICAL …  155

The anonymous Publisher, a well-dressed and good-looking man who

is a few years older than Anne, buys Anne a meal and they talk, setting
up the narrative device that drives the rest of the story forward. While
Anne will not actually show him what she has written, maintaining that
it is only for her ‘beloved’ due to its personal nature,15 she agrees to tell
him about it and the scene is set for a flashback to the Franks’ apartment
in Amsterdam. From here the character of the Publisher begins to be
developed; he is an onstage witness to the action and stays on the periph-
ery while Anne interacts with others, stepping forwards at relevant points
to talk to Anne and ask her questions in order to learn more about what
she is feeling and/or move the story along. At these points Anne ‘leaves’
the Annexe to go to him, frequently seated at a small table with a lamp—
representing the café-restaurant where they met—before returning back
into the main action. Their growing feelings for each other become evi-
dent as they talk; occasionally they dance together; and towards the end
of the play they share a romantic kiss before his true identity is revealed:
Peter Schiff, Anne’s first love (132).
Schiff is often overlooked due to Anne’s extensive writing about Peter
van Pels, with whom she was in hiding, and their romantic relationship—
including Anne’s first kiss (which is featured in all three adaptations).
Perhaps many people merge the two, similarly to how Anne described
it herself: ‘Peter Schiff and Peter van Daan [Pels] have melted into one
Peter, who’s good and kind and whom I long for desperately’ (Frank
2002: 199) Yet Anne talks about Schiff throughout her diary, often
referring to him as ‘Petel’, and her feelings for him are made clear from
the beginning:

[W]e passed […] Peter Schiff with two other boys; it was the first time
he’d said hello to me in ages, and it really made me feel good.

[…]

Mother is always asking me who I’m going to marry when I grow up, but
I bet she’ll never guess it’s Peter […]. I love Peter as I’ve never loved any-
one, and I tell myself he’s only going around with all those other girls to
hide his feelings for me. (Ibid, 16–17)

By including Schiff and van Pels within their adaptation, both of whom
are contemporaneously developing relationships with Anne, Durlacher
156  S. Mitschke

and de Winter paint a more accurate picture of who Anne really was:
she cared for van Pels, but likewise expressed strong feelings for Schiff.
Her relationship with van Pels is placed in its proper context and the
one in which Anne described it in terms of her feeling trapped within
the Annexe and desperately needing someone to love her and be loved
(Frank 2002: 60). I posit that Durlacher and de Winter exhibit both
empathic and advisory projection in doing so, in that they take Anne’s
own words and ‘magnify’ them to create the character of Schiff. His
presence and impact within Anne’s life are emphasized in the adaptation
to reflect her feelings for him, yet Durlacher and de Winter’s creation
of him as a publisher in Paris illustrate their advisory projection—they
are imagining what Anne might have wanted through their own perspec-
tive while still loosely adhering to the original text. Levin and Goodrich
and Hackett perhaps did not include Schiff due to dramatic constraints—
namely the issues of involving a character who, in real life, was not in the
Annexe—as well as possible concerns surrounding spectatorial views of
Anne as a flirt or being ‘mad about boys’; Anne herself referred to not
wanting to be perceived like this in her efforts to win Schiff’s affections
(Ibid, 164). Furthermore, Durlacher and de Winter’s utilization of Schiff
as a character, specifically in the post-war context and as accompanying
the Annexe action throughout, underscores the notion of ‘What if s/he
had lived?’ without forcing the point.
The epitome of Durlacher and de Winter play’s ‘infidelity’ to the
original text is the ending. The Goodrich and Hackett adaptation ends
with Anne’s disembodied voice declaring the hopelessly misquoted line
from her diary: ‘I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly
good at heart’ (Frank 2002: 332), to which her father replies that ‘She
puts me to shame’ and closes the diary (2.5). As Graver (1995) observes,
Anne’s words here are taken so much out of context that many people
believe that they are actually the final words of her original diary (95). In
Levin’s adaptation it is Anne who ends the play; her assertion about the
goodness of people is repeated in the context in which it appears in the
Diary:

ANNE:  W
 hen I look at moonlight and have a feeling of beauty, when I
feel love, […] and even horror and pain—[…] then, in spite of
everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
  […] I see the world gradually turning into a wilderness. I hear
the ever approaching thunder which will destroy us too. I can
 7  HAVE WE FOUND ANNE FRANK? A CRITICAL …  157

feel the suffering of millions, and yet […] I think […] this
cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will come
over the earth. (3.1)

The structural positioning of Anne’s words at the end of each adapta-

tion indicates the final ‘message’ that the adapters wish the spectator to
take from the performance—the final ‘belief’ that the adapters want to
portray Anne as having had. The closing words in the respective plays
show the authors’ highly-specific readings of the Diary. In Durlacher
and de Winter’s adaptation, Anne’s voice also ends the play—but rather
than trying to speak ‘for’ the real Anne, the masterful final scene moves
away from the original text and places the historical figure within the
proper context of the Holocaust. Following a monologue by Otto, in
which he tells of the fates of the Annexe occupants (similar monologues
are in the Levin and Goodrich and Hackett plays), Anne steps forward.
She stands alone before a bleak landscape of grassland, ragged trees,
and railway tracks stretching away from the audience, lit by what could
equally be sunset or dawn in the distance. Anne directly addresses the
spectators in a halting manner, and none of her sentences are complete—
‘I believed that… I dreamed that…’—she does not state definitively what
she believed or dreamed. These unfinished lines underscore the fact of
her death and her voice tails off before she turns away and walks the rail-
way tracks, half-turning back to face the audience in a shaft of light while
the other characters stand in shadow, dotted around nearby, facing the
spectator while a snowfall of tiny pieces of paper drift from the ceiling.
The stylized tableau is simultaneously moving and illustrates the popular
exaltation of the historical figure while also being hugely evocative. The
lighting of Anne while the other characters remain in shadow highlights
the widely held concept of Anne Frank as representing all Holocaust vic-
tims; the falling paper represents the widespread ‘drift’ of Anne’s words
around the world, as well as the snows of Eastern Europe and the ashes
of the dead; and the spectator is potentially able to glean a hint of hope
through the lighting of Anne in contrast to her surroundings, but the
shadowy figures of the other characters disable any ‘uplifting’ senti-
ment (such as that evoked by the Goodrich and Hackett play). Instead
the spectator is left feeling as if they have been confronted by very real
ghosts, emphasized by the characters’ still attitude of ‘watching’ the
audience; it is implied that the ghosts of the Holocaust are not at rest, no
matter how many times the populace choose to believe in the ‘goodness
of people at heart’.
158  S. Mitschke

Conclusion
The Durlacher and de Winter adaptation is not perfect. For instance, the
Nazis who come to take the Annexe occupants away towards the play’s
end are stereotypical and a little exaggerated as they storm through the
building, shouting, pointing guns, and issuing threats (130–134); Anne
herself comes across as rather overstated when she flamboyantly presents
her father with a letter addressing his concerns about her relationship
with van Pels (125). However, I posit that the play is masterful and bril-
liantly executed in terms of its presentation of the ‘real’ Anne by, para-
doxically, moving away from the original text. Instead of taking a notion
of Anne and building a play around it, or even attempting to speak ‘for’
her, Durlacher and de Winter take moments from the source text and
alternate between Anne’s voice and their own. In doing so they create
an adaptation that reaches the heart of Sanders’ definition in signalling a
relationship with the informing text, implementing various imaginative
changes, and yet allowing that adaptation to remain an ‘ostensible and
recognisable rendition’ (Sanders 2006: 26). By utilizing advisory and
empathic projections and imagination, yet remaining firmly grounded
within the Diary, Durlacher and de Winter have created an adaptation
that allows the spectator to effectively find their own way through to
Anne Frank.

Notes
1. Due to access and copyright restrictions, the text of the 1967 version is
referred to in this chapter.
2. Anne’s real-life first love, who is mentioned throughout the Diary but
usually overlooked by adapters and readers in favour of the romantic rela-
tionship between Anne and Peter van Pels, with whom she was in hiding.
3. This was Anne’s somewhat cruel pseudonym for Pfeffer: ‘dussel’ means
‘idiot’ in Dutch.
4. Letter from Meyer Levin to the New York Times, 9 December 1952.
Boston University archives (BU).
5. Of particular interest in the context of this chapter is Levin’s later asser-
tion that ‘At first Otto Frank […] “could not see” the Diary [sic] in dra-
matic form, but […] [p]resently, he began to “see” and even to make
suggestions for assuring absolute fidelity’ (Levin 1973, p. 36).
6. Francine Prose points out: ‘Of course the diary was read by more European
gentiles than by Jews; there were so few Jews left’ (2009, p. 190).
7. Letter from Otto Frank to Meyer Levin, June/July 1952 (BU).
 7  HAVE WE FOUND ANNE FRANK? A CRITICAL …  159

8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Letter from Meyer Levin to Cheryl Crawford, 28 October 1952 (BU).
11. Letter from Myer Mermin to Meyer Levin, 29 October 1952 (BU).
12. Letter from Meyer Levin to Herbert Luft, 28 February 1956 (BU).
13. At the time of writing it is unclear if there will be another extension.
14. Levin’s adaptation begins with a prologue, after which the action takes
place outside the Franks’ Amsterdam apartment and then moves to the
Secret Annexe, which is the location for the rest of the play (open time,
closed space). In Goodrich and Hackett’s adaptation the play begins in
the Annexe after the war; the action takes place as a flashback before end-
ing back in the post-war Annexe (open time, closed space).
15. I am indebted to Rene Voogt and John Macdonald for their assistance
with translating the Dutch script.

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Frank, Anne, Frank, Otto H., and Pressler, Mirjam (ed.). Massotty, Susan
(trans.). (2002). Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, 60th Anniversary
ed. Puffin Books.
Garfield, Simon. (2008). ‘In her diary, Anne Frank admits she was smitten by a
boy named Peter, but in the six decades since, no picture or news of him has
come to light—until now.’ Guardian, 24 February. http://www.theguardian.
com/books/2008/feb/24/news.features [Accessed 13 January 2016].
Goodrich, David L. (2001). The Real Nick and Nora: Frances Goodrich
and Albert Hackett, Writers of Stage and Screen Classics. Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
Goodrich, Frances and Hackett, Albert. (1956). The Diary of Anne Frank.
London: Samuel French.
Graver, Laurence. (1995). An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the
Diary. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Holligan, Anna. (2014). ‘Anne Frank keeps memory alive for new genera-
tion.’ BBC News, 8 May. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-
arts-27308964 [Accessed 24 October 2015].
‘Imagine if Anne Frank had lived to tell her story.’ (2014). Jewish Herald Voice,
22 May. http://jhvonline.com/imagine-if-anne-frank-had-lived-to-tell-her-
story-p17263-152.htm [Accessed 24 October 2015].
Lee, Carol Ann. (1999). Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank.
London, New York, Sydney and Toronto: BCA.
Lee, Carol Ann. (2002). The Hidden Life of Otto Frank. Penguin Books.
Levin, Meyer. (1950). In Search. Paris: Authors’ Press.
Levin, Meyer. (1967). Anne Frank: A Play. Private publication.
Levin, Meyer. (1973). The Obsession. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Liphshiz, Cnaan. (2014). ‘At new Anne Frank theater in Amsterdam, tragedy
and fancy dinners.’ 18 March, Jewish Telegraphic Agency. http://www.jta.
org/2014/03/18/news-opinion/world/at-new-anne-frank-theater-in-
amsterdam-tragedy-and-fancy-dinners [Accessed 24 October 2015].
Mitschke, Samantha. (2014). “Empathy effects: Towards an understanding of
empathy in British and American Holocaust theatre.” Ph.D. diss., University
of Birmingham.
Pavis, Patrice; Shantz, Christine (trans.). (1998). Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms,
Concepts, and Analysis. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.
Prose, Francine. (2009). Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife. New York:
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
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Poetics, 23: 33–51.
 CHAPTER 8

Adapting The Kite Runner: A Fidelity

Project to Re-Imagine Afghan Aura

Edmund Chow

Introduction
One of the tiresome debates within Adaptation Studies is fidelity, the
faithfulness of the new work to the original literary source. This concept
of fidelity—stemming from Translation Studies—is linked to typolo-
gies of equivalence which take an instrumental approach to language as
communication of objective information. In this approach, equivalence
is understood as ‘fidelity’, ‘accuracy’, ‘correctness’, ‘adequacy’, and ‘cor-
respondence’ (Venuti 5), which results in target texts resembling the
source texts in lexicon, grammar, and style in formal ways. On the other
hand, a hermeneutic approach to language privileges function, which
is the potential of a target text ‘to release diverse effects’ (Venuti 5),
including meeting social, political, economic, and cultural agendas. That
form and function are on polarizing ends is not new within Adaptation
Studies, with ‘fidelity’ often dismissed entirely as retrograde. This chap-
ter attempts to revisit the debate around fidelity to a stage adaptation of
Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner. Based on the performance at

E. Chow (*) 
University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
e-mail: edchow_phd@yahoo.co.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 161

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_8
162  E. Chow

the Birmingham Repertory Theatre on 1 October 2014 in the UK and

an interview with the adaptor Matthew Spangler, this chapter uses Walter
Benjamin’s concept of aura or ‘getting closer to things’ (9) to argue that
Spangler’s intention of adapting the original text intimately allows audi-
ences to come closer to Afghan histories, cultures, and traditions—a
politicized trope which, I would argue, is for the West ‘to be good again’
to Afghanistan, in the novel’s own words.

Fidelity
In the early debates within Adaptation Studies, Robert Stam criticizes
the fidelity discourse that often makes comparisons of films with nov-
els. He vehemently argues: ‘The standard rhetoric has often deployed an
elegiac discourse of loss, lamenting what has been “lost” in the trans-
lation from novel to film’ (Stam 3). Even though Stam is referring to
film adaptations, these attitudes are also prevalent in stage adaptations.
Instead of privileging the source text, Linda Hutcheon proposes an alter-
native theoretical perspective that sees adaptations as autonomous texts,
what she calls a plural ‘stereophony of echoes, citations, references’ (6).
Alongside other theorists (Bluestone 1957; McFarlane 1996; Cardwell
2007; Stam 2005), Hutcheon critiques the focus on comparative anal-
yses that plagues Adaptation Studies, as if an adaptation’s legitimacy
is only defined by the authority of the ‘original’ text. Similarly, Julie
Sanders adds that there are adaptations that have decisively moved away
‘from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product’, which
she calls ‘appropriation’ (26). One attraction of adaptation, according to
Joanne Tompkins, is its elasticity, its versatility in incorporating ‘cultural
translation and exchange, […] as well as the structural modifications that
multimedia are increasingly making to the [theatre] form’ (Tompkins x).
The above arguments illustrate the resistance of adaptation theorists
to fidelity discourse, a strategic divorce from these debates to legiti-
mize itself. But as J. D. Connor (2007) highlights, these decades of
campaign against fidelity have failed; the more Adaptation Studies dis-
tances itself from fidelity, the more entangled it is in practice. Connor
states that this phenomenon called ‘fidelity reflex’ is ‘not the persistence
of the discourse, but the persistent call for it to end’ (ibid.). This is
because laymen have persisted in raising fidelity questions, yet critics have
‘persisted in attempts to silence that conversation of judgment’ (ibid.).
Connor suggests that ‘once criticism is freed from fidelity discourses’
 8 ADAPTING THE KITE RUNNER: A FIDELITY PROJECT …  163

judgmental “bad conscience,” it can only offer more of itself, endlessly’

(ibid.). Prompted by this call for reconciliation, this chapter proposes
that, instead of seeing these discourses as divisive, and consequently
unproductive for adaptations, it is possible to revisit this and examine
how ‘fidelity’ (equivalence) has contributed to ‘effects’ (function) in the
case of The Kite Runner. The adaptor’s attention to textual fidelity here
causes the meanings around Afghanistan—and therefore cultural under-
standings—to increase without committing many artistic compromises.
How this is done will be explored in the following sections.

‘The Kite Runner’ Performance

Published in 2003, Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel became the New York
Times bestseller within two years, with a current record of 21 million
copies sold (Iqbal), which became the most visible cultural product and
representation of Afghanistan since 9/11, arguably humanizing a land
and her peoples that had so far been represented in images of terrorism
and religious fundamentalism. The Kite Runner’s popularity is also evi-
dent as it has been adapted for screen (Forster),1 stage (Spangler), and
graphic novel (Celoni and Andolfo), bringing to life a poignant story
of friendship and separation of two best friends from Kabul. While the
2007 film was nominated for an Oscar, grossing almost $75 million
worldwide (Iqbal), this theatre production is Matthew Spangler’s elev-
enth run on a world tour since 2009, an equally successful adaptation in
a different medium. This section critically investigates the use of music,
infusion of Dari language, and interjecting dialogues to create cultural
‘effects’ on stage, a function to not only inculcate a sense of wonder
towards an unknown culture, but to also foster a strong connection
towards the Afghan characters.

Music, Language, Dialogues

When the theatre doors of the newly refurbished Birmingham Repertory
Theatre open, a musician on downstage left is already playing his tabla
in soft rhythmic beats of South Asian music to welcome audiences as
they file into take their seats. On the proscenium stage is a pair of gen-
tly inclined floors extending from the wings to the centre of the stage,
where a large rectangular area is covered by a carpet (see Fig. 8.1).
Here, the tabla rhythms allow audiences to soak in an ambience possibly
164  E. Chow

Fig. 8.1  The flying of kites in The Kite Runner (Source: Robert Day)

identical to Afghan musical sounds. Closer to the opening time, the

drumming becomes louder and it suddenly appears as if the musician,
Hanif Khan, has taken over the stage in his own virtuosic performance
of rhythmic sounds. When the beats end to mark a transition to the
beginning of the play, the audiences clapped vigorously—congratulating
Khan’s showmanship. Music, as explained in Spangler’s script, performs
three functions: to underscore moments, to convey transitions in time
and tone, and to identify changes in location.
I would, however, add a fourth, that is to project an imagined authen-
ticity of a foreign (Afghan) culture. Authenticity is not an unproblematic
concept,2 but to explain imagined authenticity as used in this chapter,
I borrow Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘aura’, which has been defined
as the ‘appearance of magical or supernatural force arising from their
uniqueness’ (Robinson). Benjamin speaks about a ‘supremely sensitive
core in the art object’ (Benjamin 7) that possesses a degree of vulner-
ability, which gives it its ‘genuineness’. For example, a photograph is able
to bring out aspects of the original that ‘can only be accessed only by
the lens […] and not by the human eye’ (6). As such, a technological
 8 ADAPTING THE KITE RUNNER: A FIDELITY PROJECT …  165

reproduction ‘makes it possible for the original to come closer to the

person taking it in’ (6). Arguably, the tabla drumbeats before the open-
ing scene of The Kite Runner functioned to reproduce an Asian-style
ambience in the theatre—beyond what the novel could produce—so that
audiences would be ‘getting closer to’ (9) the unique cultural contexts of
Afghanistan. This is the ‘aura’ of an imagined Afghan authenticity.
To enhance the Afghan ‘aura’, the extensive use of Dari language (the
common language as spoken in Kabul) is heard very early in the play.
In Act I, the first scene shows the adult Amir, the protagonist, receiving
a phone call from a family friend (Rahim Khan) telling him that there
is a way to be good again. Briefly, the San Francisco setting changes to
Afghanistan with increased tempos from the tabla, now with a younger
Amir and his best friend, Hassan, running and playing cowboys. They
then deliver lines in Dari for a seemingly long period of time. One
reviewer writes that the ‘Farsi used by the two boys in the opening scene
as they played and joked was perfectly understandable without the need
for translation’ (Harris). Like Harris, I was admittedly charmed by the
foreign language. There is a feeling of ‘Afghanness’ in the atmosphere,
an exceptional attempt by the theatre-makers in reproducing a historical
time and place in Kabul through music, costume, and language—all of
which, I argue, contribute to the believability and ‘authenticity’ of the
fiction, reproducing, to a large extent, the aura of Afghanistan.
The most fascinating scene where instruments are used to create ‘nat-
ural’ sounds is the kite flying competition by Amir and Hassan. During
the competition, the rhythmic tabla beats become more intense, sig-
nalling heightened tension and excitement. This is then layered with
‘natural’ sounds of wind. It is created by the ensemble holding wooden
spools and rotating them on a swivel, which produced sounds identical
to the howling and whistling of wind. Harris adds that the ‘soundtrack
of Afghan percussion and the whirling wind things […] operated by
the cast members provided atmosphere and cultural authenticity’. This
is shown in stark contrast to pieces of music played through the speak-
ers when the scenes were set in San Francisco. Kool and the Gang’s
Celebration and Steve Miller Band’s Abracadabra were two such exam-
ples. The artificiality of recorded American popular music provides a
foil to the natural, ‘authentic’ Afghan soundscapes. It is the live music
in the form of drumbeats, singing bowls, Schwirrbogen—and hidden
singers underpinning the action—that gives this performance an ethnic
feel. Walter Benjamin reminds us that the ‘genuineness of a thing is the
166  E. Chow

quintessence of everything about it since its creation that can be handed

down, from its material duration to the historical witness that it bears’
(7). When audiences have been co-opted to partake in the scene, we
bear witness of Afghanistan’s history unfold. This is possibly reinforced
by Hosseini’s semi-autobiographical experiences growing up in Kabul, so
audiences become witnesses of an Afghan story, as one reviewer writes:

Overall, this production brought to light a beautiful and harrowing rela-

tionship between Amir and Hassan and, combined with the stage’s versatil-
ity, succeeded in bringing Hosseini’s epic tale to the stage with vivacity and
poignancy. (Britton)

The success of this production is largely due to the versatility of the

soundscapes and live music, the diverse effects that adaptations can bring
on a hermeneutic level to source texts like Hosseini’s novel. Audiences
become more acquainted with an Afghanistan they have not yet felt vis-
cerally and understood aurally.

Text
How the dialogues and scenes are structured in the adaptation produce a
similar effect, that is to provide immediacy to the action and therefore to
the likeability of the Afghan characters on stage. Structurally, Spangler’s
script follows the same linear progression as Hosseini’s novel.
Act I, set primarily in Kabul, documents Amir’s significant moments
and ends when Hassan and his father leave Baba’s household due to an
accusation of theft, while Act II primarily deals with Baba and Amir’s life in
San Francisco, as well as Amir’s rescue of Hassan’s orphaned son, Sohrab.
The stage adaptation offers possibilities that the novel could not, such as
the interjection of dialogue to interrupt the narrative voice. For exam-
ple, in an early scene during Act I, Amir is describing to the audience the
mud shack where Hassan was born. He goes on to explain how Hassan’s
mother had abandoned Hassan and so, both Amir and Hassan were nursed
by the same woman. The narrator’s lines are interrupted by lines from a
dialogue when Hassan is playing tag with Amir, as shown below:

Amir: So my Baba hired the same woman who had nursed me to
nurse Hassan. We fed from the same breasts. We took our first
steps on the same lawn. And under the same roof, we spoke
our first words. Mine was: Baba. His was:
 8 ADAPTING THE KITE RUNNER: A FIDELITY PROJECT …  167

Hassan: Amir!
Amir: My name.
Hassan: You’re it. (playing a game of tag)

According to Harris, Amir ‘slip[s] in and out of the action’ while

narrating his dilemma in a ‘series of soliloquies’. Harris also notes that
Spangler uses this method frequently as he ‘“love(s) the dexterity of that
approach” which brings a “film aesthetic” to the stage’. I suggest that
this ‘film aesthetic’ is the layering of two sets of time—real time and
narrative time3—which allows for a permeability of actions. Added on
to this complexity is Act II’s introduction of historical time: the Soviet
war in the 1970s and the Taliban rule in late 1990s, which Spangler
interweaves delicately. The play ends exactly how the novel ends, with
Amir running after a kite for Sohrab, just as Hassan had previously done
for Amir. To this effect and extent, this foregrounds a methodological
approach that begins to question the uses of ‘fidelity’ in adaptations—as
evidenced by the following interview with Matthew Spangler.

The Process of Adaptation

In a Birmingham Post review of the performance, Fionnuala Bourke
states that ‘the play is so good as it is based on Khaled Hosseini’s 2003
international best seller. But replicating such a complex story which
spans a long period and crosses the globe cannot have been an easy feat’
(Bourke, emphasis mine). The word ‘replicating’ implies a form of imi-
tation, duplication, or reproduction of the original text by Hosseini,
the source against which all other copies (or adaptations) are evaluated
by theatre reviewers such as Bourke. But to Linda Hutcheon, there is
a semantic distinction. She argues that an adaptation is ‘repetition, but
repetition without replication’ (7). More precisely, Hutcheon states that
an ‘adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second
without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing’ (9).
Hutcheon’s distinction here is an important one in scholarship around
adaptation, but in practice, theatre goers often succumb to compar-
ing adaptations with the original. For instance, one other reviewer
writes: ‘Not having read the book, I can’t comment on whether
Spangler’s adaptation is faithful to the original. But the play is a phe-
nomenally powerful piece of theatre which for many people will por-
tray Afghanistan in a totally new light’ (Orme, emphasis mine). For
168  E. Chow

many reviewers, there is an automatic cognitive mapping of the adap-

tation to the source text, to assess its textual fidelity, to match the old
with the new. In Orme’s case above, there is no original text to com-
pare with, so it allows for Spangler’s adaptation to remain as a deriva-
tion, an independent piece of theatre that sheds ‘a totally new light’ on
Afghanistan. I argue that the light shone on Afghanistan is framed by
semi-autobiographical materials from Hosseini’s childhood, including his
own penchant for writing (like Amir in the book), the Soviet invasion,
and his ‘returning to Afghanistan after the rise of the Taliban’ just like
the protagonist, all of which point to a form of truth—and accuracy—
of historical retelling. Even though Hutcheon argues that it makes lit-
tle ontological sense ‘to talk about adaptations as “historically accurate”
or “historically inaccurate”’ (Hutcheon 18), I contend that readers and
audiences welcome historical accuracies in this case to counteract the ver-
sion of ‘Afghanistan’ that had been perpetuated by news channels on the
‘war on terror’. In other words, while the medium of stage adaptation
can, potentially, be a point of departure for the adaptor, the choice to be
historically ‘truthful’—both in honour of Hosseini’s semi-autobiography
and to the other realities in Afghanistan—is an ethical one, even if there
is some recognition that ‘truth’ is often multi-layered and contested.
Spangler is an experienced adaptor — he has adapted other award-
winning plays including Tortilla Curtain (based on the novel by T.C.
Boyle); Paradise Hills (based on the short stories by John Cheever); and
Albatross (based on Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner); how-
ever, he found that in working on The Kite Runner, he had to engage
in a different process as an adaptor. He spent about nine months read-
ing, researching, and understanding Afghanistan. Spangler says in our
interview:

In the case of Kite Runner, I wanted to learn as much as I could about

Afghan history and culture before I started adapting. Because it occurred to
me that if I didn’t know things about Afghan history and culture, I could
make a mistake in adaptation, [like] take something out or leave some-
thing in, juxtapose two scenes that shouldn’t really be juxtaposed, and cre-
ate something that would be culturally offensive. And I may not even know
that I’m doing it. (Spangler, emphasis mine)

To avoid being ‘culturally offensive’ is an important consideration here.

In fact, Spangler had lengthy conversations with Hosseini’s father-in-law
 8 ADAPTING THE KITE RUNNER: A FIDELITY PROJECT …  169

who was a university professor to clarify the accuracies about Afghan his-
tory. Weighing against an Afghan’s perspective, Spangler was able to,
in his words, ‘triangulate’ what he was reading and arrive at his own
conclusions, for a period from November 2005 to July 2006 before he
created the adaptation for the stage. He states that he wanted to know
Afghan history and culture ‘well enough that [he] felt he could sort of
take a scalpel to Khaled’s novel […] and reduce the likelihood that he
would make something culturally offensive’. To a large extent, this ech-
oes the ‘historical fidelity’ that Beekman and Callow advocate for, where
they state: ‘For historical references, it is inappropriate to make use of
cultural substitutes, as this would violate the fundamental principle of
historical fidelity’ (Beekman and Callow, 203).
Beekman and Callow’s work on Biblical translations, in contrast,
stems from the conviction that ‘the Christian faith is rooted in history’
(Shuttleworth and Cowie 71). Because of that, they argue that objects,
places, persons, animals, customs, beliefs, or activities that are part of a
historical statement must be translated—or adapted, in our case—in a
way that the ‘same information is communicated […] as by the original
statements’ (35). In other words, historical fidelity is a strategy of ‘not
transplanting historical narratives into a target setting’, of not violating
the faith. Likewise, Walter Benjamin states that ‘[t]he uniqueness of the
work of art is identical with its embeddedness in the context of tradi-
tion’ (10). It is, therefore, necessary for a piece of art to reference its
‘context of tradition’, especially since tradition is ‘alive’ and ‘extraordi-
narily changeable’ (ibid.). For example, the Greeks viewed the statue of
Venus as an object of worship, while medieval clerics saw it as an idol,
but both groups of people were ‘struck by […] its singularity or, to use
another word, its aura’ (10). Benjamin also states that the ‘genuineness
of a thing’ includes ‘everything about it since its creation that can be
handed down, from its material duration to the historical witness that it
bears’ (7). Following these assertions, I argue that when Hosseini wrote
The Kite Runner, it was his way of reproducing the Afghanistan that he
knew of; this was the first adaptation of his own life experience. By doing
this, the novel allowed his readers to get closer to things and experience
the rich traditions and ‘aura’ of Afghanistan. Hosseini wanted ‘to make
Afghanistan a more real place rather than just a remote, war-afflicted
nation’ (Iqbal, emphasis mine), and to overturn the normative rhetoric
of the media, as already argued. Consequently, for Matthew Spangler to
research on Afghanistan for nine months before he started writing is a
170  E. Chow

deviation from his usual adaptation process. This suggests that his choice
to subscribe to historical fidelity was a way of getting closer to the ‘truth’
of Afghan histories and cultures, so that when audiences watch his play,
we could appreciate the Afghan ‘aura’ without violating Afghans’ faith
or culture, similar to Beekman et al’s philosophy on Biblical translations.
This also explains why Spangler wants his script to be true to the origi-
nal text. I would further posit that Spangler’s stage adaptation (as well
as David Benioff’s screen adaptation) is a reproduction of Hosseini’s
The Kite Runner, which is another reproduction of Afghanistan’s ‘aura’,
real or imagined. That means Spangler’s text is considered the second
level of adaptation of ‘Afghanistan’. So instead of seeing the ‘aura’ fade
in Benjamin’s argument, all these reproductions of Afghanistan—all of
which kept the title unchanged—are reimagining this ‘aura’ through the
complex retelling of dynamic relationships, kite-flying, bacha bazi (young
Hazara boys exploited as dancers), and other customs that Western audi-
ences and readers hardly know about.
Despite the ethical necessity to exercise fidelity to Hosseini’s novel,
this does not negate the fact that Spangler’s emphasis is on creating
good theatre. ‘It doesn’t do any good if you create a play that is very
accurate to the text but doesn’t work as theatre’, Spangler asserts. ‘You
don’t do the text any favours’ (Spangler). In other words, the play has
to be theatrically engaging in order to tell a good story. Spangler points
out that The Kite Runner has a ‘built-in advantage’ because of Amir’s
first-person narrative voice. Since the narrator can be on stage telling the
story, it allows Spangler to be both ‘true to the text and create a work-
able piece of theatre’ (ibid.), whereas other texts require more changes
or are resistant to changes. Second, Spangler claims that ‘the shape of the
book follows the shape of a stage play’ (ibid.): there is an inciting inci-
dent in the first act, the second act introduces new themes that resolve
the themes from the first act, followed by a climatic scene at the end.
Spangler admits, ‘The Kite Runner follows the form of what we in west-
ern theatre expect’. He adds: ‘In a strange way, the closer I was to that
book, I felt like the more it was working as a piece of theatre’ (ibid.).
Adaptation, in that sense, operated on two levels. For the adaptor to get
close to Benjamin’s ‘aura’ of Afghanistan, he had to abide by Beekman
and Callow’s ‘historical fidelity’, and, on the second level, he had to
abide by Hosseini’s novel because it worked structurally, and therefore
theatrically, for the stage.
 8 ADAPTING THE KITE RUNNER: A FIDELITY PROJECT …  171

The third level of adaptation is more unique to Spangler’s context.

Because of his geographical proximity to Khaled Hosseini in the USA,
Spangler’s adaptation process involves liaising and collaborating directly
with the author from the beginning, a privilege not many adaptors
have when adapting texts (Zatlin), and a collaboration that could also
be construed as artistically stifling (Logan). For Spangler, his collabo-
ration with Hosseini was an integral part of his process. Spangler met
up with the author in 2006 in Say Francisco Bay Area where they both
live, and shared ideas with him. Spangler originally thought the adapta-
tion would focus on a refugee story in the latter half of the novel. But
the more Spangler involved himself in the story of the refugee charac-
ter, the more he felt he had to include other sections, which eventually
became the entire novel. Furthermore, many of the earlier drafts were
vetted by Hosseini, whose comments ‘were things in the book that he
(Hosseini) would have wanted changed if he were to rewrite the book
today’ (Spangler). Seen in this light, Spangler’s adaptation could be con-
strued as a newer interpretation of The Kite Runner which he co-wrote
with Hosseini. But the collaboration did not end there.
Hosseini was involved in the first production at San Jose State
University, where Spangler directed it. When it was produced by the
San Jose Repertory Theatre, Hosseini was present for many rehearsals.
In all, Hosseini had an active part as ‘artistic collaborator’ in the stage
adaptations from 2005 to 2009, a term Spangler coined for him, and a
partnership that Spangler is most appreciative of. Spangler speaks about
Hosseini’s generosity and kindness—and how easy it was to work with
him. Spangler also professes that ‘[i]t’s important to me that Khaled
[Hosseini] likes the play, and that he feels that it’s a fair reflection of the
book’. The implicit need for the novelist’s approval here is, as I have
argued earlier, an attempt to get closer to the ‘aura’ of Afghanistan in
the bid to represent the narratives of Afghanistan to counter the media-
fabricated versions of Afghanistan, and to avoid being ‘culturally offen-
sive’. To put it in back into the context of the play, I would argue that it
is Spangler’s attempt to find a ‘way to be good again’—the line spoken
by Rahim Khan at the beginning of the play to Amir—as one American
practitioner’s theatrical intervention to redeem the ‘war on terror’ waged
on Afghan soil. This could explain why, of all his adaptation practices,
Spangler felt the need to be historically and culturally faithful, to have
nine months of research, to collaborate with Hosseini’s father-in-law, and
172  E. Chow

finally, to gain Hosseini’s approval. In an interview with the Nottingham

Post, Hosseini praises Spangler’s adaptation:

I think it translates incredibly well. What I really love about the play is that
so much of the book is preserved in it. You have freedoms with stage adap-
tations that you don’t have with film. One large chunk of the book is the
main character’s Amir’s internal monologue, […] In the play the lead actor
can break from the action, turn to the audience and share his thoughts.
(Hosseini in Wilson)

Furthermore, Spangler’s view of The Kite Runner as an adaptation is

an unfinished one. Even though the production at the Birmingham
Repertory Theatre is its eleventh run globally, the script is undergoing
constant revisions. Spangler says, ‘I’m not publishing the script, because
I like making changes to it for every production’ (Spangler). In other
words, his rewriting is possibly another attempt to get closer and closer
to the ‘aura’ of Afghanistan—to be faithful to source text, culture, and
history—while releasing the diverse effects of cultural understanding and
appreciation for a gripping Afghan narrative. In fact, a New York Times
reviewer of the novel states that Hosseini has ‘give[n] us a vivid and
engaging story that reminds us how long his people have been struggling
to triumph over the forces of violence—forces that continue to threaten
them even today’ (Hower, 2003). For an adaptation to possess fidelity,
then, is to prevent further disrepair and stereotyping of an Afghan nation,
of an existing war narrative that demands a constant re-writing.

Notes
1. David Forster is the director of the film, but the screenplay is written by
David Benioff.
2. See Helen Freshwater’s 2012 discussion of authenticity where she
acknowledges the avoidance of this term within theatre discourses.
3. See Ryan Claycomb’s 2008 discussion on the intersections between real
and narrative worlds in theatre.

References
Beekman, John, and John Callow. Translating The Word Of God, With Scripture
And Topical Indexes. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Pub. House, 1974. Print.
 8 ADAPTING THE KITE RUNNER: A FIDELITY PROJECT …  173

Benjamin, Walter. The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction.

London: Penguin, 2008. Print.
Bluestone, George. Novels Into Film. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1957. Print.
Bourke, Fionnuala. ‘Birmingham Rep Hosts The Kite Runner: Review’. Birmingham
Post. N.p., 2014. Web. 7 Apr. 2015. <http://www.birminghampost.co.uk/
whats-on/arts-culture-news/birmingham-rep-hosts-kite-runner-7817863>.
Britton, Louisa. ‘Review: The Kite Runner’. Nouse. N.p., 2014. Web. 6 Apr.
2015. <http://www.nouse.co.uk/2014/11/01/review-the-kite-runner/>.
Celoni, Fabio, and Mirka Andolfo. The Kite Runner Graphic Novel. New York:
Riverhead Books, 2011. Print.
Cardwell, Sarah. ‘Adaptation Studies Revisited: Purposes, Perspectives, And
Inspiration’. The Literature/Film Reader: Issues Of Adaptation. Ed. James M.
Welsh and Peter Lev. 1st ed. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2007.
51–63. Print.
Claycomb, Ryan. ‘Curtain Up? Disrupted, Disguised, And Delayed Beginnings
In Theater And Drama’. Narrative Beginnings: Theories And Practices. Ed.
Brian Richardson. 1st ed. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press,
2008. 166–178. Print.
Connor, J. D. ‘The Persistence Of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today’. A
Journal of Media and Culture. N.p., 2007. Web. 6 Apr. 2015. <http://jour-
nal.media-culture.org.au/0705/15-connor.php>.
Freshwater, Helen. ‘Consuming Authenticities: Billy Elliot the Musical and the
Performing Child’. The Lion and the Unicorn 36 (2012): 154–173. Web.
Harris, Val. ‘The Kite Runner – Birmingham Rep’. The Good Review. N.p., 2014. Web. 7
Apr. 2015. <http://thegoodreview.co.uk/2014/09/the-kite-runner-birmingham-
rep/>.
Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Print.
Hower, Edward. ‘The Servant’. New York Times 2003. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/books/the-servant.html>.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory Of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Iqbal, Nosheen. ‘How Do You Put The Kite Runner On Stage?’. Guardian
2013. Web. 25 Mar. 2015.
Logan, Brian. ‘Whose Play Is It Anyway?’. The Guardian 2003. Web. 13 Apr. 2015.
<http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/mar/12/theatre.artsfeatures>.
McFarlane, Brian. Novel To Film. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Print.
Orme, Steve. ‘Theatre Review: The Kite Runner At Nottingham Playhouse’.
British Theatre Guide. N.p., 2013. Web. 7 Apr. 2015. <http://www.brit-
ishtheatreguide.info/reviews/the-kite-runner-nottingham-play-8808>.
Robinson, Andrew. ‘Walter Benjamin: Art, Aura And Authenticity’. Ceasefire
Magazine. N.p., 2013. Web. 7 Apr. 2015. <https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/
walter-benjamin-art-aura-authenticity/>.
174  E. Chow

Sanders, Julie. Adaptation And Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Shuttleworth, Mark, and Moira Cowie. Dictionary Of Translation Studies.
Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Pub., 1997. Print.
Spangler, Matthew. Interview. 28 Oct. 2014. Skype.
Stam, Robert. ‘Introduction: The Theory And Practice Of Adaptation’.
Literature And Film: A Guide To The Theory And Practice Of Adaptation.
Ed. Robert Stam and Alessandro Raengo. 1st ed. New York: Blackwell, 2005.
1–52. Print.
The Kite Runner. USA: Marc Forster, 2007. Film.
The Kite Runner. New York: Matthew Spangler, 2007. Theatre.
Tompkins, Joanne. ‘Editorial Comment: Theatre And Adaptation’. Theatre
Journal 66.4 (2014): ix−xi. Web.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translation Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Print.
Wilson, Simon. ‘Kite Runner Author Khaled Hosseini On The Stage Adaptation
That Comes To Nottingham Playhouse’. Nottingham Post 2014. Web. 13
Apr. 2015. <http://www.nottinghampost.com/Kite-Runner-author-Khaled-
Hosseini-stage/story-22844029-detail/story.html>.
Zatlin, Phyllis. Theatrical Translation And Film Adaptation. Clevedon
[England]: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Print.
 CHAPTER 9

Fanny Hill Onstage: TheatreState and April

De Angelis’s Feminist Adaptations

Kara Reilly

As the performer with a bomb strapped to his chest in Forced

Entertainment’s Showtime explains: ‘the audience are people who like
to watch other people do it in the dark’. A theatre production with the
title Fanny Hill—with its implicit promise of voyeurism—gets bums
on seats. The British stage has seen two contemporary feminist adapta-
tions of John Cleland’s 1747–1748 pornographic novel in recent years:
TheatreState’s 2014 production of Fanny Hill Project Volume 2.0 and
April De Angelis’s 2015 version of Life and Times of Fanny Hill at the
Bristol Old Vic (an updating of her 1991 script). Both productions are
feminist adaptations of a famous pornographic novel in which the male
author, John Cleland, ventriloquizes female prostitute, Fanny. The male
vision of the female sexual experience expressed in Cleland’s novel is rad-
ically shifted in these productions as Fanny finds a female voice.
TheatreState’s Fanny Hill Project Volume 2.0 juxtaposed performer Tess
Seddon’s experience of working in a foot fetish club in Manhattan with
performer Cheryl Gallacher’s re-staging of Fanny Hill’s story in the novel.1
April De Angelis re-imagines Fanny Hill as a woman in her early sixties who

K. Reilly (*) 
University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
e-mail: k.reilly@exeter.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 175

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_9
176  K. Reilly

is threatened by her creditor, Spark. He demands she write an erotic memoir

as a way to pay her debt. The only problem is that Fanny has forgotten her
past and so she hires two younger prostitutes to act out her story and help
her ‘remember it’. Her uncertainty about her past conjures that dictum that
memory is an interruption of forgetting. Both productions use the eroticism
and bawdy comedy that is ubiquitous in Fanny Hill to lure audiences into
the theatre and make them pay attention. However, as José Esteban Muñoz
has written, ‘comedy does not exist independently of rage’ (xi). So while
these productions seduced audiences with pleasure and laughter, they then
pulled the rug out from underneath them by raising the stakes, reversing the
situation, and making thinking audience members ask questions about the
cultural construction of the female body through pornography.
Cleland’s Fanny Hill offers the reader a chance to project him or her-
self into the narrative voice of Fanny Hill without consequences—indeed
the novel is famous for the fact that Fanny marries her true love, Charles,
and lives happily ever after. In contradistinction to the novel, both of
these productions critique the nature of sex work in the eighteenth cen-
tury, but also how women are still perceived through the male gaze in
the contemporary moment. De Angelis’s Fanny Hill shows the long-
term devastation that a life of prostitution can have on women and the
traumatic origin stories of prostitutes that are erased from Cleland’s
novel. Starring Caroline Quentin in the title role, De Angelis writes back
to pornography by making her appropriation contemporary, political and
relevant. Director Michael Oakley offered a stellar production that illu-
minated a contemporary take on one of the most banned books of all
time. The setting in the Bristol Old Vic Theatre was grand and luxurious
in scale, as it is one of the oldest extant theatres in the country and built
in the eighteenth century. In contrast, TheatreState’s production was at
the small fringe black box theatre in Exeter. TheatreState makes the story
contemporary by creating a dialectic between Fanny Hill’s experiences
of selling her body in 1747 with performer Tess’s experience selling
her feet in 2010. Using pillow fights, drinking games, a DJ, rap music,
and a send up of pop music videos and choreographed dance routines,
TheatreState employs laughter to engage audiences in the narrative jour-
ney which is dramaturgically structured around the chapters in Fanny
Hill. What initially seems like an innocent enough picara-style story
about a young woman on an adventure in New York who needs some
cash, and so chooses to sell her feet to foot fetishists in a club, reveals a
much darker message about what it takes to be an ‘independent woman’.
 9  FANNY HILL ONSTAGE: THEATRESTATE AND APRIL …  177

TheatreState’s adaptation writes back to eighteenth-century pornogra-

phy in a diachronic way, questioning the degree to which women can
ever really own the gaze and their own sexuality as performers or prosti-
tutes either in the eighteenth century or in the contemporary moment.
The production is ultimately post-Brechtian in that it uses a dialectical
type of performance to juxtapose Seddon’s experience in the twenty-first
century with Fanny Hill’s experience at the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury (Barnette 333). April De Angelis’s Life and Times of Fanny Hill is
also diachronic and dialectic to the contemporary moment. She seduces
the audience with ribald sex scenes only to show the original traumas of
the women who are forced into prostitution. Essentially, both produc-
tions ‘write back’ to the pornographic novel, using it to make their own,
feminist version that speaks volumes about the gaze in the contemporary
moment.

Time to Confess
TheatreState’s Fanny Hill 2.0 begins with Cheryl greeting the audience
as they enter Exeter’s Bike Shed (an intimate 50 seat basement theatre)
in May 2014. The stage is basically empty except for a blonde boy-ish
DJ Jordan, who stands centre stage in a DJ booth playing Madonna’s
‘Celebrate’ with automated coloured lights projected around the space.
Cheryl offers audience members vodka or juice, as Tess lies stage left
wearing stiletto heels and a half paper mask that is eighteenth century
in style (complete with periwig curls) while kicking her leg up and down
with mechanical repetition and a permi-grin on her face. Once the audi-
ence is settled Tess and Cheryl conspiratorially come centre stage to
the microphone: ‘We’ve got something big to confess to you, it’s really
embarrassing, but first a game…’ The audience is asked to play the
drinking game ‘I have never’. The rules of the game—for those who
haven’t played—are simple: one person places their glass on their head
and says: ‘I have never…’ For example, and this is one from the show,
‘I have never taken a selfie’. If the other players have taken a selfie, then
they must drink their drinks. Meanwhile DJ Jordan samples Kendrick
Lamar’s rap song “Swimming Pool (Drank)”, which is about a man
struggling to survive in drinking culture, as the audience settles into
their drinking game. The phrase ‘Drank’ also produces a sample of gestic
music, which is music that accrues meaning through repetition. Tess and
Cheryl tell us that ‘I have never’ is a game:
178  K. Reilly

where there’s no clear winner…. It’s a game where there’s no clear end-
ing. Sometimes I wonder is the game really playing us? It’s a game where
you don’t have to do anything or say anything but you’re still playing the
game. You’re always playing the game.

The game is a warm up act that loosens up the audience, but also
becomes a metaphor for the confusing impulses behind sexuality. The
implication being that we all play the game whether we want to or not.
At first the challenges are simple, including ‘I have never read Fanny
Hill.’ But Tess and Cheryl compete with each other getting meaner and
meaner: ‘I have never had a sex dream about an oranguatan’; ‘I have
never been in a power trip in rehearsals’; ‘I’ve never been a shit per-
former’; until Cheryl says to Tess, ‘I have never been a prostitute’. And
Tess drinks her drink. This moment is a catalyst as Tess Seddon moves
centre stage and begins telling us her story, while Cheryl begins her
physical transformation into Fanny through eighteenth century dress.
Tess directly addresses the audience at the microphone:

Hi, the story I’m going to tell you tonight is a little bit embarrassing and a
bit awkward. But it’s something that I did. I sold my feet, but before I tell
you about that I want to give you a bit of background. When I was 13 I
asked my parents for a playboy bunny t-shirt for my birthday and in return
I got Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman. I was a little bit confused, but I
read it and I was shocked. I had been oppressed for 13 long years of my life.

Some members of the audience tittered with recognition at the desire

to wear a playboy bunny t-shirt or at the sudden total awareness reading
Greer can deliver. At the same time, Tess’s monologue is dead-pan and
somewhat tongue in cheek. She goes onto to describe her 13-year-old
awkwardly heroic self:

And I went into school the next day and demanded that all my classmates
rip off their pictures of Katie Price and Jodie Marsh from their exercise
books. And a couple of years later when we were fifteen and everyone
started fantasizing about being strippers I told them that they were going
to let down not only themselves but also womanity. That the sisterhood
would be broken if they started selling themselves because it would
affect how men saw women everywhere. A few years later having found
no friends at school: I found myself doing exactly the same thing, letting
down the sisterhood.
 9  FANNY HILL ONSTAGE: THEATRESTATE AND APRIL …  179

Here Tess indicates a key theme in the piece, which is the way images
from popular culture permeate women’s ideas about how their identities
should be constructed. The inciting incident becomes clear—Tess will
tell her story—that juicy confession we were promised earlier. It is the
story of a descent into vice:

And that’s the story I’m going to tell you tonight. It’s the story I told
Cheryl a while ago and she was desperate to make a show about it. At first
I was like, there was no way I am going to get up on stage and tell peo-
ple what I have been up to, but she was super desperate and she said she
would do whatever it took for me to do this tonight. So I dug deep into
the history of erotic literature and found this, Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a
Woman of Pleasure … and it tells the story of a young woman’s descent
into vice, and just how much she totally loves it. I think it’s probably the
most embarrassing book for someone to read. Hopefully, it’s worse than
my story, I’ll let you decide … Let’s cast our minds back to the eighteenth
century as we meet Fanny Hill…

DJ Jordan rings a boxing match bell and announces ‘Introducing Fanny

Hill’. The bell will take on a character of its own as it is repeatedly rung
throughout the performance, signifying scene changes but also heighten-
ing the sense of competition between performers. This was a reference to
Brecht’s famous essay “Emphasis on Sport”, which suggests good thea-
tre should be like a boxing match. Cheryl prances forward wearing her
pink quasi-eighteenth century frock and holding a copy of the novel. She
begins her story with the epistolary, ‘Dear Madam’. The physical book
often appears in stage adaptations and here the book becomes a key per-
formative object reminding the audience that they are watching an adap-
tation. The book functions as a tool to help Cheryl transform into Fanny
Hill. She coyly promises to tell the story of her shameful and horrifyingly
perverse descent into prostitution. The sequence ends with DJ Jordan
playing David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ as Tess and Cheryl engage in a cho-
reographed routine that is playful and knowingly bad.
In contrast April De Angelis’s Life and Times of Fanny Hill opens with
Voltaire who is ‘having a lovely holiday in England’, declaiming his love
of the English over the French, a clear citation of Voltaire’s Letters on
the English. A 60-something Fanny propositions Voltaire, and he runs
off, after shouting an insulting, ‘Mon Dieu!’ This opening illustrates De
Angelis’s awareness of Fanny Hill’s participation in the materialist philo-
sophical tradition. Fanny is down on her luck. She explains:
180  K. Reilly

Fanny’s fallen on hard times. Hard times.

Corners aren’t as dark as they used to be
And customers are fussy.
What I say is, you don’t need teeth to give good suck!
I wish it was always dark.
Black like inside a hat.
Then I’d do business.
Then I’d have a carriage and a parrot.
I haven’t eaten for three days.
I could be dead on Sunday! (De Angelis, 3)2

Spark enters and Fanny hopes he is a paying customer who will hire her,
but in fact he has purchased her gambling debts and is now her demand-
ing creditor. He wants her to write her erotic memoir as a way to pay her
debt. Spark argues that by writing a book, she will service ‘the multitude in
one singular act’ (7). Here the origins of pornography enter into the story,
and Spark argues that the experience of the prostitute can titillate multi-
ple readers through print, as opposed to only one client in person. Fanny
agrees to write the book, but she has one significant problem—her past is a
blank slate. Like Cheryl and Tess, she also has a confession to make:

I have a confession.

My horrid career.

It has been horrid I’m sure of that.

when I turn round fast to catch at it all I see is a blur of bedpans

or a bloke buttoning up. (7)

The promise of juicy confessions in Fanny Hill—who is famous for tit-

illating generations—is deflated here by Fanny’s reduced circumstances
and her memory loss. The real world intrudes on fantasy. To solve her
memory dilemma Fanny hires two younger prostitutes, Swallow and
Louisa, to act out her story. She claims she is ‘remembering it’ but really
she is creating it from scratch. The implication is that Fanny has few
 9  FANNY HILL ONSTAGE: THEATRESTATE AND APRIL …  181

happy memories from her life of prostitution, which rather than a life of
pleasure, has instead been a life of trauma.
Fanny instructs Swallow and Louisa to imagine themselves newly
arrived to a London coach station from the country. She tells them:

Fanny:  ou’re all alone. Penniless.

Y
An innocent and friendless orphan new to London.
What will happen?
Imagine.
Pause.
Well?
Louisa: I’ll get screwed.
Fanny: That is a trifle bald, Louisa.
Louisa: It’s the truth.
Fanny: But it lacks narrative. The reader, as we all do, requires a little
fondling before being brought to the point.

And that is the dramaturgical motivation for the bawdiness that

follows—Fanny, Swallow, and Louisa will improvise and create a story,
thereby seducing the reader into the world of Fanny Hill and all of its
erotic pleasures through fantasy. Young Swallow becomes Fanny as the
elder Fanny takes on the role of Mrs Brown who introduces her to the
world of pleasures in the brothel. Fanny is seduced by Phoebe, who kisses
her and remarks, ‘Perhaps it is the London way to do things’. This laugh
line from the novel is also used in TheatreState’s production during a so
called ‘girl-on-girl’ scene that spoofs slumber parties in pornography. Tess
spends most of the scene awkwardly trying to dress Cheryl in her pink
pyjamas, which deflates anything erotic and makes the sequence embar-
rassing. When Katie Perry’s pop song ‘I kissed a girl and I liked it’ comes
on DJ Jordan puts feathers in front of a fan as the two have a pillow fight
that shows the representation of lesbian sexuality for sale in the media. In
April De Angelis’s play Phoebe initiates Swallow/Fanny into the world of
voyeurism as they peep on Mrs Brown while she has explicit sex with a
young horse grenadier. The sex is acted out onstage where it looks increas-
ingly automatic and the grenadier’s penis is referred to as ‘a machine’.
But before the elder Fanny as Mrs Brown can auction off her virginity
to the highest bidder, Swallow/Fanny explains that she has met Charles,
fallen in love at first sight, and that he has decided to ‘keep’ her. This
scene is staged with Swallow/Fanny putting her arm carefully through
182  K. Reilly

a blue velvet jacket and embracing herself. The tenderness of the per-
former towards this performing object was evocative. However, the older
Fanny refuses to approve this as a viable ending: ‘You can’t end a book
on chapter three. It’s too thin, it won’t sell’ (28). So the older Fanny has
Charles kidnapped by his family and sent to the South Indies, while the
younger Fanny has to contend with a new ‘keeper’, Mr. H. The plotting
of Act I closely follows Cleland’s novel.

Origin Stories
While the back stories of Fanny, Louisa, and Swallow are less impor-
tant initially than their enactment of a present that Fanny can record
and sell, TheatreState makes a point of explaining the material circum-
stances that led to Tess selling her feet. The lack of back story in April
De Angelis’s adaptation will become the return of the repressed as the
figures are all haunted by the traumas that led to their careers as prosti-
tutes in Act II. Tess tells us about her experience finishing university with
a drama degree during the 2008 crash. She was less than employable
and was forced to move home to Bradford and take a job as a reception-
ist. Her father had gone bankrupt, had a midlife crisis, and abandoned
her mother for a woman half her age. At her miserable day job a mali-
cious boss forces Tess to wear a vomit-coloured brown pin striped suit
and a 90 degree ponytail. The boxing ring bell dings, as Cheryl becomes
Fanny again and tells of her upbringing in a village outside Liverpool and
her parents’ sudden death from smallpox when she was 15. She quickly
moves onto how ‘I set my sights and the last of my moneys, on getting
to London!’ The boxing bell rings again. We learn that while working in
the office, Tess is determined to do something with her theatre degree.
She realises most theatre companies wanted her to do an unpaid intern-
ship. ‘If I’m going to work for free, I’m not going to do it in Bradford’.
Tess decides to get a New York-based internship and is invited for an
interview. ‘After a particularly bad day in that brown suit I decided it
was time to book that flight and I headed off to New York’. Suddenly
Miley Cyrus’s song ‘Party in the USA’ is blasting from the speakers and
Tess and Cheryl engage in a campy live ‘music video’ style dance com-
plete with lip-synching. They dance like enthusiastic teenagers acting
out a fantasy: they put on sunglasses, twirl umbrellas, dance in unison,
and unfold maps to find their way around the city. The lack of polish in
these music videos is deliberate and charming. The failure here is part of
 9  FANNY HILL ONSTAGE: THEATRESTATE AND APRIL …  183

their charisma (see Bailes). This use of the music video fantasy speaks to
the formation of the ego identity through the projection of the self onto
media figures. Cheryl and Tess’s eyes gleam with the naïve possibility of a
new life and ‘the magic of New York’. Suddenly the music is interrupted
by DJ Jordan announcing “Chapter Two: Being Taken in”. Both women
looked harried as they rush to tell the next part of the story.
Cheryl describes being taken in by Mrs Brown’s brothel; whereas,
Tess has been taken in by her boyfriend’s Aunt in New York. However,
the aunt has gone to Canada for her mother’s funeral and Tess is con-
fronted with Tommy Cooper or ‘Coops’ who answers the door wearing
nothing but science goggles and his speedo. The boxing bell rings again
and Cheryl describes meeting Mrs Brown’s cousin, who is cadaverous in
hue with ‘tusks rather than teeth … he was so blind to his own startling
deformities as to think himself born for pleasing’. Mrs Brown’s disgusting
cousin forces his pestilential kisses on Cheryl. As the bell rings again, Tess
explains that every morning over breakfast Tommy would tell her how
many women had been abducted and raped in the city that day and that
she should not go out. She is terrified and decides to remain indoors. In
addition to dealing with unwanted attention from Tommy, she looks after
his husky, cooks, and cleans for him. The boxing ring bell rings faster and
faster as Tess and Cheryl jump in front of the microphone. Their stories
are more and more juxtaposed in a theatrical montage (see Bryant-Bertail).
The unwanted affections of Mrs Brown’s older cousin are juxtaposed with
Tess combating the annoying attention from Tommy. Tommy kisses Tess
after she has vomited from too much alcohol; Cheryl is outraged that Mrs
Brown has auctioned off her virginity to the highest bidder. The boxing
ring bell goes off again and DJ Jordan announces, ‘Here we go!’, as David
Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ plays again. Here the music becomes gestic through
repetition. This time it is distorted, as the bell continues to ring with
increasing ferocity. Tess and Cheryl have a competitive dance off. This time
the dancing is not a knowing, playful choreography; instead, it is a disturb-
ing frenzy of automatic and desperate competition.

Tess’s Story
Tess explains that she moves out of the house with Tommy and into a
freegan commune with 90 other people. She needed a job that was cash-
in-hand in New York and she explains that the best available job was for a
foot fetish club, so she auditioned after having a pedicure and was quickly
184  K. Reilly

accepted. This is juxtaposed with Cheryl as Fanny describes seeing Charles

and falling in love at first sight with him. DJ Jordan becomes Charles,
dressed in a pimp-style outfit complete with sheepskin coat and leather
hat. He offers to keep Cheryl and she agrees. The bell dings and Tess
explains that she was casted after ‘de-socking’. There she was told ‘he’d
never seen such beautiful arches’ and he took a photo for the website.
Tess explains the situation in the foot fetish club. You got $20 for every
10 min of a client touching your feet, or you could earn the big bucks
in the booth where a sign hung that said ‘self-masturbation is not ille-
gal’; something she decided against. The first night the clients were not
as weird as Tess anticipates, so she helps herself to a vodka and settles in.
The bell rings again and Cheryl wears a bridal veil. The scene is called
‘Attack of the Truncheon’ and is the climax of the play. Cheryl explains
that having successfully escaped from Mrs Brown’s and gone to their new
abode, Charles then flings her onto the bed. Striking a bridal pose, she
explains that she doted on him and could have died for him. She takes the
sheet covering the front of the DJ booth off, and Jordan slowly emerges
from behind the booth lip synching the Ying Yang Twins pornographic
‘Whisper Song’. The lyrics are ‘Wait till you see my dick. I’m gonna beat
that pussy. Beat the puss up. Bam. Bam.’ As the chorus starts Jordan
dances evocatively and pulls two flesh coloured dildos out of his pock-
ets pointing them at the audience like guns. He then dances with Cheryl
pointing the dildo guns at her while she playfully puts her hands up in the
air, and then pulls her skirt over her head. Suddenly, Jordan begins shoot-
ing Cheryl and a sperm-like milky white substance comes out of the dildo
guns. Cheryl tries to hide behind Tess, she even steals one of Jordan’s
squirt guns and shoots Tess’s feet, but ultimately she ends up on the floor
as Jordan continues to shoot her with the sperm from the dildo guns.
Cheryl is stunned; she refuses to move. Jordan looks confused and
puts down the dildo gun. Suddenly a computerized voice announces
from the DJ box that they must move onto ‘Chapter 8: An Education’
and the boxing bell rings twice with insistence. Tess and Jordan stare at
one another and at Cheryl seated on the ground. Nothing happens for
some time, until Jordan gets the novel and hands it to Cheryl. Cheryl
throws it across the room, Jordan picks it up again, and gives it back to
Cheryl who indicates that now Jordan must play Fanny. With the micro-
phone in hand, Jordan begins to read from the novel with a lucky lisp,
indicating a campy queerness, as Cheryl throws her skirt at his head and
he offers her his coat. She refuses the coat, and Jordan begins to put
 9  FANNY HILL ONSTAGE: THEATRESTATE AND APRIL …  185

on her fluffy tulle skirt, explaining that after sex ‘he couldn’t walk for
ten days’. Jordan, who was just performing hyper-masculinity through
the Ying Yang twins’ song, is now objectified. Through this sudden shift,
the performers reveal the compulsive heteronormativity inherent in por-
nography like Fanny Hill and the potential for self-loathing that comes
when one identifies with the wrong gender. If for the contemporary male
the identification with the phallus signifies his own identity with himself
and his absolute distinction and difference from the female, by taking on
the role of Fanny Hill Jordan queers himself and becomes an object (see
Moten). However, there is also a subtler reading that allows his queer-
ness to reflect an anxiety about female sexuality on the part of some
queer men and the misogyny that is a part of that anxiety.
When bell rings again Tess finishes the story of working in the foot
fetish club. She made $600 in the first night, and she made extra money
for letting clients tickle her. Some girls who worked there left early with
the men, but for Tess the strangest part about her job was competing
with the other women to get clients. Tess explains that over sixty women
worked in the club, so that in order to get clients you had to chat people
up. ‘I’ve never been very good at chatting people up, especially people
you don’t want to touch you.’ The booth automatically begins playing
Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Swimming Pool (Drank)’ rap again, reminding the
audience of the drinking game that initiated the play. Jordan takes on the
persona of a fellow prostitute ‘playing the game’ via the drinking game
and uses his ‘I have never’ announcements as a chance to humiliate Tess.
Eighteenth century harpsichord music comes on. Jordan and Tess dance
in competition with each another for the audience’s attention and by
extension the attention of the clients at the foot fetish club. An upset and
silent Cheryl goes up stage to the back wall of the theatre and watches
the two compete.
The bell rings again and the computerized voice announces
‘Chapter 9: Queen of Fucking Everything’. Tess changes into her foot
fetish club outfit which consists of gold stilletos and a sheer white negli-
gee. Jordan lisps into the microphone as Fanny Hill:

I joined a house of convenience … I was at the top of my game, and as

such, only dealt with persons of distinction. I began to take pleasure in
the vanities of our sex that were in ready supply … all the trinkets and
dresses were lavishly heaped upon me … None are treated better during
their reign than the mistresses of those fine gentlemen.
186  K. Reilly

He gets down on the ground in front of the booth and begins to

mechanically kick his leg up and down like an automaton while moving
a red umbrella in the air. He freezes as the robot DJ voice announces
Chapter 10: Independent Woman. Tess grabs the microphone from
Jordan, clears her throat and stares out at the audience:

So my sister told my dad what I’d been up to and I hadn’t spoken to him
in a while, and he laughed. My boyfriend came out to visit. He had just
lost his job. He had known about the foot fetish thing. He didn’t want to
kind of get in the way. He said it was my choice whether I wanted to do
it or not. I got the usual Friday night text from Crystal. She said that that
night it was sexy lingerie night. We had a bit of a debate about whether or
not I should do it, but he had run out of money so we thought it was a
good idea. We went round Brooklyn discount stores looking for the right
underwear that would cover just the right amount of flesh but reveal just
enough. I met him around 5am after and I remember eating all you can
eat pancakes until we felt sick (with all the money).

Tess stares long and hard at the audience. Her boyfriend had been com-
plicit in her foot fetish club job as a prostitute, even going so far as to
pick out her ‘sexy lingerie’, which is a betrayal. He had also been happy
to eat the pancakes purchased by her hard night of work. Tess goes onto
explain:

The secret also got out at the theatre company where I’d been intern-
ing, and I was really worried going in the next day, but I shouldn’t have
because the director suddenly learned my name. And she used to ask me
what I thought about scenes in a way she didn’t talk to the interns. The
lead actor he used to flirt with me in the corridors.

Her sex work gives her a certain glamour at her internship where sud-
denly people see her in a new way. Her monologue culminates with her
explaining that: ‘I felt like I was part of this culture now, I would hear
pop songs in a new way. I felt dangerous and exciting. I felt like this was
a new me: a Tess Seddon I couldn’t have been before.’ This is delivered
in a deadpan way, as Tess takes her place on the ground next to Jordan.
Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ comes on for the third time, it is slowed down,
distorted, and is now gestic music. The celebratory nature of the song is
distanced and made strange. As Tess kicks her leg up while Jordan twirls
his red umbrella slowly, their bodies are available and on display to the
 9  FANNY HILL ONSTAGE: THEATRESTATE AND APRIL …  187

gaze, but everything is automated. As an audience member, I felt com-

plicit in that gaze as the performers stared at me, returning my gaze.

Fanny Hill and Materialism

Historically there is a link between Fanny Hill and materialist philosophy.
Cleland’s work is often written about in relationship to Julien Offray de
La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine or Man, A Machine, which was written
the year before Cleland published Volume One of Fanny Hill. In Man, A
Machine La Mettrie argues for the machine-like nature of the body after
Descartes. La Mettrie argues that ‘the human body is a machine which
winds up its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual motion’ (La
Mettrie, 93). La Mettrie engaged directly with Descartes’s theories about
the bête machine, writing that he ‘understood animal nature, he was the
first to prove completely that animals are pure machines’ (La Mettrie in
Rosenfeld, 143). But La Mettrie also interrogated Descartes’s mind/
body dichotomy, since he believed it was utterly impossible to imagine
a working mind outside a working body. When Descartes put forward
his theory of the bête-machine he always distinguished human beings
from animals by their possession of a rational soul. However, La Mettrie
disagreed with Descartes about the very existence of the rational soul;
instead, he created a materialist argument that the human body only
functioned like an automaton. He also thought that the soul could
not exist outside the body, because the mind was intrinsically insepara-
ble from the body. La Mettrie’s machine was a delicate, bespoke clock-
work automaton—not the industrial mass-manufactured machine we
think of today. But the sexuality in Cleland’s novel reflects back on La
Mettrie’s idea of the body as a machine, because throughout the novel
the penis is constantly referred to as a machine. This produces a sense
of the Freudian uncanny. Indeed the very nature of repetitive sexuality
comes to seem both mechanical and grotesque. As Elizabeth Kubeck has
argued, ‘the main secondary affect’ in Fanny Hill ‘is one of horror, at
times shaded with grotesque humour’ (Kubeck, 174).
De Angelis demonstrates an awareness of the materialist history of
the novel. In a seduction scene between Fanny and Mr. H, Fanny is cer-
tain she will not feel anything. However, during sex she remarks, ‘my
how the animal spirits do rush mechanically to their parts!’ (32). Bodies
engaged in repetitive sex become mechanical and uncanny. This is clear
188  K. Reilly

in De Angelis’s adaptation as the actors engage in ‘a dumbshow of inter-

course’ (32). There is a clear effort to distance the audience from get-
ting too involved in scopophilia or pleasure in looking. For example, in
a sequence when Fanny seduces a male servant as revenge for Mr H hav-
ing sex with her maid, a large brown sock is thrown onstage and Louisa
wears it on her arm as a ‘sceptre member’ (35). The absurdity of the
giant arm as phallus fills the audience with laughter as the scene inten-
sifies, only to leave Dingle, upset at its treatment, saying the sock has
been ‘most vilely ill used’ (38). It is impossible to not see the absurdity
of the sock-cock in the play and the ridiculous quality of lust for sale. At
the beginning of Part II the entire cast appears in a bizarre, copulating
tableau, the stage directions state that the company ‘moves as one thing,
like a machine. It gets frantic and then dies. Everyone “dies” together. The
machine collapses, sags.’ This mechanical perspective on repetitive sexual-
ity for sale climaxes in Fanny’s final dream of herself as being entirely full
of holes:

Sometimes I have this dream. God says, ‘Fanny, you may have one wish’,
so I ask for some holes. Then whoosh just like that all these holes appear
all over me, small at first but big enough to stick a finger in. I’m delighted.
What a time I’ll have with these, I think. I have tripled in value and tripled
again. (77)

Fanny envisions herself as full of orifices and therefore tripling her market
value—she is the ultimate commodity. But the holes extend and grow
swallowing her up:

And then my mouth opens wider and wider and all the holes get bigger
still and bigger till finally all the holes join up at the edges until I’m just
one big hole. Big enough for God or a giant reader to fuck and then I dis-
appear. (77)

The holes engulf Fanny’s body until there is nothing left—she is only an
orifice which the reader projects him or herself into for satisfaction. This
awareness of the emptiness of Fanny’s character as she is caught in the
desire to serve/please her client and entirely loses her identity is tragic.
The back stories of Swallow and Louisa are made evident. Louisa left her
home in the north during the enclosure movement where she saw starv-
ing people reduced to eating grass. Swallow worked for a gentleman who
 9  FANNY HILL ONSTAGE: THEATRESTATE AND APRIL …  189

read all the time and taught her to read, but then he raped her. Pregnant
and without friends Swallow gives birth to her child alone in the woods
and must tie the infant up in a blanket and put it in the river. She begs
Fanny to tell her story, the story of trauma and abandonment. But Fanny
is too focused on her profit, too full of the desire to sell the erotic story.
Ultimately, Swallow begging Fanny to tell her story makes us aware of
the tragic nature of sex work and of the miserable and traumatic condi-
tions that lead people to choose sex work in order to survive. Fanny Hill
is not a gaping hole for readers to project themselves into. Instead, in
these appropriations, the novel becomes a platform for a feminism that
writes back to pornography and interrogates it. As De Angelis explains:

There is nothing actually wrong with erotic material. It’s the way that
women are used in the industry that’s wrong … I wanted to show the
reality underneath it, so that if you were to allow the people in a porno-
graphic story to be real, what would happen? That’s where all the other
stories came in; so that they weren’t just cyphers, one dimensional figures
who have sex. They did have sex, but they also came from somewhere and
had a background and a history and you therefore identified with them
in some way. I suppose I was trying to do two things: one was to say that
erotic material can be life-enhancing and the other, that when you deny
the reality of the people working in pornography, then it’s exploitative just
like any market force can be exploitative (De Angelis in Stephenson and
Langridge, 57)

In both productions the exploitation of the women involved in the sex

industry is apparent. But neither production is anti-sex or pro-censorship
when it comes to pornography, instead these artists manage to queer
pornography. In José Esteban Muñoz terms they have dis-identified with
Fanny Hill, projecting themselves into her story, but queering it. Both
productions ‘write back’ to Cleland’s pornographic novel, appropriating
it and making it their own. By doing so, these feminist versions offer new
insights into the politics of cultural appropriation in the contemporary
moment.

Note
1. 
An ‘emerging’ feminist company TheatreState has made five pieces of
theatre of which I have seen two. Please see theatrestate.co.uk for more
information.
190  K. Reilly

2. 
All citations are from the updated unpublished The Life and Times of
Fanny Hill, obtained from the author’s agent Casaratto.

Works Cited
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffins and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory
and Practice in Post-colonial Literature, London: Routledge, 1989.
Bailes, Sarah Jane, Performance, Theatre and the Politics of Failure: Forced
Entertainment, Goat Island, and Elevator Repair Service, London: Routledge,
2011.
Barnette, David, “Toward a Definition of Post-Brechtian Performance: The
Example of In the Jungle of Cities at the Berliner Ensemble, 1971.” Modern
Drama. 54.3. (2011): 333–356.
Cleland, John, Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, London:
Wordsworth, 2000.
De Angelis, April, The Life and Times of Fanny Hill in Frontline Drama 4
Adapting Classics. London: Methuen, 1996.
De Angelis, Updated unpublished The Life and Times of Fanny Hill, obtained
from the author’s agent Casaratto on 15 May 2015.
Fanny Hill 2.0, by TheatreState. Bike Shed Theatre, Exeter. 15 May 2014,
Performance.
Ferguson, Frances, Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action,
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004.
Kubeck, Elizabeth, “The Man-Machine: Horror and the Phallus in Memoirs
of a Woman of Pleasure,” Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and Its
Influences. Patsy S Fowler and Alan Jackson, Eds. New York: Aims Press,
2003.
La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, Man, a Machine, trans. G.G. Bussey et all. Chicago:
Open Court Press, 1912.
Life and Times of Fanny Hill, by April De Angelis. Dir by Michael Oakley. Bristol
Old Vic, Bristol. 7 March. Performance.
Moten, Fred, “Resistance of the Object: Adrian Piper’s Theatricality.” In the
Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2003): 233–254.
Muñoz, José Esteban, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of
Politics. London; Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1999.
Rosenfield, Leonora Cohen. From Beast Man to Man-Machine. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1943.
Showtime, by Forced Entertainment. Dir by Tim Etchells. Robin Arthur, Richard
Lowdon Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor. DVD.
Stephenson, Heidi and Natasha Langridge. Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights
and Playwriting. London: Methuen, 1997.
 PART III

Reinscribing the Other in Contemporary

Adaptations of Greek Tragedy, Introduced
by Eleftheria Ioannidou

In the oldest extant Greek tragedy, and the only surviving one that takes
its subject from historical facts, Aeschylus’s The Persians, the sympathetic
representation of the defeated enemy offers an affirmation of the hegem-
onic power of the victor. A similar ambivalence is also evident in the case of
numerous contemporary feminist or postcolonial adaptations of the classics
that seek to challenge authorial rule. For all its power to rewrite the canon
and redefine aesthetic and cultural hierarchies, adaptation inevitably affirms
the canonical power of the original. While postcolonial appropriations of
the classical text have repeatedly questioned the practices through which
Western culture was legitimized and imposed, at the same time, they rein-
scribe the canon that was instrumental in sustaining the cultural hegemony
of the West. The act of reclaiming the classical canon in order to speak for
the dispossessed and excluded Other reiterates its claim to universality upon
which its very supremacy was proclaimed in the first instance.
Tragedy as an aesthetic response to pain and suffering, and an attempt
to ascribe meaning to it, is also used to determine which suffering is mean-
ingful. It was in mid-twentieth century that the common man was first
considered as worth of tragedy. Two decades after Arthur Miller’s seminal
essay ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’,1 cultural materialism proposed a
tragic theory that should break with the suffering of the individual hero
to seek responsibility in collective suffering.2 Even though a number of
contemporary adaptations have interrogated the role of the West in global
192  PART III  REINSCRIBING THE OTHER IN CONTEMPORARY ...

conflict and war, tragedy still remains tied to its Western contexts, which
exclude subjects outside dominant discourses and power relations. This
is evident when contrasting media reports on the tragedies happening in
Paris or Brussels to normalizing representations of massive loss and catas-
trophe elsewhere. In that regard, Mark Ravenhill’s short piece The Women
of Troy in which a female group implore an imaginary bomber to spare
them, insisting on their self-definition as the ‘good people’ and celebrating
their civilization of ‘freedom and democracy’ is deeply ironic in its implica-
tion that only these women can be viewed as tragic victims.3
The chapters presented in this volume raise questions of otherness, dis-
placement, and disembodiment in relation to contemporary adaptations
of the classical texts. The projects under examination do not just establish
narrative or structural analogies with the ancient texts in order to prompt
parallels with modern contexts, but enter a dialogue with dominant
tropes of representation and manifest the differences in order to interro-
gate the politics of appropriation. George Potter focuses on shifting rep-
resentations of Syrian refuges in Jordan through a critical juxtaposition of
production of Slawomir Mrozek’s play The Emigrants directed by Samer
Omran and post-2011 outreach productions of Syria: The Trojan Women
and Shakespeare in Zaatari, adaptations of Euripides’ eponymous play and
Hamlet, respectively. Gabriel Varghese offers a detailed examination of the
radical adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad in the 2015 performance This Flesh
is Mine developed by the Palestinian theatre group Ashtar in collaboration
with the UK-based company Crossing Borders in response to the blockade
of the Gaza Strip; in this version Briseis is given the voice and bodily pres-
ence that she is deprived of in the Homeric narrative and decides to claim
her land. In a different strand, Olga Kekis examines Katie O’Reilly’s Peeling
and Christine Evans’ Trojan Barbie; both plays’ adaptation of The Trojan
Women, as argued by Kekis, depart from the portrayal of women as the
victims of war characterizing the Euripidean play and numerous modern
adaptations to retell the story of the female body as one of shared strength.
The theory of adaptation defines it as product as well as a process of
creation,4 paying equal attention to the final artistic outcome and the con-
ditions under which its production and reception take place. The authors
of the texts included in the volume draw on similar methodologies in ana-
lysing the collaborative modes of work, the economic frameworks and the
broader ideologies that shape the final outcome of the adaptation. The
heuristic tools introduced in the following pages propose new approaches
to the study of adaptation. Potter employs Lori Allen’s distinction between
 PART III  REINSCRIBING THE OTHER IN CONTEMPORARY ...  193

human rights and the human rights industry in order to interrogate the
reliance on Western classics within the adaptation industry which ‘marginal-
izes Syrian voices that are only deemed human when in the drag of Hecuba
or Hamlet […]’. Varghese’s critique of international collaborations is based
on an exploration of different artistic materials, work methodologies, and
political languages that intersect in rehearsal. Kekis uses Gérard Genette’s
concept of the palimpsest to discuss the layering of texts as a layering of dif-
ferent realities in the adapted work.
Adaptations of classical works that seek to voice the marginalized Other
function in ways that exceed the scope of their creation. The politics of
adaptation is not easy to unravel without addressing the wider economic,
collaborative, and representational structures that condition the final prod-
uct. As will be demonstrated in the following texts, the canonical author-
ity of the classical text is recast in the hierarchies that are embedded in
the process of collaboration and supported by funding patterns and wider
political discourses. These structures would often seem to reproduce the
power dynamics that they set off to dismantle within an intricate process
within which the encounter between texts is often only a pretext.

Notes 
1. Miller’s essay was published in the New York Times in 1949 and provided
the preface to the publication of The Death of a Salesman.
2. See in particular Raymond Williams’s book Modern Tragedy, first pub-
lished in 1969.
3. Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat is the collective of a cycle of short plays, first
produced for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2007 under the title
Ravenhill for Breakfast. The Women of Troy is the first play in the published
edition of the play scripts.
4. Linda Hutcheon (2002), A Theory of Adaptation, second edition
(London and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 7-8.

References
Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edn. London and New York:
Routledge, 2013 [2002].
Ravenhill, Mark, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat. London: Methuen Drama, 2008.
Williams, Raymond, Modern Tragedy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1966
 CHAPTER 10

Hypertheatrical Engagement with Euripides’

Trojan Women: A Female ‘Writ of Habeas
Corpus’

Olga Kekis

This chapter explores two contemporary adaptations that use Euripides’

Trojan Women as a scaffold upon which they build their own construct.
By using the ancient play as a palimpsest, Kaite O’Reilly’s Peeling and
Christine Evans’ Trojan Barbie simultaneously place the contemporary
moment in productive dialogue with the past. This analysis takes Gérard
Genette’s concept of ‘hypertextuality’ and transfers the applicability of
the terms ‘hypertext’ and ‘hypotext’ to the theatre and practice of the-
atrical adaptation, in order to explore in the most effective way these
plays bear a host of connections to The Trojan Women. Genette uses
the term ‘hypertext’ to refer to ‘any text derived from a previous text’
(7) and ‘hypotext’ to refer to the earlier text (1–10). The term ‘hyper-
play’ is used to refer to the plays that have been written and performed
bearing some relation to the play which pre-existed them, and the term
‘hypoplay’ is used to refer to Euripides’ play. The term ‘hypertheatrical-
ity’ consequently, is used to refer to all the active links and connections

O. Kekis (*) 
Independent Scholar, Birmingham, UK
e-mail: olgakekis@yahoo.co.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 195

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_10
196  O. Kekis

which set the contemporary plays in a relationship—whether overt or

covert—to Trojan Women. As Genette once again suggests, there is a
‘duplicity’ in the new object, in our case the new performances, which
can be represented by the analogy of the palimpsest: ‘on the same parch-
ment, one text can become superimposed upon another, which it does
not quite conceal but allows to show through’ (398–399). In the same
way, the hypoplay may or may not be clearly visible behind the hyper-
play, but its existence invites us to engage in a ‘palimpsestuous’ viewing
or experiencing of such a performance.
The defining radicality of Evans’ and O’Reilly’s hyperplays lies in that
the defeated women, unlike their mythical counterparts, gain a voice
to speak against those who victimize them, and ultimately manage to
re-gain control of their own bodies and therefore their own existence.
Consequently, the focus is shifted from the helplessness of female mourn-
ing to the politics of the female body, on its state of brokenness, and on
the women’s attempt to piece it back together to a meaningful state,
and to account for it. O’Reilly’s efforts converge towards highlighting
the disabled/able-bodied conflict, while Evans directs her attention to
the shocking encounter of us/them, west/east, here/there, fake/real.
Both present a postmodern fragmentation of time by transforming the
most tragic of classical female characters into twenty-first-century women
who challenge and contest their social and personal status. Referring to
Euripides’ play Robert Scanlan writes that it ‘was like a writ of habeas cor-
pus: a demand that the bodies be produced and that they be accounted
for’ (27). In Latin the phrase ‘habeas corpus’ means ‘may you have the/
your body’, while a ‘writ’ is a legal procedure to which one has an unde-
niable right. In law, ‘a writ of habeas corpus’ is a judicial mandate order-
ing that a prisoner be brought to court so it can be determined whether
or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and to showcase why the lib-
erty of that person is being restrained. O’Reilly’s and Evans’ adapta-
tions function as a female writ of habeas corpus: a legal demand which
is drawn up and made public by the women themselves who demand
and seize control of their own bodies and by extension, their own fate.
Though they are victimized for varied reasons, they all essentially over-
turn the concept of victimhood associated with the female survivors of
the war at Troy which has been central to the understanding of Trojan
Women and which seems to have been a common stimulus for creative
hypertheatrical engagement. At the end of Euripides’ play the women
of Troy are dragged away and the play ends, implying therefore a state
 10  HYPERTHEATRICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH EURIPIDES’ …  197

of helplessness. In these adaptations the women act; they do not accept

their fate in lamentation—they reject it and re-define themselves. At the
end of the performance they actually ‘habent corpus’: they have their own
body, they accept who they are and are in charge of their own existence;
they assert themselves and refuse to allow themselves to be victimized or
held in an unlawful, victimizing gaze by the audience.

Peeling: A Painful Striptease

In 2002 Kaite O’Reilly was commissioned by the Graeae Theatre
Company to write a play addressing and reflecting the company’s con-
cerns (www.graeae.org.uk). The result of that commission was Peeling,
which she developed collaboratively with the director Jenny Sealey and
the original performers. The play engages hypertheatrically with The
Trojan Women and metadramatically with the nature of its own perfor-
mance as well as with the presence of the performers on stage as actresses
and as characters. It premiered in February of the same year at The Door
of the Birmingham Rep and was revived in March 2011 by Forest Forge
Theatre Company who took it on a rural tour in village halls and com-
munity centres in Hampshire.
O’Reilly’s agreement to write this play for Graeae is connected to her
observation that the canon of western theatrical tradition is abundant
with disabled bodies which are frequently used to portray Otherness as
a metaphor for the human condition. However, seldom are the plays
that portray such individuals written or performed by disabled actors,
even in parts written specifically for them (Performance Programme for
Peeling, 2011). O’Reilly chose to challenge this tradition by engaging
with Euripides’ Trojan Women in a radical way, which focuses on the
issue of women with ‘broken’ bodies and their position in the face of
personal and social warfare. It also interrogates the way performances
of ­classics have been staged throughout the centuries, as the archetype
of the ultimately well-written plays to be performed by and for the physi-
cally and mentally able elite (www.forestforge.co.uk). O’Reilly draws a
parallel between the metaphorical peeling of the layers of clothes that the
performers are wearing, and the painful revelation of their souls to each
other as they peel off the layers of social conventions that restrict them as
female performers who are disabled.
The play is written for three characters that are given a very specific
profile and have specific disabilities. Alfa, 38, is ‘fiercely independent,
198  O. Kekis

eccentric and slightly puritanical. She is Deaf and uses sign language.’
Beaty, 26, is ‘fierce, feisty, sexy and four feet tall.’ Coral, 30, ‘is small and
looks very fragile, but has a ferocious, inquiring mind. She uses an elec-
tric wheelchair’ (O’Reilly, 5). The playwright has been steadfast in her
insistence that the play never be performed by anyone other than deaf
and disabled performers and that has been the case both in the 2002 pre-
mier and in the 2011 revival.
The interesting paradox that needs to be explored in this play is that
while its most significant aspect stems from the fact that the characters
and the actresses are disabled, simultaneously the least important ele-
ment of this theatrical melange is that very disability. By laying bare their
souls as the performance evolves, these three women who are visibly
impaired show the audience their strength and essentially their lack of
otherness. They are just like any other women, feeling sexy or feeling
low, feeling weak or strong, emotional or cold, angry or cynical, mean to
each other or plain sarcastic. And just like the women of Troy, Hecuba
or Andromache, they are victims of prejudice but also survivors on
stage and in life. Director Jenny Sealey, who is also the Artistic Director
of Graeae, says on the company’s website that one of the main focuses
of the play was to try to dispel the myth that all disabled women are
‘lovely’, that they all love each other and they all share the same poli-
tics. So they created three complex characters, who found it liberating to
express negativity in the same way as anybody else, without the fear that
they were going to be invalidated.
Alfa, Beaty, and Coral, whose very names point towards their central-
ity and primary importance as characters in this play, are the three disa-
bled actresses cast as the chorus in a mainstream postmodern production
of The Trojan Women, called Trojan Women—Then and Now. They are,
as Coral bitterly points out the ticks ‘on an equal opportunities monitor-
ing form’ (45) commenting on the action, watching the play, but never
taking part: ‘shoved at the back, unlit, onstage’ (14). They are three
bickering women, kept tucked away somewhere upstage, away from the
limelight and the leading roles. Just like the women of Troy who are
cast aside as insignificant entities who cannot make decisions related to
their own existence, so the three actresses are confined to the margins of
theatre and society. However, in this dense, complicated play, they take
centre stage and assume full responsibility for the choices they make as
women.
 10  HYPERTHEATRICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH EURIPIDES’ …  199

Throughout the performance the three women are stranded on stage,

looking like cake decorations in three absurd, oversized, metal-framed
crinolines formed in the shape of ball gowns which take up the whole
stage. Strewn on the stage are relics of war, like ammunition boxes and
all sorts of items found back stage in a theatre. When The Trojan Women
is playing, the women speak their parts, commenting on the action and
the situation that the war victims find themselves in. The rest of the time
they are waiting, bickering, chatting, and sharing stories of sex, decep-
tion, and recipes in their absurd isolation. Gradually, as the narrative
weaves in and out between the production of the play and the realities
of the women’s lives they help each other peel off the layers of the pre-
posterous costumes which have been masking the metal frames they were
perched on, and strip themselves of all pretence, to reveal their own dark
and devastating truths. As the parallel unseen production of The Trojan
Women becomes more contemporary and relevant to their own lives, so
their stories become more personal, more confessional, and more pain-
ful. Finally, they strip right down to simple underclothes, bearing them-
selves inside and out to each other and to the audience. And as Peeling
begins to do exactly as its title promises, stripping away layer after layer
of hopes and secrets, and metres and metres of colourful fabric, the audi-
ence may discover it’s not just theatre directors who keep Alfa, Beaty,
and Coral tucked away from the limelight and the leading roles. It might
be all of us—men and women alike—who constantly push them to one
side, deeming them unsuitable for certain roles and opportunities, mak-
ing them ‘the right-on extras stuck at the back whilst the real actors con-
tinue with the real play’ (45).
Kirstie Davis’s deeply perceptive production has Kaite O’Reilly’s
entire text together with stage directions projected as surtitles while at
the same time the actors audio-describe what they are doing. Clearly on
one level, this is done for the benefit of those members of the audience
who don’t see or hear, but it is also a comment on the self-reflexivity
of the performance and the messages it communicates. Language and
communication therefore become a complex, multi-faceted process that
underscores the multiple layers of theatrical adaptation. On one level we
have the formal English (which of course is a translation) of the Trojan
Women text, on another we have the colloquial language of the women’s
informal interaction. On top of that there’s audio description, text on
screen, British Sign Language and Sign-Supported English which are all
integrated into the production. We therefore have a ‘story’ told, retold,
200  O. Kekis

and untold on many different levels and in many different ways thus cre-
ating an ‘alternative dramaturgy’ which, as Karen Jürs Munby contends
in her analysis of Peeling, combines ‘inclusivity/accessibility and ges-
tic defamiliarisation’ and categorizes the piece as postdramatic theatre
despite its dramatic structure (Lehmann 5–6). This multiplicity of levels
also strips the layers of respectability that the hypoplay holds as a classic
and adds on layers of interpretation, which make it a hyperplay of The
Trojan Women that gives the power to ‘broken’ women to piece their
existence back together and provide the audience with a female writ of
habeas corpus.
In his review of the 2002 performance, Dominic Cavendish astutely
points out that ‘the spirits of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett hover
over Peeling … in a teasing, provocative combination’. Indeed, the
central image of the play, of the three women being stuck within their
huge, ludicrous gowns, with their heads sticking out like toppings to a
decorated cup-cake is one which alludes to Beckettian characters who
are at once profoundly tragic and darkly comic, stranded within the
confines of a bleak, inflexible structure, caught in an existential anxi-
ety. Furthermore the existence of strategies such as the use of projec-
tions, sign language, and directorial/authorial comments interspersed
within the theatrical performance, all bear affinities to what Cavendish
calls Brecht’s ‘alienation-effect sloganising’. However, the pastiche of
epic drama and petty daily chit-chat, the fusion of formal language with
swearing and daily slang, the parallel discussion of genocide and recipes,
the evident fragmentation, and the non-linear, self-reflective, a-temporal
unfolding of ‘action’ on stage, all make Peeling a play that resists catego-
rization as a work that is primarily existential, philosophical or epic. This
is a play that does not provide a single answer to the issues it explores,
nor any philosophy as panacea to the world’s problems. Rather than
being purely philosophical or polemically political it seems to rest more
comfortably in the space of ‘post-Brechtian’ theatre which Hans-Thies
Lehmann conceives as created ‘by the Brechtian enquiries into the pres-
ence and consciousness of the process of representation within the rep-
resented’ (33) and which goes beyond the certainties and the rational
socialist solutions supported by epic theatre.
The play is, I would add, deliberately complicated on all levels to
point towards the postmodern layering of multiple realities, or, to use
Fredric Jameson’s words, the search for ‘breaks’ rather than a flowing
continuity, and for ‘shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation
 10  HYPERTHEATRICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH EURIPIDES’ …  201

of things and of the way they change’ (ix). The action—or better the
in-action—opens with the chorus speaking their parts from the ancient
text and lamenting the loss of Troy. Soon there is a pause, the intense
lights fade, and the women are ‘off’, therefore ‘themselves’, professional
actresses who have been performing as chorus members of the play. As
such they are not initially that bothered by the words of the Trojan wid-
ows. They focus on their own mundane reality and comment on the
conventions of theatre. ‘Every night this play’, Beaty complains, ‘Every
bloody night this play. /Every night this bloody play. /It gives me
a headache’ (O’Reilly, 12). They pour themselves a cup of hot choco-
late but then discuss how the ‘wardrobe mistress’ will ‘kill them’ if she
catches them drinking in costume, ‘these frocks cost a fortune’. Again,
however, they question the very reason behind what they are doing when
they wonder about the significance of all of these conventions and con-
found the many and complex layers of reality, which are unfolding in
front of the audience of Peeling. In their very informal, chatty way Coral,
Alfa, and Beaty question the nature of representation in theatre, the con-
ventions of realism on stage and the place and motivation of ‘character’
in a dramatic script. Their parodic discourse underscores the openness of
experimental staging practices, challenges every traditional staging, espe-
cially of classic texts, and sarcastically defies all theatre which constructs a
world irrelevant to those experiencing it.
Their apparent distance from everything that is unfolding on or off
stage, however, changes as the unseen performance of The Trojan Women
becomes more ‘now’ than ‘then’. It becomes an image of a world we
all know, where ‘Men [are] marching forward with their uniforms and
their machetes and their orders: To rape To pillage To conquer Destroy
… Woman’s body as battlefield. Rape as a war tactic. Mutilation as a
reminder’ (22–23). Coral responds to these images saying, ‘I don’t think
I like this play very much’ (24). A story about the mothers who commit
suicide with their children rather than be caught by the enemy triggers
painful revelations in Alfa, Coral, and Beaty’s own lives but not always
invoking the stereotype of a selfless mother figure. It is the story that
forges obvious links between the horrific war stories narrated by the
actresses as chorus and the bitter reality of their own lives as women, as
well as their traumatic experiences related to motherhood.
Beaty recalls with powerful vindictiveness the day she buried her
mother, who had projected her own sense of guilt, failure, and fear of
death onto her disabled daughter. ‘There’s not many with “reduced life
202  O. Kekis

expectancy” can … press the earth down on their mother’s face. Stamp
on the grave. Put a layer of concrete over so she can’t rise again’ she
says, before adding sarcastically, ‘I joke of course’ (29–30). So while on
the one hand the women of Troy in a classic text promote the image
of idealized mothers, the three women question the traditional assump-
tion that all mothers are loving and caring individuals. Later still, Coral
admits that she had had a baby herself but was forced to give it up for
adoption to ‘a nice non-disabled family with a life expectancy much
longer than the biological mother’s’ (57). As for herself she ‘received
a special operation, without consent or knowledge’ (57), to ensure no
further babies were conceived by a woman who is a ‘freaky damaged
sick chick [with] an interesting and increasingly rare genetic conjunc-
tion’ (56). She brings her account to a close by using words which evoke
the killing of Astyanax in an attempt by the Greeks to kill off the line
of heroic Trojans—an act which our society would so readily condemn.
‘The last of my line,’ she says of herself aggressively, ‘A full stop. /The
blank page following the final chapter in a book’ (57).
As the women watch Andromache lamenting when her son is dragged
from her arms Coral’s attention wanders. And when as a member of the
chorus Beaty says ‘I should have crushed you in the womb—folded you
back inside myself rather than let you die by suicide bomb in a crowded
discotheque’ (50), evoking images of contemporary wars as well as her
own traumatic experience, Coral breaks down and tells the other women
that she is pregnant but is terrified of bringing a child into this world
for fear of turning into her own mum, of making the same mistakes,
or simply because this earth is not ‘an OK place to take a baby’ (51).
But Beaty wants her to fight on, like she did not manage to: ‘Have the
bloody baby,’ she urges her matter-of-factly, ‘To make up for what we’ve
lost’ (70). As for Alfa’s tale of secret pain, it surfaces when after Beaty,
as the chorus talks about women being strong and killing their babies to
prevent them from suffering, she repeats Coral’s earlier words, ‘I don’t
like this play very much’ (66). Alfa reveals that following an amniocente-
sis test that showed a missing chromosome, she had had an abortion and
since then has been punishing herself and ‘serving time’.
All these interweaving images of women as mothers, ancient or mod-
ern, abled or dis-abled, melodramatic or cynical, young or old, self-
punishing or liberating, stimulate Alfa, Beaty, and Coral to share their
own versions of loss which have been served to them as sanitized solu-
tions, backed up by politically correct justifications ultimately reflecting
 10  HYPERTHEATRICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH EURIPIDES’ …  203

society’s discomfort with disability especially in relation to motherhood.

Yet, even though their voices are heard loud and clear on stage, signs of
their entrapment linger on at the end of this performance. They admit
that they are on a search for a ‘happy ending’, to life, to this perfor-
mance, to any performance that they may act in, but they also cynically
conclude that anything ‘positive’, ‘uplifting’, or with a ‘happy ending’
is a ‘fantasy’ (26). They look to their audience in the theatre on the
night of the performance in search of an answer, but they find the same
impasse reflected on their faces:

Coral:  I watch them—the audience—their heads sleek in the dark—

furtive—secretive, with their little habits, tics, inappropriate
coughs, gaze. I watch them—but it’s transgressive—I’m to
be stared at, not them. But I look and I want to ask, who are
you? Why are you here? What do you think of me? Am I just
another performer? What am I? My mother could never even
find the exact word for me—even though she is still search-
ing. (as her mother) ‘What are you like Coral? I’ll tell you what
you’re like: a disappointment. A let-down. And after all my sac-
rifices …’ (to audience as self) I’m watching you. (48)

They step out of their massive dresses which constrict them and even
shed their clothes as they share their painful dark secrets with each other
and with the audience, but the metal frames that held their clothing,
so like cages when they are stripped of material, remain on stage and
indeed continue to take up the whole space even after the end of the
final blackout. These cage-like frames, create an image of entrapment
which leaves the audience feeling that these women may have ‘confessed
their way out’ of their own constrictions but the power structures which
keep them restricted as women, as mothers, as lovers, as daughters, still
remain. As characters that have been deconstructed in a contemporary
version of The Trojan Women, they interrogate their role as performers
and are in playful interaction with the contemporary resonances of the
hypoplay. But as women who seek liberation from the clichés that soci-
ety has placed on them, they have a long battle to fight before their final
victory.
The above contradiction lies in a further catch-22 situation in which
women especially in the western world found themselves, in the latter
half of the twentieth century. On the one hand, women gained the right
204  O. Kekis

to control their bodies in a way that has had no precedent in history.

On the other hand, society has often remained conservative and hesi-
tant in sanctioning that right. Therefore, women have found themselves
alone and unsupported in decisions that relate to their right to govern
their own body especially their reproductive choices—and even today
many still silently carry solitary burdens of guilt or responsibility related
to these choices. By engaging with The Trojan Women, Peeling seeks to
break this silence and to provide a coherent link between the experience
of contemporary women, disabled or able bodied and that of women of
the ancient world. The strength of this play as a hyperplay, therefore, lies
in its boldness to address and reflect on the issue of disability and perfor-
mance, the ethics and aesthetics of appearance, and the right of women
to have a political voice of their own concerning their own fertility. It
reaches a new theatre audience by peeling off layers and layers of preju-
dices and engaging with ideas emanating from a very old play in an inno-
vative way.

Trojan Barbie: ‘A Dream with a Hard Core of Truth

Inside.’
Christine Evans wrote Trojan Barbie as a ‘modern car-crash encoun-
ter with Euripides’ Trojan Women’ (“AS Interview”), a play that would
address the many layers of time, history, and culture that have accumu-
lated and collide between two works of art crafted with two millennia
between them. The play began its life as a commission by the University
of San Francisco to adapt Euripides’ Trojan Women for a student pro-
ject. Its final form eventually captured the attention of the American
Repertory Theatre in Boston where it premiered in March 2009,
directed by Carmel O’Reilly.
Evans developed a radical adaptation because she believed it was
not enough to simply ‘modernize’ the dialogue in the hypoplay and
assume that the same words and ideas presented with a contemporary
polish could reflect in a better way the sufferings of women in war. She
wanted to re-invent a new dialogue between our own time and that of
The Trojan Women. She focused on the false sense of distance that we
in the Western world feel exists between our reality and the suffering of
countries and people who are in a war situation. Her idea of a ‘collision’
between the past and the present was an attempt to explore the concept
 10  HYPERTHEATRICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH EURIPIDES’ …  205

of cyclical traumatic memory and her observation that in a very paradoxi-

cal way we seem comfortable living in many different times and places
at once. This multiplicity of layers gave Evans a sense ‘of time collaps-
ing, from modernity to ancient society [that] seemed true of our own
strange postmodern moment’ (“In Conversation”), and provided a start-
ing point for [her] play’s collision of times.
Trojan Barbie tells the story of Lotte Jones, a middle aged, childless
doll-repair expert from Reading, who decides to go on ‘a cultural tour
for singles’ to the site of Ancient Troy in Turkey, advertised in her bro-
chure as ‘Tragedy in Troy’ (Evans TB 26). Lotte packs her dreams of
romantic love and cultured adventures into her suitcase and leaves her
safe haven in the UK to travel to ‘the city that has been razed and re-
built nine times’ (9). When she arrives there she is impressed by how
‘sad and quite lovely’ the place is, and observes that ‘history is all around
[her], in a shopworn and dusty silence’ (26). But suddenly her naive,
tourist observations as well as the surrounding silence, are shattered. Her
cultural space bubble is violated by the entrance of Andromache who
comes on stage and into Lotte’s reality, lost and devastated by what has
been happening to her family and to her country. Lotte has somehow
landed back in time in an ancient war zone—among the ruins of Troy,
during the last days of the Trojan War, as the city is being burnt to the
ground. From that moment on the two worlds—of Lotte, the woman
who can mend and replace the limbs of broken dolls, and of the tor-
mented women of Troy, who cannot get their ‘broken’ children, or
husbands, or homes repaired and fixed—are presented in forceful juxta-
position, shattering the constructs of time and reality and identifying the
harsh pain that violence and ‘other people’s’ wars bring to those who did
not invite it.
Trojan Barbie encompasses the two colliding worlds in its very title.
While ‘Trojan’ refers us back in time to a mythological reality that
invokes images of war, pain, and loss, ‘Barbie’ pushes us into a present
which is plastic, playful, colourful, and related negatively to an uncom-
fortable re-imagining of the ideal female body. However Evans man-
ages to evade this familiar image of the un-ageing Barbie doll. In fact she
uses it as a kind of distancing device which reverses our expectations and
our habitual perception of the play. The only figure in her play which
could be called Barbie-like, is Helen, who uses all her feminine wiles to
try to escape from the terrifying reality of the war. However, she does
not promote the image of the brainless beauty, because she is the one
206  O. Kekis

who manages to escape portraying in that way an image of active resist-

ance, fierce practicality, and clever persuasiveness rather than what she
calls the ‘Wailing Women routine’ (18). Helen’s versatility and ability to
‘manoeuvre’ other human beings, especially men, is regarded as one of
the ways that women in war situations manage to regain the voice that
has been taken away from them and make a political statement.
But the central re-invented image of Barbie comes from Hecuba’s
teenage daughter Polly X who conceives of a sculpture which she calls
the Trojan Barbie. She is inspired by what she sees in the only museum
exhibition which has not been looted by invading soldiers: works fash-
ioned out of found objects—mostly things that have been broken in bat-
tle and are completely useless. In a similar fashion she decides to make
a sculpture out of her own ‘broken stuff’: mostly old, dismembered
Barbie dolls. In an outbreak of childish excitement she says: ‘I am going
to get a big piece of pink cardboard … and then I am going to get all
my dolls and nail them onto it. In the shape of a heart. So when it’s fin-
ished it will be this huge heart, made of smashed up dolls … It will be
very, very scary’ (11). Polly X’s creative fantasy will not be completed
until the end of the play when she becomes one of those dolls, nailed
in a crucifixion-like pose to the huge heart. This final image of the play,
with all the implications it carries, is indeed ‘very scary’, but it is also
a celebration of a young woman’s defiant attitude, of her fierce desire
to live, rebel, and be creative, and of her ability to redefine her role in
society not as that of the Barbie doll but on the contrary as a girl ‘who’d
rather invent something than be [an] icon’ (8). ‘I don’t care about
History’, Polly X says before she is sacrificed, ‘It’s full of dead people.
I just wanted to live’ (68).
Her defiant attitude is directly related to the re-invented image of the
Barbie which I have been discussing but also to dolls as lifeless-objects-
that-could-be-living-people, which are the central recurring image of
the play. As Evans experiments with the dolls as a central image running
throughout her text, director Carmel O’Reilly together with designer
David Reynoso translate this effectively into theatrical space. As the audi-
ence walk into the theatre they are greeted by the gruesome image of a
string of mutilated dolls that hangs over the middle of the stage. Some
are without arms, some without legs, some even without heads—it is just
a collection of body parts. These dolls which are garishly real, yet also
obviously plastic become for the director a chance to explore the tension
between the doll as replica of a human and the human as real. Though
 10  HYPERTHEATRICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH EURIPIDES’ …  207

the two look alike there is one main fracture between them. In a replica
the trauma can be erased completely, in a human it cannot. Futhermore,
this shock encounter between the audience and the mutilated dolls
brings forward the almost impossible task that female victims of war are
faced with in this performance: to put back together their own shattered
bodies and to ‘show’ them in one piece, to present the body, whole and
functioning.
When Andromache breaks into Lotte’s world, at the café in Turkey,
she is covered in ragged clothing, and fresh bruises. In her arms she car-
ries a toddler sized doll. To Andromache this is her son, to Lotte it is
‘a precious little doll. And in such good condition’ (28). Evans poign-
antly highlights Lotte’s naivete as the average Westerner who cannot
see beyond her glass bubble reality. Dead bodies become corpses with a
name and some significance only when they come home in coffins cov-
ered in flags; they are not corpses when they are strewn by their hun-
dreds in dusty, dry places on the other side of the world, without a
name, a face, or a personal history. When we read or hear about them
we can, with a haughty compassion say, like Lotte, when she is writing
home about her tourist experience: ‘It’s so dusty and dry here. History’s
fascinating—but bits of it stick in your throat’ (25).
Furthermore while Lotte acknowledges the inevitability of history
and the fact that truly terrible wars do happen, she can only see them
happening elsewhere, not in her safe sterilized suburban Reading. When
Andromache laments, looking at the destruction around her, ‘My broken
city. Raped by the sword and flame. Ash and dust your shroud,’ Lotte
coolly comments: ‘It is sad to think of the city being obliterated so many
times. But on the other hand, if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have got into his-
tory, would it, and we wouldn’t be here’ (27). The horror of Lotte’s
world does not lie in the things that are done to her, such as rape or kill-
ing of her people or burning of her city, but in things that happen inside
her, her emotions, like her loneliness, her despair, her disillusionment,
or even her childlessness, which is projected in her desire to fix dolls and
bring them back to life. In lifeless doll bodies, which feel like they are
alive after she spends hours repairing them, Lotte sees the potential for
new life, because as she says, ‘they might become somebody, whereas we
actually are, and that’s inevitably disappointing’ (28). Andromache talks
about the same disillusionment, emptiness and fear of a childless future
which bring them so close though they are worlds apart. And Lotte is
208  O. Kekis

drawn into her world as if to experience the other woman’s horror, that
different ‘external’ pain which goes even deeper than she has ever felt.
Yet Evans does not present a world which is all-impossible. There is
some hope in the bonding between the women in this play that does
occur though their worlds collide and smash. In a re-imagining of the
scene which is the culmination point for Euripides’ play, the moment
when the Greek soldiers hand over Astyanax’s dead body to Hecuba for
burial, Talthybius enters, covered in blood, holding the broken body of
the doll that Andromache was carrying earlier in the play. He hands it
over to Hecuba and she mourns over her dead grandson. At that point,
Lotte who has all along remained emotionally unaffected by the broken
dolls lying around the stage, because for her they are clearly not human
bodies, approaches Hecuba and offers to put him back together for her.
Evans writes in her stage directions that the women bend over the doll/
corpse together and present an image of collaboration and solidarity, an
image of the two disparate worlds finding a point of contact, ‘a moment
of ritual—women working together as they have done for thousands of years’
(62). She paints in this way the only glimpse of hope that can possibly
come through the bleak horror of war, hope which is achieved through
passionate and heartfelt collaboration.
Thus Trojan Barbie manages to explore political questions while
simultaneously avoiding being didactic or polemical. It brings women
face to face with their past, their history, their culture, their present, and
their future, and shows them on a trajectory where they take control of
their own realities and assert their existence. Lotte expresses her desire to
explore culture and history in the very act of booking to go on a holiday
to Troy, a city which has ‘resurrect[ed] itself over the bones of its previ-
ous lives and deaths’ (9). But her view of what culture and history are
is superficial and naive or maybe it is just socially and historically condi-
tioned since essentially she wishes to go to Troy not because she genu-
inely desires to delve into the history of an ancient people but because
she wishes to bestow her ‘tourist gaze’ upon a mythological site (Urry
and Larsen). When she actually does get to Troy, however, the ‘pseudo-
event’ and history collide with reality (Eco). The earth cracks under her
feet and she is thrown into the catastrophic events which actually make
history. Past and present fuse into one apocalyptic reality which brings
forth an equally hellish future. In her characteristic prophetic revelations
Cassandra depicts this painful collision of past, present, and future, myth,
fantasy and reality: ‘The present is pregnant with death. /Because the
 10  HYPERTHEATRICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH EURIPIDES’ …  209

past fucked it already … [Now] I can taste blood on my tongue. That

means the future is being born’ (Evans, TB, 19–20). Lotte, the women
of Troy, and with them all the women who are caught in the throes of
war and destruction the world over, are swept by the tidal wave of history
which Cassandra speaks about: ‘I think history’s a wave’, she says, ‘I think
that’s it. /It rolls and sucks at you and drags you under. / It smashes
you into the future/right when you think you’re on solid ground. Like
stepping on a landmine’ (30). All the women in this play are trapped in
this insecure, liminal space that history has hurled them into, ‘ghosts in
the dead zone of immigration’, hostages in their own bodies, refugees
in their own countries. ‘There’s a black hole now, where I used to think
“future”’ says Esme, one of the chorus, ‘But now/it’s like someone tore
up a map/and that map was my body’ (37). Their presence on stage
becomes an endeavour against all odds to piece together their broken
bodies and to habent corpus.
Similarly to O’Reilly, Evans shows only faint rays of light in the
penultimate scene of the play and leaves the audience grappling with the
bitter suggestion that while women can bring about change through col-
laboration, the social structures that imprison and restrict them remain
largely in place. The women realise that ‘the only fertile seed is hate’ and
their only comfort lies in them forming a strong support system for each
other. They are raped, beaten, and taken away. Astyanax is killed by hav-
ing a tank driven over his skull (on auto pilot so that no man would bear
his blood on their hands); Polly X’s throat is slit at Achilles’ grave so
that the sand storm can cease and the trucks can set off—her sculpture
left half-finished; Hecuba is not even allowed to bury Astyanax who is
grabbed from her and thrown into a ‘pit’; the city is torched and the oil
tanks are about to explode; Lotte is saved at the last minute by a deus ex
machina British officer and whisked safely ‘home, back to piles of bills
and the terrible English weather’ (65).
This ruthless re-telling of the familiar myth will leave an audience with
an uncomfortable feeling that in this world we value the life of some,
more than the life of others; that what for one person is a dismembered
corpse for another person is just an image of a broken doll; and that one
person’s apocalyptic war is another person’s holiday-gone-wrong. In the
last scene of Trojan Barbie, Lotte is back in Reading. Still ‘a little bruised
and band-aided’, but confident that ‘soon everything will feel normal …
and the memories will fade’ (66) since this hideous tragedy only hap-
pened to some foreigners and not to anybody with a name and a face
210  O. Kekis

that she/we can identify. It is a bleak revelation to see how easily Lotte
forgets what happened ‘out there’ and finds comfort within her culturally
defined space bubble again. However, Christine Evans will not leave her
audience with this smug feeling of false safety and security which they
feel in front of their television sets—not without reminding them that
the real world is still out there, whichever safe little bubble we choose
to hide in. As Lotte sets to fixing a very fragile and precious porcelain
doll—the very same one that was Astyanax in previous scenes—Hecuba
appears in the form of a bag lady, dressed in contemporary rags and
looking frantic. Lotte does not recognize her. Hecuba has survived the
centuries, ‘the deserts and the seas’ (66) to look for her dead children’s
bodies. She has returned because it is not enough for her simply to dis-
appear into a mythical victimhood. She cannot rest unless the bodies are
produced, accounted for, and buried. She starts rummaging through
Lotte’s bags of doll parts and starts flinging them to the floor as she
searches and then sees the broken porcelain body of Astyanax and moves
towards it transfixed.
The episode ends swiftly and cleanly for Lotte. A hospital worker, alias
Talthybius, rushes in, restrains Hecuba and takes her away as he did in
Troy. Lotte, visibly shaken stares as they leave ‘like the last fragment of a
dream’ (67), but quickly snaps herself out of it and starts picking up the
doll parts that Hecuba scattered on the floor. However, while Lotte con-
tinues to be ignorant of the reality surrounding her, the audience see a
final image of Polly X, as the soldiers are ready to sacrifice her in front of
her unfinished Trojan Barbie sculpture. Her work of art becomes com-
plete only after they tie a red ribbon around her neck, killing her in a
very stylized and unrealistic way, and she becomes just another one of
those broken doll parts that make up Trojan Barbie. Her sculpture is fin-
ished, and, as she had promised, is now ‘very very scary’ (11), because it
evidences that there is another world out there which exists whether we
choose to turn a blind eye to it or not.

Peeling and Trojan Barbie; Radical and Palimpsestic

When Christine Evans set off to write Trojan Barbie her intention was
not to make ‘a modern paean to Euripides’ because as she said, The
Trojan Women still speaks eloquently of the suffering of women in sit-
uations of war (www.americanrepertorytheater.org). She was aiming
for a radical re-making, in the style of Charles L. Mee’s postmodern
 10  HYPERTHEATRICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH EURIPIDES’ …  211

appropriations, which would take apart Euripides’ play and build a new
contemporary construct to interrogate many of the assumptions that the
ancient work carried (Lester, Mee, E., Mee, C.L.). Similarly, in writing
Peeling, Kaite O’Reilly encountered Euripides’ hypoplay in a structure
that peels off the layers of interpretation that the classical tradition has
attached to The Trojan Women, and breaks away from it to reveal a pal-
impsestic work which gives its female characters a novel strength. What
both playwrights achieve in their hyperplays is to invoke re-configura-
tions or re-inventions of femininity that detect and emphasize individual
women’s strengths but also female solidarity in the form of ‘shared pleas-
ures and strengths rather than shared vulnerability and pain’ (Genz and
Brabon, 69), thus placing the plays firmly within a contemporary femi-
nist discourse. As adaptations, these plays have granted the central female
figures a powerful presence and given them the strength of individual,
political choice, while taking on for them a form of self-discovery and
self-assertion in line with Adrienne Rich’s view, who writes:

Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering

an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chap-
ter in cultural history: it is an act of survival …[it] is more than a search for
identity…[it is a] drive to self-knowledge (33).

As such therefore, Peeling and Trojan Barbie become ‘female writs of

habeas corpus’ which grant victimized women their undeniable right to
self-determination.

Note
1. For detailed analysis of the use of these terms refer to Kekis, Ph.D. Thesis,
Unpublished, 2013. Print. (53-62).

Bibliography
Cavendish, Dominic. “Provocative Chorus of Disaproval.” TheDaily Telegraph.
April 9 2002. Web. March 17 2011.
Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality : Essays. London: Picador, 1987. Print.
Evans, Christine. “In Conversation with Georgeann Murphy at the University of
New Hampshire on 8th April 2010.” (2010a). Web. 17 March 2011.
212  O. Kekis

———. “Interviewed by Adam Szymkovicz on June 14th 2010.” (2010b). Web.

17 March 2011.
———. Trojan Barbie. New York: Samuel French, 2010. Print.
———. “Playwright’s Note on American Repertory Theatre Website, March 1st
2009” (2009). Web. 17 March 2011.
Garland, Robert. Surviving Greek Tragedy. London: Duckworth, 2004. Print.
Genette, Gérard. “Palimpsests : Literature in the Second Degree.” Stages.
Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. 490. Print.
Genz, Stephanie. and Brabon, Benjamin. Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and
Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Print.
Hall, Edith, and Fiona Macintosh. Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre,
1660–1914. Oxford [England] ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.
Hall, Edith. Greek Tragedy : Suffering under the Sun. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010. Print.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
London: Verso, 1991. Print.
Kekis, Olga. “Contemporary Antigones, Medeas and Trojan Women Perform
on Stages around the World.” Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis. University of
Birmingham, 2013. Print.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Jürs-Munby, Karen. London,
New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Lester, Gideon. All About Mee http://www.amrep.org/people/mee1.html
7 Feb 2000. Web. 28 March 2009.
Macintosh, Fiona. “Tragedy in Performance: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century
Productions.” The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Ed. Easterling, P. E.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 284–323. Print.
Mee, Erin. ‘Mee on Mee’. TDR/The Drama Review, 46 (2002): (3): 82–92.
Mee, Charles L. A Nearly Normal Life: A Memoir. Boston, London: Little,
1999.
O’Reilly, Kaite. Peeling. London: Faber and Faber, 2002.
Performance Programme for Peeling. Forest Forge Theatre Company: Rural
Hampshire, Spring 2011. Print.
Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”. In On Lies,
Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978, 33–49. London: Virago, 1971.
Scanlan, Robert. “Writ of Habeas Corpus: Christine Evans’ Trojan Barbie”.
Theatre Forum, 35 (2009): 26–27.
Urry, John, and Larsen, Jonas. The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 3rd ed. Los Angeles: SAGE,
2011.
 CHAPTER 11

A Tale of Two Jordans: Representing Syrian

Refugees Before and After 2011

George Potter

In spring 2009, Syrian director Samer Omran brought his Arabic-language

production of Slawomir Mrozek’s play The Emigrants to Jordan for the
Amman International Theater Festival. Performed in a storage space
underneath the stage of the Royal Cultural Center, the tale of two Syrian
immigrants confronting the complexities of immigration and identity
became the must-see event of the festival, with audiences jostling for tickets
every night and standing in celebratory ovation at the end of each perfor-
mance. In a country with a long, complex relationship with Syria—from
deep family ties to aggressive political rivalries—it was a moment of artis-
tic union and acclaim. After years of Syrian actors having received praise
throughout the region, a small troupe had brought a deeply moving play
to Amman that underscored a thriving period in Syrian dramatic perfor-
mance. The possibility of the reality represented in the play, however, still
seemed far away.
Since then, the 2011 uprising in Syria has led to a protracted civil war
in Syria and an extended refugee crisis in Jordan, which has absorbed
over one million Syrians into a state of 6.2 million citizens with limited

G. Potter (*) 
Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, USA
e-mail: george.potter@valpo.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 213

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_11
214  G. Potter

water and financial resources. As was the case with both Iraqis and
Palestinians before them, the Syrians have been met both by limited ser-
vices for refugees and discontent from the local population that worries
about economic loss, violence, and a disappearing ‘Jordanian’ identity. In
this context, Syrians have been reconstructed, not as a source of artistic
praise, but as a threat to the nation.
This chapter juxtaposes the pre- and post-2011 Jordanian imagination
of Syrians, using Omran’s production as a starting point for imagining
the ‘ideal’ Syrian immigrant during an era when mass Syrian immigra-
tion, let alone refugees, was a distant nightmare. Conversely, contempo-
rary Jordanian imaginings of Syrians post-2011 often create an opposite
extreme ‘other’ tied to militancy, increasing crime, and escalating infla-
tion. In an attempt to counterbalance these stereotypes, post-2011
outreach productions have attempted to turn the plight of Syrians into
spectacles for staging Western classics, such as Trojan Women in Syria:
The Trojan Women and Hamlet in Shakespeare in Zaatari. These produc-
tions seek both to display Syrians as non-terrorists and to gain attention
for the ever-growing non-governmental organization (NGO) complex
inside Jordan. Through this comparison between The Emigres and The
Trojan Women and Shakespeare in Zaatari, it is also possible to examine
the cultural politics of adaptation when famous Western classics aim to
do political work in the global south, specifically in the service of NGOs.
Though such performances aim to alleviate suffering in afflicted commu-
nities, the intersection of the human rights industry and the adaptation
industry often marginalizes Syrian voices that are only deemed human
when in the drag of Hecuba or Hamlet and voiced by women and chil-
dren. Such productions are a far cry from Omran’s attempt to humanize
Syrians as Syrian refugees through his adaptation of Mrozek’s play The
Emigrants, a text less readily known to his largely Arab audience. In the
end, productions like The Trojan Women and Shakespeare in Zaatari ren-
der Syrians on stage invisible to cosmopolitan internationals in any form
other than as refugee performance chic.
In many ways, Mrozek’s The Emigrants provides a perfect meta-
phor for the relationship between Syria and Jordan: two men thrust
together by circumstances, on land that they have not chosen for them-
selves, struggling to define their new lives, while moving between sup-
porting and threatening one another. Likewise, the modern history of
Syria and Jordan has been one of movement between fidelity and ten-
sion. Nominally on the same side in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Jordan
 11  A TALE OF TWO JORDANS: REPRESENTING SYRIAN REFUGEES …  215

also engaged in secret negotiations with Israel.1 Later, Syria tied itself
to the Egyptian led United Arab Republic and the Ba’ath Party, while
resource-poor Jordan sought patronage from the UK and the USA.
Eventually, the Syrian military crossed into Jordan on the side of the
Palestinians during the Black September fighting between the Jordanian
state and PLO militias (among others) in 1970. These competing visions
for modern Arab states later transformed into familial rivalries between
Hafez and Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Kings Hussein and Abdullah II in
Jordan. As political scientist Curtis Ryan summarizes:

Throughout their histories as independent states, Jordan and Syria have

had a tenuous relationship at best, marked by temporary military alliances
during wars with Israel, but more often by varying degrees of mutual hos-
tility. These long periods of hostility were so extensive, in fact, that they
amounted to a local ‘Cold War’.2

In the 2000s, the tensions relented some, as President Bashar al-Assad

and King Abdullah II brought a new era of Western-influenced neolib-
eralism and economic ties, including free trade zones on the border, to
their respective states.3 However, like the uneasy relations in Mrozek’s
play, these tenuous peace offerings quickly crumbled in the wake of the
2011 uprisings. In subsequent years, King Abdullah II became the first
Arab leader to call for Assad to leave power, telling the BBC in 2011, ‘If
Bashar has the interest of his country, he would step down, but he would
also create an ability to reach out and start a new phase of Syrian life’
beyond the current regime.4 For its part, Syria has consistently criticized
Jordan for hosting American-backed training of Syrian rebels as well as
meetings of Syrian opposition movements.5
Despite all of this, Jordan has absorbed an astonishing number of
Syrian refugees. As of 17 June 2015, the United Nations has registered
over 600,000 refugees in Jordan, with the vast majority concentrated
in the urban areas of northern Jordan.6 The Jordanian government,
counting unregistered refugees and Syrians who had previously lived
in Jordan, has long claimed that at least 1.4 million Syrian refugees
reside in Jordan.7 These populations are disproportionately composed
of women and children8 and are placed inside a resource-poor country,
best noted by the fact that Jordan is the fourth water-poorest country
in the world. As the reality of an extended civil war set-in, the United
Nations turned from talking about temporary relief to discussing
216  G. Potter

long-term infrastructure solutions.9 However, the strains on Jordan have

been felt, as the population wonders why it has been left to carry the
burden of a situation that multiple Middle Eastern regimes, the USA,
Russia, and European powers helped escalate—and fund—in Syria, and
many Jordanians begin to speak of Syrians being ‘everywhere’ in their
country.10 The Jordanian government has attempted to allay these con-
cerns by using a part of all money donated to help Syrians for infrastruc-
ture development in the Jordanian communities affected by the Syrian
refugee population. As more radical forms of violence have character-
ized the Syrian civil war, the refugee population in Jordan has also come
under increased scrutiny by the Jordanian mukhbarat (secret police).11
The Jordanian military has also long been involved in the fight against
ISIS, and tensions were inflamed further when Jordanian Air Force pilot
Mutah al-Kaseasbeh was executed in winter 2015. However, as former
Jordanian Ambassador Omar Rifai stated, in a moment of mixed convic-
tion and desperate hope, ‘Jordan is a land where refugees come … We
have to make it eventually’.12
Of course, at the time of Omran’s production of The Emigrants in
Spring 2009, the reality of a Syrian refugee crisis was far from anyone’s
mind, though Iraqi and Palestinian refugees were, and remain, a regular
part of life in Jordan, particularly in Amman. Instead, the production was
notable both for its staging and the strong acting performances that car-
ried the script. In terms of the former, the production was staged in a
storage room beneath the stage in the Royal Cultural Center in Amman,
limiting the production to 50 tickets a night. After obtaining one of the
coveted tickets, the audience entered the theater as if it was attending
a standard performance. However, it was led through the back of the
performance space and downstairs, to a room lit merely by one dangling
light and with sparse furniture in a central performance space, with seat-
ing for the audience on either side. Aside from being an innovative use of
a rather traditional performance hall, the production brought the audi-
ence into the heart of Mrozek’s script, where two refugees listen to the
sounds of a New Year’s Eve party above them, knowing that they have
to lower their voices and stay in hiding until the people above leave. In
actual performance, there literally were people above attending other
performances in the festival staged elsewhere in the building.
Thus, as other audiences went to performances, or a New Year’s Eve
celebration was imagined on stage, the two anonymous characters—
AA and XX in Mrozek’s script—contemplated their situation living and
 11  A TALE OF TWO JORDANS: REPRESENTING SYRIAN REFUGEES …  217

working secretly in a foreign country. In fact, early on, AA, the more
contemplative and integrated of the pair, questions where XX escapes to
when he goes out:

Now, where did you go? Into the street. Everyone is free to go there. But
those looks! … From a mile away people know who you are. Yes, you have
the right to walk there, but they have the right to look at you. And to
recognize your foreign mug. Because you’re part of our people. Your flesh
and blood belong to our people.13

A view of immigration as a state of constant difference, AA’s views, when

spoken in Arabic created a strong critique of how many Arab nations
hosted refugees from other Arab countries. In 2009, Iraqi refugees in
Jordan and Syria were given limited rights and access to work and edu-
cation. And Palestinians within Syria had long been denied citizenship.
Additionally, voice and dress were perpetual markers of this difference.
As one Iraqi refugee told me, ‘When I enter a taxi and they hear my
accent, they immediately ask where I am from. When I say, “Iraq”, the
next question is “Sunni or Shi’a”’. He continued to explain that if he
answered Sunni, the driver would praise Saddam Hussein, whom the
refugee hated, but if he said Shi’a, the driver, in predominately Sunni
Jordan, would consider the refugee not to be a real Muslim. As noted
above, many Syrians in Jordan now face the discrimination based on
accent and dress that Mrozek’s play previously critiqued beneath a
Jordanian stage, thereby bringing the Polish script intimately into the
Arab context. As for AA, his only response is to say that XX escaped to
the cinema as a place where he could exist in anonymity: ‘Everybody
is looking at the screen. You too. You watch something move, images,
you don’t understand anything that’s being said. But that’s of no impor-
tance. The essential thing is that you are there and that you feel safe’.14
Unfortunately, as AA points out, there is one tragic flaw in the cinema:
unlike the streets, it’s not free, leaving XX to simply reply, ‘I never go to
the cinema’.15
This theme of difference is carried throughout the play, most notably
in an extended exchange about language acquisition:

AA:  W
 hy don’t you learn the language? (XX goes on coughing, though
now deliberately, in order to gain time.) I am asking you why you
don’t learn the language?
218  G. Potter

[…]
XX:  You mean why don’t I speak their language?
AA:  You know damn well what I mean. You’re an illiterate in this
country—worse, a deafmute!
XX:  I don’t want to learn their language.
AA:  Why not? You live in this country. You eat here, you drink, you
walk the streets like people here—so why don’t you want to speak
like them? You could get a better job…
XX:  They’re not people.
AA:  No?
XX:  No. They’re not human There aren’t any real people here.
AA:  And where, according to you, are these real people?
XX:  Back home.16

It is interesting to speculate on how a Jordanian audience would view

Syrian actors, speaking in a different dialect of Arabic, discussing the idea
of learning the local language. Within the Arab world, there are many
registers of Arabic, most notably a divide between fusha (literary Arabic)
and ‘amiyya (colloquial Arabic). More broadly, there are wide variants in
local ‘amiyyas throughout the region, making pronunciation and word
choice an instant marker of regional roots and difference, as indicated in
the example of the Iraqi refugee discussed above. However, like accents
in a non-native language, dialects in one’s native language are difficult
to shed, particularly when the native population can understand your
dialect, as Jordanians are able to do with the Syrian dialect. Thus, the
Syrian accent still serves as a marker of difference and not belonging.
And many, if not all Syrians, would not want to switch to the Jordanian
accent, which is often viewed as a more Bedouin (i.e. inferior or less
educated) register of Arabic among Arabs from the Northern Levant.
Not unlike XX, the more ‘authentic’ Arabic is always that spoken ‘back
home’. At the same time, the use of Syrian Arabic has now become an
instant identifier of someone that can be exploited for lower-salary labor,
just as XX.
Meanwhile, off-the-record, many in the aid industry now speak of
two common assumptions of international conflicts: conflicts lasting
over three years tend to extend to at least a decade and, typically, only
50% of refugees return to their home countries. While there are many
factors that could determine whether Syrians return home—political
 11  A TALE OF TWO JORDANS: REPRESENTING SYRIAN REFUGEES …  219

circumstances, development, economic opportunities, and so on—as

noted above, the UN (and the US Embassy, for that matter), have begun
to speak of long-term sustainability for refugees and the communities
affected by their presence in Jordan. The challenge of returning home
was also predicted in the performance of The Emigrants. At one point,
AA even speculates that economics will prevent XX from ever returning
to his homeland, telling him,

Here you save a little more money every day, you lie on your bed thinking
how tomorrow you’ll have a little more money, the day after still more,
and in a year’s time lots and lots more. You have a goal in life that grows
more seductive the further removed it is. Have you already saved enough
for a little house with a little garden? So, why not try to save some more
until you can afford a bigger house with a bigger garden? It’s quite simple.
All you have to do is to postpone your return for a month or two. And
then, why not an even bigger house with an even bigger garden? … And
so you keep on postponing your return because the more money you have
the more you want to have.17

As the war in Syria spirals across regional borders and grows ever more
intransigent, many Syrians are being asked to turn from short-term cal-
culations to long-term decisions: is it better to return home or live as
a second-class citizen, or seek refugee status in a third-party country?
While AA’s calculation in The Emigrants is based on a cynical assess-
ment of consumerist drives, it also places a face to the reality of the refu-
gees that do not return home. They are not merely parasites continually
draining off their host states, but individuals locked in a web of difficult
and limited choices.
At the time of performance, a second resonance was captured due to
the play’s discussion, by Syrian actors, of interrogations and informants.
When AA tells XX, ‘I’m not asking you if you’ve done anything. I’m
asking you if you’ve ever been interrogated’,18 it would be difficult for
any member of an Arabic-speaking audience not to be reminded of the
Syrian mukhbarat (secret police), an organization that has often drawn
comparisons to the German Stasi, both for the depth of its informant
network and the specific torture techniques it employed.19 And long
before the Western world cared about violence by the Assad regime,
the fear of the Syrian state was underscored when Hafez al-Assad had
between 10,000 and 40,000 people killed in Hama in a single month
220  G. Potter

in 1982 after the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood attempted an uprising.20

Thus, the fear of government informants and interrogations weaved
throughout Mrozek’s play was a very real one during Omran’s produc-
tion. In fact, when XX defends himself against allegations of being a gov-
ernment collaborator with the statement, ‘I have a wife and children!’
AA soon responds simply:

Admit it. I said I was a bastard, so you conclude I must be a government

agent, right? Shall we drink? Well, well. You know, if you take a dislike to a
loyal servant of your government, that raises certain doubts in your loyalty
to the regime. That’s bad, that’s very bad, my friend. What if I really were
a government spy?21

What the performance places before the audience is the idea of a secu-
rity apparatus with ties so deep and wide that they stretch across national
borders, where one’s actions abroad could endanger one’s wife and chil-
dren at home, and where one never knows whom one can talk to safely.
In other words, two hours from Damascus, Omran was forcing his audi-
ence to engage the reality of life in contemporary Syria that would only
grow worse after 2011. As AA says, ‘[I]n a dictatorship all people are
equal. Fear creates that equality’.22
The height of this tension between the characters—and the real-world
fears behind it—came when the lights in the performance space went
out, rendering the entire area completely dark. When the lights returned,
AA and XX stood close to one another, with AA holding his glass in a
toast, and XX holding an axe, ready to kill his companion, as gasps rose
from the audience, before XX lowered the axe and accepted the drink. A
glimpse into the reality of refugees—where those with opposing politics
in their native lands are thrown together based on shared heritage and
desperation—this moment captured the thin line between enemies and
compatriots, between life and death for so many now in Jordan. Later,
as the play draws to its close, with the characters lying on their respective
beds, AA contemplates the possibility of a better world:

And everything will be good and true … Work will provide bread, and the
law freedom, because freedom will be the law and the law will be freedom!
Isn’t that what we are looking for? What we are all aiming for? And if we all
have a common goal, if we all want the same thing, what prevents us from
creating a community, a healthy community, wise … You’ll go back home
and you’ll never again be a slave. Neither you, nor your children …23
 11  A TALE OF TWO JORDANS: REPRESENTING SYRIAN REFUGEES …  221

As the lights returned to the performance space, with this utopia of com-
munity in mind, the primarily Jordanian audience stood and applauded
the two actors who had carried their nearly three-hour show, the power
of the performance perhaps overriding the concern for actual refugees.
No one knew just how far from a utopia the Jordanian and Syrian com-
munities would soon move.
In recent years, as the fictional scenario from The Emigrants has
become a daily reality for thousands of Syrians within Jordan, perfor-
mances involving Syrians in Jordan have moved further from the con-
tent of Mrozek’s play, rather than closer to it. Perhaps this is because the
material is too sensitive or those staging plays are less familiar with such
work or with the Syrian theatrical heritage, but there also appears to be a
desire to use Syrian performers as a prop in drawing attention to refugees
and the refugee industry surrounding them—particularly in shows fea-
turing older classics of the Western stage.
The most famous of these productions is Syria: The Trojan Women,
directed by Omar Abusaada and produced by the Prospero World
Charitable Trust in 2013 and 2014. The project’s website describes itself
as a project that:

combines drama therapy and strategic communications. We aim to help

refugees work through PTSD, depression and mental anxiety via suit-
ably chosen drama projects. We try where possible to provide some paid
employment for refugees. We also work to help refugees and their host
communities to understand each other. Through our drama projects we
also spread awareness of the Syrian refugee crisis.24

These goals of awareness and healing are all, of course, noble. At the
same time, there seems to be some doubt for whom the project actu-
ally exists. Throughout the development of the project, participants
were filmed by documentarian Yasmin Fedda with the aims of produc-
ing a film, Queens of Syria, about the project.25 Likewise, the website for
the project produces many calls for funding, yet they appear more tied
toward the production of the documentary, rather than aid to Syrian ref-
ugees or the communities surrounding them. And there is now talk of
producing a feature film of Euripides’ play set in contemporary Jordan.
One is left to wonder, then, if the goals of the production really are to
heal Syrian refugees or, instead, to use them as a spectacle for foreign
audiences in order to advance the careers of theatre and film artists with
international mobility and careers denied to the refugees.
222  G. Potter

The goal of spectacle might also explain why the implications of the
Trojan analogy are not fully explored. In Euripides’ play, there is no
hope for the women of Troy. Cassandra is taken as the concubine of
Agamemnon, later to be killed by Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife.
Andromache has had her children killed and is taken as the concubine
of Achilles’ son. Helen is returned to Menelaus, the king that she had
fled. And Hecuba is taken away as a slave to Odysseus. Presumably, she
does not survive the journey back to Greece.26 Is this to imply that the
only way forward for Syrian women is to become concubines, be killed,
or have their children killed? Even Abusaada, the director, questioned
whether the production was the right Greek drama for the Syrian con-
text, stating:

Antigone feels more relevant to the Syrian context in many ways. Firstly,
the wars they talk about are so different. In The Trojan Women, the war is
coming from outside—the Greeks invaded Troy. But in Antigone, the war
is coming from within, between two brothers.

Secondly, The Trojan Women takes place after the war has happened, the
women’s destiny and fate is decided and they have no agency, no deci-
sions to take. Antigone is not like this. We are watching the character of
Antigone take a series of critical decisions. She is active, she decides her
own fate.27

As with Antigone’s Thebes, many audiences are still left to imagine a

world in which Syrian women are given agency, rather than tragedy, on
stage.
In a discussion at Georgetown University—after the USA denied
visas for the women to perform in Washington—Co-Director of the
Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics Cynthia P. Schneider
argued the opposite: ‘This story tonight is not a tragedy. It is not like
Euripides’ play. It’s a story of incredible resilience, courage, personal
strength, friendship, love, humor, and joy’.28 At the macro level, this
might be true: performing art in the face of tragedy will be seen by many
as a sign of resilience and joy. And the company’s own production may
be understood as a positive intervention. However, Schneider’s own
Co-Director, Derek Goldman, has focused on the women’s statements
about the tragedy of their circumstances. In an article about the produc-
tion, he quotes a number of cast members. Suaad says, ‘I have a scream
I want the whole world to hear, but I wonder if it will be heard’. Farah
 11  A TALE OF TWO JORDANS: REPRESENTING SYRIAN REFUGEES …  223

states, ‘The line I most like in the play is “My tears had escaped, who
would give eyes to cry with.”’ I love this line because I am in a lot of
pain, but I don’t show anything to the world.’ And Nadine adds, ‘The
character I love the most is Hecuba. My favourite line that she says is,
“Oh world! Do you witness what we suffer? Our race doesn’t deserve
this treatment”. I feel this speaks to us. We used to live in a beautiful life
before all this and now we are nothing’.29 Given these quotes, and the
women’s stories of difficult experiences in Syria and Jordan during the
discussion at Georgetown, it would seem that the women’s experiences
exist between the rhetoric of Schneider and Euripides’ story. They are
not yet in a place of pure joy and love, nor are they defeated and without
options, as with the women of Troy. Perhaps it is a production of hope, a
word that Schneider strangely avoided.
But the question remains hope for whom? When Euripides wrote
Trojan Women, he was responding to Greek violence on the island
of Melos, where the Greek army killed most of the men and sold the
women and children into slavery. The play was then performed in front
of a Greek audience, likely including soldiers and politicians culpable for
the violence. But does anyone question the degree of violence in Syria
today? Is performing the stories of Syrian women in front of an audience
in Amman or students and faculty at Georgetown the same as challeng-
ing the Athenian state? Sadly, one must conclude that Syria: The Trojan
Women plays much less radically in performance than Euripides’ Trojan
Women or Omran’s The Emigrants.
Instead, the production seems to be used because performing
Euripides to foreign audiences makes Syrians more human to non-Syri-
ans. This is not meant to imply that Syrians should only perform Syrian
work, rather than Greek classics. A Mediterranean culture like Syria has a
much longer and deeper relation to Greek theatre than any US company,
after all. Instead, the point is that audiences may find the presentation of
works deemed more ‘Western’ as more artistically viable and, therefore,
worthier of humane responses than the rich Syrian artistic tradition. This
was the note struck in Goldman’s introduction, where he contrasted
the Syrian women to ‘the picture of Syria created by the current ISIS-
dominated news cycle’, and argued, ‘The Syrian Trojan Women project
speaks deeply to us both because of its extraordinary artistry and because
we feel that the voices of these women and, by extension, the voices of
three million Syrian refugees are almost entirely unknown and unheard
by US audiences’.30 However, it still seems worth asking whether Syrians
224  G. Potter

are seen as equally artistic and human when they are performing in
their own indigenous plays, films, and YouTube videos about the civil
war,31 or even when they are adapting less famous works, such as The
Emigrants. Just as the tragic, though less common, deaths of American
journalists in Syria receive more attention than the thousands of Syrian
dead and millions of refugees, so it seems that cultural products that
adapt to local Syrian contexts will always be less noted than those that
ride Western tropes.
In Spring 2014, the Qatari Red Crescent32 staged a production enti-
tled Shakespeare in Zaatari directed by Nawwar Bulbul.33 Taking its
name from the largest refugee camp in Jordan, whose size has often run
over 100,000 inhabitants, the production involved 60 children from the
camp performing an ‘interpretation’ of Hamlet and King Lear in the
Roman theater in downtown Amman.
Again, the practitioners appear to believe that staging classics will help
to make refugees more visible and, perhaps, more human. Of course,
such productions are engaging in a long tradition wherein Shakespeare
is staged in the global south as a means to promote a culture’s ‘moder-
nity’ and ‘development’, as well as its general artistic and intellectual
worth. Geoffrey M. Ridden has argued that ‘It is commonplace for
Shakespeare to be used to signal high culture in works that are intended
for a popular culture’.34 Similarly, Terence Hawkes has noted, ‘[Hamlet]
has come to function as a universal cultural reference point, a piece of
social shorthand … Hamlet crucially helps to determine how we perceive
and respond to the world in which we live. You can even name a cigar
after it.’35 In the Arab context, Margaret Litvin writes, ‘Hamlet is one
of Shakespeare’s most often translated plays; in many languages (includ-
ing Arabic and Russian) it is the most translated. Despite his resistance
or because of it, Hamlet is one of the most intensely appropriated lit-
erary characters of all time.’36 The Qatari Red Crescent seems to be
acknowledging that the violence of the war in Syria is not enough to sus-
tain interest in Syrian refugees, nor are statistics alone. Instead, having
children recite lines from Hamlet and King Lear will make the children
seem more fully human, more like wealthy foreign donors, and more
deserving of salvation. On stage before the world, refugees too must
now prove that they have ‘that within which passeth show’.37 As with
Syria: The Trojan Women, the production’s director, Nawaar Bulbul,
told Sky News Arabic that one of the production’s goals was to show the
world that Syrians were more than just ‘terrorists’. This was juxtaposed
 11  A TALE OF TWO JORDANS: REPRESENTING SYRIAN REFUGEES …  225

against his ending comment in the interview, where he claimed that the
United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was without
‘humanity’ because it did not help the production.38 In this way, Bulbul
was able to reverse the stereotype of Western humanism versus Arab bar-
barism. Likewise, his production received extensive international atten-
tion, including coverage from the New York Times,39 as well as all major
Arabic-language satellite channels, many of whom had previously shown
little interest in Syrian theater.40 And a Google search for ‘Shakespeare in
Zaatari’ now returns nearly 49,000 results. Apparently, Shakespeare is a
good vehicle for global refugee chic.
Again, though, the question turns to whether the performance was
more for the children or a global audience. On one hand, the issues
of lineage, power, and sovereignty presented in Hamlet and King
Lear speak as much to modern-day Syria as they did to Shakespeare’s
England. Likewise, there is a long Arabic tradition, most notably pre-
sented by Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad, which argues that Shakespeare
is part of a ‘global heritage’.41 And one can hardly blame a direc-
tor for wanting to give the children of Syria a cultural activity to break
the monotony of life in a refugee camp, not unlike many other ‘service
Shakespeare’ projects around the world.42 At the same time, in addition
to the extensive media coverage, the actual staging of the play under-
scores the idea that the show used Syrian children as a spectacle. The
end of the performance came during Hamlet’s famous ‘To be or not
to be’ soliloquy. Though this soliloquy is the most-cited passage from
Hamlet in the Arab tradition, it also has traditionally posed one of the
most interesting translation issues. As Litvin writes, ‘Since Arabic has no
infinitive form (‘to be’…), there is no way to ask ‘to be or not to be’
without identifying who is doing the being. Each translator is forced to
choose a pronoun’.43 In Bulbul’s production, the line was translated as
(‘I am or I am not.’). The staging during the Amman pro-
duction involved the young boy playing Hamlet chanting the phrase in
both English and Arabic as he led a procession of actors through a cheer-
ing audience.44 On its surface, it seems natural to assume that the audi-
ence was cheering both the production and the idea of continued Syrian
presence, at least in the existential sense, if not in the present-in-Jordan
one. However, given that, at this point in the play, Hamlet is contem-
plating suicide, it makes for a rather strange segment to both cheer and
to have children chanting, one that not only erases the play’s context,
but also makes the children a spectacle for a political ideology and NGO
226  G. Potter

event that has nothing to do with the play they are performing and little
to do with the children themselves. Similarly, if all of the children in the
production are made to recite the beginning of Hamlet’s soliloquy, then
the narratalogical conclusions of the metaphor are that all of the chil-
dren in Zaatari will die violent deaths. As with Syria: The Trojan Women,
the relationship to Shakespeare’s text inevitably leads the performers to a
much less hopeful conclusion than the staging and cheering want. Craig
Dionne and Parmita Kapadia have argued, ‘Not the preserve of a refined
dramatic culture or a rarefied metropolitan entertainment, Shakespeare
is therefore intimately linked to local traditions that tell the story of how
native cultures bear the imprint of contact with those peoples who were
part of its history’.45 However, the ability to meaningfully imprint native
cultures on Shakespeare requires a careful interrogation of the text,
rather than a sloganeering appropriation meant to fill seats. Inevitably,
one is left to wonder whether the show was cast to explore Shakespeare
and help children overcome the trauma of war or because children are a
better box office draw and more sympathetic spectacle when staging the
trauma of war. More broadly, one wonders when international govern-
ments and aid workers will find a better opportunity for Syrian children
than being used as a performance spectacle on foreign stages or washing
ashore dead on foreign shores.
In their reliance on Western classics and use of uncritical adaptations
to the local context, Shakespeare in Zaatari and Syria: The Trojan Women
are symptomatic of a burgeoning—and often white, Western, and
Islamaphobic—NGO industry in Jordan in the wake of the wars in Iraq
and Syria. In fact, what Lori Allen has written of Palestine is also becom-
ing the norm in Jordan:

The international human rights system comprises a conglomeration of

organizations, ideologies, activists, discourses, and declarations. As this sys-
tem has grown increasingly large since the 1980s, human rights language
has come to infuse the ways in which Palestinians from all walks of life—
from politicians and representatives of civil society to militants and random
victims of violations—speak and relate to outsiders and to one another.46

For Allen, there is an important distinction here between human rights—

the values that these institutions aim to uphold—and the human rights
industry—a system of professional institutions that replicate themselves
using the language of human rights.47 Similarly, one might ask if there
 11  A TALE OF TWO JORDANS: REPRESENTING SYRIAN REFUGEES …  227

is a difference between an adaptation that does local work and the adap-
tation industry, wherein famous foreign classics serve to fill the space
for the humanity that internationals are not willing to bestow either on
domestic artistic productions or non-white victims of an internationally
funded and prolonged civil war. Certainly, in the realm of Syrian per-
formances in Jordan, there seems to be a marked difference, not just
between the performances before and during the Syrian civil war, but
also between those made independently by Syrians and those sponsored
by international aid organizations. The former move toward turning
both women and children into spectacles in order to advance individual
artistic careers and draw attention to organizations as much as refugees.
The latter, however, ask the audience to engage in empathy with the
humanity of the performers, as well as the challenge for Syrians moving
across borders and being marginalized in non-native societies. They ask,
in the end, that Syrians be remembered as humans, not simply because
they are on stage delivering famous lines, but because their human-
ity remains unquestionable even when the audience does not know the
words.

Notes
1. For an extensive discussion of this history, see Shlaim, Avi. Collusion
Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition
of Palestine. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.
2. Ryan, Curtis. “The odd Couple: Ending the Jordanian-Syrian ‘Cold War.”
Middle East Journal 60.1 (Winter 2006): 33–56. 1.
3. Ibid., 18–9.
4. “King Abdullah of Jordan Becomes Firsts Arab Ruler to Call on Syria’s
Bashar al-Assad to Go.” BBC 14 Nov. 2011. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. http://
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/8889653/
King-Abdullah-of-Jordan-becomes-first-Arab-ruler-to-call-on-Syrias-
Bashar-al-Assad-to-go.html.
5. Associated Press. “Syria Criticizes Jordan for Hosting Rebel Training.”
Seattle Times 3 Apr. 2013. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. http://seattletimes.
com/html/nationworld/2020695248_apmlsyria.html.
6. United Nations High Commission for Refugees. “Syria Regional Refugee
Response.” UN 2014. Online. 13 Jul. 2015. http://data.unhcr.org/syri-
anrefugees/country.php?id=107.
228  G. Potter

7. Al Emam, Dana. “Jordan, UN Sign Fund Deal to Address Syrian Refugee
Burden.” Jordan Times 28 Mar. 2015. Online. 13 Jul. 2015. http://
www.jordantimes.com/news/local/jordan-un-sign-fund-deal-address-
syrian-refugee-burden.
8. Arif, Tamim. Lecture. Jordan Institute for Diplomacy, Amman, Jordan,
19 Apr. 2014.
9. Stromberg, Paul. Lecture. Center for International Educational Exchange
Faculty Development Seminar, Amman, Jordan, 15 Jun. 2014.
10. The Jordanian comedy news program 7akey Jarayad even recorded a
song, “Where Are the Million Jordanians”, about the increased refugee
population—from Syria and elsewhere—within Jordan.
11. ‘Carefully Watched’ The Economist 18 Jun. 2014. Online. 4 Sep. 2014.
12. Rifai, Omar. Lecture. Center for International Educational Exchange
Faculty Development Seminar, Amman, Jordan, 15 Jun. 2014.
13. Mrozek, Slawomir. The Emigrants. Trans. Henry Beissel. London: Samuel
French, 1984. 10.
14. Ibid., 10.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 48–9.
17. Ibid., 77.
18. Ibid., 33.
19. See, for example, Miller, Jonathan. “Syria’s Torture Machine.” Guardian
13 Dec. 2011. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/
world/2011/dec/13/syria-torture-evidence and McNaught, Anita.
“The Business of Detention in Syria.” Al-Jazeera 1 Aug. 2012. Online. 4
Sep. 2014.
20. See Zyiad, Leen. “Hama’s Ghosts.” New Yorker 12 Aug. 2011. Online. 4
Sep. 2014. http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hamas-ghosts
and AFP. “Syrians Revolt Against Reign of Fear.” Gulf Times 11 Mar.
2013. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. http://www.gulf-times.com/opinion/189/
details/345181/syrians-revolt-against-reign-of-fear.
21. Mrozek, 43.
22. Ibid., 63.
23. Ibid., 85.
24. Syria: The Trojan Women. 2013. Online at. 28 Aug. 2014. http://www.
syriatrojanwomen.org/.
25. At the time of writing, the website for the documentary itself was pass-
word protected.
26. Euripides. The Trojan Women. Trans. Gilbert Murray. Seaside: Watchmaker,
2010.
 11  A TALE OF TWO JORDANS: REPRESENTING SYRIAN REFUGEES …  229

27.  Qtd. in Ross, Tabitha. “Interview with Omar Abusaada, Antigone

Director.” Aperta Productions 8 Oct. 2014. Online. 13 Jul. 2015. http://
www.apertaproductions.org/news/2014/11/5/interview-with-omar-
abu-saada-antigone-director.
28.  HowlRound. “Voices Unheard: The Syria: Trojan Women Summit in
Washington DC with in Amman, Jordan-Sept 19, 2014.” YouTube 19
Sep. 2014. Online. 13 Jul. 2015. https://youtu.be/OLJ3aIcnSzc.
29.  Qtd. in Goldman, Derek. “Listening for Unheard Voices—Syria: The
Trojan Women.” HowlRound 2014. Online. 13 Jul. 2015. http://howl-
round.com/listening-for-unheard-voices-syria-the-trojan-women.
30. HowlRound.
31. The most famous YouTube reaction is probably the puppet show Massasit
Matti (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF2ctaUxu20b60YRc
4l4pLQ), while Mohamad Malas has continued making films during
the civil war (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt35OdFp2kk).
See also Houssami, Eyad, ed. Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre.
New York: Pluto, 2012, Carlson, Marvin, and Safi Mahfouz, eds. Four
Plays from Syria: Sa’dallah Wannous. New York: Segal Theatre Center
Publications, 2014, and Ziter, Edward. Political Performance in Syria:
From the Six-Day War to the Syrian Uprising. New York: Palgrave, 2014.
32. The Red Crescent is the Islamic counterpart to the Red Cross.
33. ‘“To Be Or Not To Be”—Zaatari Children Bring Their Interpretation of
Shakespeare to Amman.” Jordan Times 31 May 2014. Online. 28 Aug.
2014. http://jordantimes.com/to-be-or-not-to-be----zaatari-children-
bring-their-interpretation-of-shakespeare-to-amman.
34. Ridden, Geoffrey M. “The Bard’s Speech: Making It Better; Shakespeare
and Therapy in Film.” Borrows and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare
and Appropriation 8.2 (Fall 2013/Winter 2014). Online. 11 Jul. 2015.
http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/1015/show.
35. Hawkes, Terence. Meaning in Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 1992. 4.
36. In fact, Jordanian Palestinian playwright Nader Omran has his own post-
modern version of Hamlet, titled A Theatre Company Found a Play and
Theatred Hamlet. Litvin, Margaret. Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s
Prince and Nasser’s Ghost. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. 3.
37. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Norton Anthology of Shakespeare. Eds.
Stephen Greenblatt, et. al. Oxford: Norton, 1997. 1.2.85.
38. “ Shakespeare in Zaatari.” YouTube
2 Mar. 2014. Online. 4 Sep. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=0Pno5s9BsKk&list=UUQ5sxonzSJaBXwzVv19m4HQ.
39.  Hubbard, Ben. “Behind Barbed Wire, Shakespeare Inspires a Cast of
Young Syrians.” New York Times 31 Mar. 2014. Online. 4 Sep. 2014.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/world/middleeast/behind-
barbed-wire-shakespeare-inspires-a-cast-of-young-syrians.html?_r=0.
230  G. Potter

40. Interestingly, in a number of these television and radio pieces, the children

echo the line about not being terrorists, seemingly implying that a degree
of media coaching was part of the rehearsal process.
41. Litvin, 75.
42.  Jensen, Michael P. “‘What Service Is Here?’: Exploring Service
Shakespeare.” Borrows and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and
Appropriation 8.2 (Fall 2013/Winter 2014). Online. 11 Jul. 2015. http://
www.borrowers.uga.edu/1039/show.
43. Litvin, 18.
44. “ to be or not to be.” YouTube 1 Jun. 2014. Online. 4 Sep.
2014.
45. Dionne, Craig, and Parmita Kapadia. “Introduction.” Native Shakespeares:
Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage. Eds. Craig Dionne and
Parmita Kapadia. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008. 3.
46. Allen, Lori. The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in
Occupied Palestine. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013. 2.
47. Ibid., 4.
 CHAPTER 12

Homer in Palestine

Gabriel Varghese

With the rise of the international solidarity movement since the end of
the second intifada (2000–2005), collaboration between Palestinian the-
atre-makers and international practitioners has become an abiding feature
of theatre-making in the West Bank in the Oslo and post-Oslo periods.1
In May 2014, for example, the Palestinian theatre company Ashtar and
the London-based company Border Crossings embarked on an adapta-
tion of Homer’s Iliad entitled This Flesh is Mine, developed collabora-
tively but written by the British playwright Brian Woolland. Formed in
1991, Ashtar is based in Ramallah in the West Bank, and led by artistic
director Iman Aoun. Over the years, the company has produced many
internationally performed plays such as The Gaza Monologues (2010)
and Richard II which was part of the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival at
Shakespeare’s Globe in London. As well as these productions, Ashtar has
further established its reputation as a leading exponent of Boal’s Theatre
of the Oppressed, serving as the Middle East regional centre and helping
to establish similar centres in Yemen and Iraq.
This Flesh is Mine provides a useful starting point for discussions about
the politics and ethics of theatrical collaboration between partners based

G. Varghese (*) 
The Kenyon Institute (Council for British Research in the Levant), East
Jerusalem, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Israel
e-mail: akkasistan@gmail.com

© The Author(s) 2018 231

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_12
232  G. Varghese

in two very different countries. The process by which Ashtar and Border
Crossings negotiated a collaborative practice demonstrates the obstacles
theatre-makers face when, in the context of a national liberation strug-
gle, the stakes for one side of the partnership are far higher than for the
other. When such relationships are, to some extent, pre-determined by
the power dynamics at the centre of the Palestine–Israel conflict, collab-
orations between local and international practitioners illustrate how the-
atre-makers ‘talk back’ to these dynamics. In this chapter, I am interested
in the process by which Ashtar and Border Crossings created an ensem-
ble that brought together practitioners of diverse backgrounds and expe-
riences. How, for example, was this ensemble created and sustained when
the collaborative relation was inherently bound by time and geography?

This Flesh is Mine

This Flesh is Mine is a radical adaptation of The Iliad that unfolds over
two acts consisting of eleven and ten scenes respectively. Whereas each
act is roughly of equal length, scenes themselves vary considerably with
some feeling more like vignettes. The first act is situated in the ancient
world before a ‘booming explosion’ (Woolland 2014a: 38) brings us
into the modern world of the second act. Dark lighting and menacing
soundscapes create the foreboding atmosphere of a besieged city almost
destroyed by a decade-long war. Visually, there is little to situate the play
in either Troy or Palestine. However, in keeping with its contemporary
setting, the second act has Achilles dressed in modern army fatigues, car-
rying a revolver and using a mobile phone. Performed by six actors (two
female and four male of which three were Palestinian and three were
British) in multiple roles, the play begins in the foyer of Ashtar, with a
quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over Briseis, the former’s
war-prize and concubine. Whereas The Iliad presents Briseis as a mar-
ginal character, even though her kidnapping drives its plot, this version
places her at the centre of the text. We learn more about her through her
own monologues, her frenzied arguments with the ghosts of her father
and brother (video images projected onto a white screen), in which
she appears to be having a nervous breakdown, and her dialogues with
Achilles and Hecuba. As this strand of the narrative develops into the
modern world of the second act, the performance becomes less about
Achilles’ loss of honour to Agamemnon and more about whether or
not Briseis will accept his offer of safety in exile. Yet, This Flesh is Mine
 12  HOMER IN PALESTINE  233

is also as much about the despair of the aging king and queen of Troy,
Priam and Hecuba, and the vainglory of their son Hector who is intent
on defeating Achilles. At the end of the first act, when Hector is killed in
battle, Priam must humble himself to Achilles for the return of his son’s
mutilated body. (I will have more to say about these characters later in
this section).
In an interview with The Guardian in 2014, Walling explained that
the title of the play is intended to draw attention to ‘the politics of the
body and living inside this experience’ of war.2 That experience is also
inscribed upon the bodies of its victims as, primarily, political violence
and structural oppression delimit the boundaries between the national
body as subject/self and the colonized body as other. In a performance
where Trojans stand in for Palestinians and Achaeans for Israelis, the
play’s constant invocation of the body alerts us to the ‘historico-racial
schema’ (Fanon 2008: 84) that fixes colonized bodies as both unintel-
ligible, expendable, and unsafe. The question of who ‘owns’ whose body
is a recurring motif throughout the play, and how characters refer to
their own and each other’s bodies signifies ownership, autonomy, self-
hood, and presence. They also signify who gets to be included in the
national body and who is excluded to those ‘unliveable’ and ‘uninhabit-
able’ zones of social life (Butler 1993: 3).
These inclusions and exclusions are repeated throughout the play.
For example, in the opening scene, between Achilles and Agamemnon,
Achilles insists that Briseis’s ‘flesh is mine’ (Woolland 2014a: 10). As a
great warrior who represents the national body, Achilles is not declar-
ing Briseis’s inclusion within that body as a full subject. Rather, he is
asserting the authority of his own body, as national subject/self, over her
body, as national other. For all his avowals of love and promises to res-
cue her to the safety of the metropolis, she is still only war booty and
hinterland. It is in a barely lit performance space that we first encoun-
ter Briseis, in the second scene of the play. A dim spotlight shines upon
her and she lists all those parts of her body—feet, legs, arms, eyes—that
belong to her. As she delivers this list, writhing on the floor in a catatonic
state, with ever more anguish and urgency, we realise that her status as
other has driven her mad. Yet, by retaining the capacity to recognize her-
self, she is able to resist that categorization. In another scene, between
Phoenix and Achilles, Phoenix asserts a continuous, unified, and leg-
ible identity between those bodies constituting the national subject/self
when he appeals to Achilles to return to battle. Holding his pupil’s arm,
234  G. Varghese

he says: ‘This flesh as good as mine’ (Ibid: 19). In a different way, the
Trojan prince Hector invokes his own body when Hecuba tries to per-
suade him not to fight Achilles. He tells her that he is unable to ‘speak of
this body as my own’ (Ibid: 22) until the Achaeans have been defeated.
Ultimately, Hector is killed and Priam must abase his own body before
Achilles to retrieve his son’s corpse. Hector may have believed that, by
fighting Achilles, he would be able to ‘speak’ his body into being. Yet, in
death, it is his corpse that reveals the illegibility of his humanity. Towards
the end of the first act, Hecuba attempts to assert her body in almost
the same manner as Briseis. As the queen walks among the graves of her
children, she wonders what sort of mother she has become. She lists vari-
ous parts of her body—legs, feet, arms, breasts, eyes—as if trying to find
somewhere to locate her selfhood as ‘[m]other to a brood of ghosts’
(Ibid: 28). In these scenes, the bodies of Briseis, Hector, Priam, and
Hecuba function within the wider matrix of a ‘racial epidermal schema’
(Fanon 2008: 84) that treats colonized bodies as simultaneously intelligi-
ble and unfamiliar through their categorization as other.
I attended the preview performance of This Flesh is Mine at Ashtar in
Ramallah on 8 May 2015, which took place before a week-long run at
Testbed1 in south London. The Ramallah audience was small, not more
than seventy, and consisted mainly of students from Birzeit University
(where Border Crossings had facilitated a writing workshop earlier
that day), professional and student actors, and other artistic practition-
ers. Gathered in the foyer of the theatre, the atmosphere pulsating with
anticipation, it was clear people knew each other. This was not a gen-
eral audience walking in from the streets. Rather, it was a selection of
those educated (and, often, Western-educated), upper and middle class
‘Ramallawis’ who frequent the city’s cultural ‘circuit’ and are part of a
social elite who have the English-language skills to access a play like This
Flesh is Mine. Michael Walling acknowledges that the audience may have
been ‘a bit of an in-crowd’ and that the play did not ‘touch as many lives
as we would want to’.3 Not only did the play’s short run (just two per-
formances) circumscribe its audience, but the fact that it was in English,
without Arabic surtitles, would have excluded audiences even more.
Further, that audiences from outlying areas would have had to travel
through different kinds of occupied space to get to the performance
would also have been a hindrance. In our discussion, Walling acknowl-
edged that any future performance in the West Bank would have to take
these factors into consideration.4
 12  HOMER IN PALESTINE  235

The performance itself takes place as a promenade, with theatre staff

ushering audiences between scenes through the theatre’s claustropho-
bic foyer, the central studio (the largest of the performance spaces) and
the black box studio. This attempt at transforming the theatre building
into a scenographic space had both advantages and disadvantages. On
the one hand, the act of moving back and forth between three spaces—
rooms within rooms, in fact—endangered the narrative flow of the per-
formance. First, there was the external voice of the theatre usher; then,
a small degree of confusion about where to go next; followed by time
spent finding somewhere to sit or stand. This criticism is peripheral,
however, because the promenade, as opposed to a static stage, actually
facilitated a more dynamic relationship between audience, performers,
and performance. Depending on their proximity to the performers, or by
simply changing their positions or by moving from sitting to standing,
audiences could gain different perspectives on the narrative as well as the
subtler nuances of the performance itself.

The Collaborative Process of This Flesh Is Mine

The question, then, is: Who is the subject of the play’s title? For the
company to arrive at an answer to this complicated question, the pro-
duction required a rigorous, collaborative process that made space for
multiple and contradictory voices. The development of This Flesh is Mine
evolved over a period of six years, and involved three stages of develop-
ment. The first stage was in 2007 when Woolland, who is also a practi-
tioner of drama in education, was invited by the Panhellenic Association
of Teaching Drama to deliver a series of workshops to Greek teach-
ers in Athens, exploring how The Iliad can be taught to teenagers ‘in
a way which would empower them’ and how participatory theatre can
feed into theatrical performance (Woolland 2014c). These experi-
ences led to the initial idea for a theatrical adaptation of the epic poem,
which Woolland first proposed to Walling in 2008 (Woolland 2014d).
However, it was not until 2013 that Border Crossings was able to secure
financial support from the British Council and embark upon the second
stage of development (Ibid).
The second stage involved a week of workshops with the Lebanese
Zoukak Theater in Beirut, which was intended to culminate in a co-
production of the final play. Through a process of discussions and
improvisations, in which sketches of moments from The Iliad provided
236  G. Varghese

workshop participants with stimuli for group work, a narrative struc-

ture for the eventual script began to emerge. Woolland stresses that he
and Walling intentionally arrived in Beirut with sketches rather than a
script in order to create an open workshop that would encourage par-
ticipants to develop their own ‘ideas and concerns’ (Ibid). For example,
the participants grounded their improvisations in their experiences of the
Lebanese civil war, which meant that Priam’s attempt to reconcile with
Achilles towards the end of The Iliad would have elided the complexi-
ties of sectarian violence, rendering the play problematic for a Lebanese
audience. Border Crossings’s approach, then, allowed the play to emerge
‘in response to [participants’] contributions’ (Ibid). When Zoukak
Theater was no longer able to take part in the project due to ‘their own
priorities and programme as an organisation’, Border Crossings invited
Ashtar to participate in a co-production.5 This marked the third stage
in the development of This Flesh is Mine, giving the adaptation its final
form, narrative, and structure.
A co-production with Ashtar had been an early intention of Border
Crossings.6 According to Walling, the cycles of violence and revenge
in The Iliad and the Achaean siege of Troy resonated with the vio-
lence of the Palestine–Israel conflict and Israel’s eight-year land, sea,
and air blockade of Gaza. An attempt was made to establish a partner-
ship with Ashtar through the European Commission’s cooperation
programme with ‘third countries’ (that is, non-EU/EEA countries).
However, because the programme requires the participation of three eli-
gible European countries as well as the ‘third country’ and, according
to Walling, the project ‘only made sense as a bilateral partnership’, this
bid fell through. However, these conversations meant that a partnership
between Ashtar and Border Crossings had been established and ready to
be actualized should an opportunity present itself.7
It was while workshopping in Beirut that Border Crossings was able
to secure funding from the Anna Lindh Foundation for the planned
co-production with Zoukak Theater. When Zoukak withdrew from the
project, Walling says, Border Crossings found itself ‘exactly where we’d
wanted to be in the first place’—that is in partnership with Ashtar .8 This
circuitous route to Palestine, Walling insists, was ‘hugely beneficial’ to
the play’s development.9 For example, their engagement with Zoukak
Theater provided Woolland and Walling with a more nuanced under-
standing of internecine conflict than they might otherwise have been
able to access, and the drafts of the script Woolland wrote following
 12  HOMER IN PALESTINE  237

these workshops paved the way for a more fruitful collaboration between
Border Crossings and Ashtar. This was important because, when rehears-
als began in Ramallah, two obstacles had to be resolved: first, Briseis’s
decision to embrace exile needed to be clarified; second, and more
importantly, they had to decide whether or not to retain Helen as a char-
acter in the play.
In The Iliad, Briseis is a concubine given to Achilles after his conquest
of Lyrnessus during the Trojan War. When Agamemnon appropriates
her as compensation for the loss of his own concubine, Achilles with-
draws in protest from the battle thus tipping the war in favour of the
Trojans. Briseis’s role is central to Homer’s narrative, as she ignites the
feud between Achilles and Agamemnon. Yet, as a colonized body, her
character is positioned at the boundaries of the narrative, never allowed
to enter it as a prominent character. She appears in only a few scenes
where she is objectified as war-prize, the concubine of her family’s mur-
derer and as little more than chattel to be exchanged by gods and men
alike. At the start of The Iliad, Briseis and Achilles have already fallen in
love. Through Patroclus, Achilles promises that after the war he will take
her to Greece where they will marry. Deeply comforted by this, Briseis
accepts his promise.
Briseis’s readiness to leave Troy, which Woolland had already written
into the rehearsal draft, was questioned by the Palestinian actors espe-
cially by Razan Alazzeh (who played Briseis in the Ramallah produc-
tion) and Iman Aoun (who played Hecuba). Although they accepted the
truthfulness of her desire, Alazzeh and Aoun believed Briseis’s choice
had to be challenged in a play in which Troy resonates with Palestine.
According to Woolland (2014d), it was crucial that the narrative ‘drama-
tise the psychological, social and political struggles surrounding the issue
of voluntary exile’. Walling states that the conversations in the rehearsal
room became preoccupied with the issue of forced migration and ‘why
it’s important for Palestinian people to stay’ in Palestine.10 So, in the
performance text, when Hecuba enters Achilles’ camp and persuades
Briseis not to leave Troy, it is not simply that she is convincing her to
stay in a war zone thus endangering her life. Rather, as Walling explains,
the discussions that led to Woolland re-writing the final scene were about
how the acceptance of the life of a refugee might be at the expense of
losing one’s homeland, culture, and identity. So, Briseis’ decision to
remain in Troy despite the hardships she would have to endure encap-
sulates the transgressive practice of sumud (steadfastness) one aspect of
238  G. Varghese

which has been that Palestinians remain on their land, against all odds, in
defiance of Israeli attempts to drive them out. Woolland insists that the
Palestinian context ‘enhanced’ his characterization of Briseis by taking
into account the practice of sumud, allowing her to embody contradic-
tory desires and positions.11
The dramaturgical and political questions posed by the character of
Helen, however, were much more difficult to resolve. Woolland says
that he knew very early in the process that Helen’s corporeal presence
on stage would be problematic. He adds that, even though his intention
was to avoid allegory, he could see there were ‘close parallels’ between
the Achaeans’ use of Helen in war propaganda and, for example, ‘the
Bush/Blair alliance using the threat of Saddam Hussein having Weapons
of Mass Destruction as their justification for invading Iraq’ (Woolland
2014d).
One attempt to resolve this problem emerged from his reading
of Euripides’ tragi-comedy, Helen, which tells a variant of the original
myth—that the Helen who causes the Trojan War is actually an eido-
lon or spirit-image while the real Helen had been transported to Egypt
by the gods many years earlier. For Woolland, the parallels between
Euripides’ condemnation of unjust warfare and ‘the hypocrisy of leaders
who invoke phantom causes to justify militarism’ offered a way to make
ancient mythology ‘resonate with a contemporary audience’ (Ibid). In
light of this, he decided to preserve Helen as a character in This Flesh
is Mine and, indeed, in the early rehearsal draft, Helen and Briseis are
played by the same actor (Ibid). Not only would this have driven the
narrative tension of the play towards its conclusion, he writes, but it
would also have allowed for an exploration of how these women resist
‘the identities created for them by possessive men’ (Ibid). Their jour-
neys, then, would have been from victimhood (as objects of desire con-
tested by Menelaus and Paris, and Achilles and Agamemnon) to agency
(thus unravelling Achaean propaganda).
However, as a result of the rehearsal process, discussions with the
Palestinian actors and his own presence in Ramallah, Woolland began to
realise that his solutions to these dramaturgical concerns were ‘disingen-
uous’ (Ibid) because the Palestinian actors began to see Helen’s presence
on stage as politically problematic. Aoun describes how discussions about
Helen kept re-emerging throughout the four-week rehearsal period. ‘It
wasn’t an easy task because we kept going back to it’, she says. ‘You go
page by page and then you go back to the same issue: “And what about
Helen?”’12
 12  HOMER IN PALESTINE  239

Aoun describes how the question of Helen’s inclusion in the play

was wrapped up in discussions about what her presence would signify
politically since, in The Iliad, her kidnapping provides the Achaeans with
the pretext they need to attack and occupy Troy. In addition to this, as
Woolland acknowledges, the involvement of a Palestinian company in the
production means that audiences will always identify the Achaean siege
of Troy with Israel’s colonization of Palestine, and Helen with the land
of Palestine itself (Woolland 2014d). For the Palestinian actors, Aoun
explains, the inclusion of an embodied Helen would have rendered them
complicit in the Zionist narrative: that the Palestinians had stolen some-
thing when, in fact, they were the dispossessed. As the Palestinian actor
Emile Saba (who played Hector and Patroclus in the Ramallah perfor-
mance) points out, the presence of Helen in the Trojan camp would
have been equivalent to justifying Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. This,
he believes, would have led audiences to raise serious questions about
Ashtar’s political commitments.13
In the end, these tensions were resolved by omitting Helen as an
embodied character, thus presenting her in the play’s narrative through
her absence and how other characters talk about her. In a perfor-
mance lasting well over an hour, Helen is mentioned just eleven times
by the Achaean characters. The single instance in which a Trojan char-
acter refers to her is when Hecuba responds to an Achaean soldier ask-
ing her about the whereabouts of Helen following the sacking of Troy.
She says: ‘Helen has brought us nothing but blood and death. This hell
on earth is Helen ... If I knew where Helen was I’d take you myself. If
my legs had been blown off I’d still find a way’ (Woolland 2014a: 78).
The decision to omit Helen made the performance I attended compel-
ling because it integrated the political but not by sacrificing the play’s
artistic qualities. These adjustments to the script required major struc-
tural changes such as losing or re-writing entire scenes. An example of
this was that the company realised the script’s original dénouement—
in which the Trojan king Priam humbles himself before Achilles, kisses
his hand and pleads for the return of Hector’s body—would have been
wholly unsuited to a Palestinian context. The presentation of a Trojan,
standing in for Palestinians, humbling himself in such a manner before
an Achaean, standing in for Israelis, would not have directed audiences
to the nobility with which Homer accents Priam’s act. Rather, it would
have rendered the ‘Palestinian’ Priam as grovelling, obsequious, and sub-
missive to the Zionist narrative over homeland which lies at the core of
240  G. Varghese

the Palestine–Israel conflict. Although that scene is still present as the

end of the first act, the sight of a king grovelling before his oppressor
serves as an oblique reminder of the Palestinian Authority’s entrenched
relationship with the Israeli state. The play now ends with Hecuba con-
vincing Briseis to stay in Troy—in others words, to practice sumud—fol-
lowed by Achilles’ death in a car bomb explosion off-stage. Making these
decisions was difficult, as Woolland says.14 They necessitated a process
involving open dialogue in which the entire group felt able to express
their doubts and hesitance, and the confidence that such expressions
would be respected.

Creating Ensembles
In the preceding discussion of the collaborative process underpinning
the adaptation of This Flesh is Mine, what emerges is the importance of
establishing shared languages facilitating open dialogue between writers,
directors, and performers especially in the context of international col-
laborations. Although shared languages are crucial to open dialogue, nei-
ther precedes the other. Instead, they are ways of making thoughts and
ideas mutually recognizable. Shared languages and open dialogue aug-
ment and strengthen each other because creating open dialogue requires
ensembles to establish shared languages but, in order to establish shared
languages, ensembles require open dialogue.
By shared languages, I refer to the ways in which a group forges com-
mon aesthetic, methodological, and political vocabularies in order to
encourage and maintain meaningful collaborations in creating an adapta-
tion. Whereas I use the term aesthetic language to refer to the material
developed in the rehearsal room through performance-based tasks—that
is to say, the play itself—I use methodological language to refer to the
rehearsal processes and structures a group might use in order to develop
that material. Although these terms might also be called product and
process, it is important to acknowledge that, in rehearsal, they overlap.
Finally, by political language, I refer to the vocabulary a group might use
to ‘read’ and discuss the wider socio-political contexts in which the aes-
thetic and methodological languages meet.
Different practitioners and scholars have used variations of these ter-
minologies to discuss the need for a shared language. For example, Tim
Etchells, artistic director of the British experimental theatre company
 12  HOMER IN PALESTINE  241

Forced Entertainment, has described collaboration as ‘simply find-

ing the process of developing new words for the strange situations in
which a group can find itself’ (Etchells 1999: 62). Theatre scholar Alex
Mermikides uses the term ‘consensus’ to discuss the work of Meyerhold
and Grotowski, arguing that consensus can be ‘easy to achieve because
the group shares the same values’ (Mermikides 2010: 156). Since theatre
is always a collaborative practice—not just between writer, director, and
actors, but also between the creative personnel who participate in the
production—establishing these shared languages facilitates the dialogism
that is so crucial to theatre-making.
But the dangers of creating a shared methodological language should
not be overlooked because, as Mermikides points out, in attempting to
create consensus, the group may also display ‘a willingness to submit to
the director’ (Mermikides 2010: 156). She explains that ‘too much [con-
sensus] may hinder the opportunity for innovation and novelty, and risk
what the business world would call “groupthink”’ (Ibid: 158). The risk
inherent in not developing a shared language, then, is the danger that a
limited vocabulary might produce work that is stale. In the case of This
Flesh is Mine, the most important development in the aesthetic language
occurred when the writer’s ideas were challenged by the actors. What is
interesting about this process is that the group turned to a shared politi-
cal language in order to resolve questions and differences about the aes-
thetic language.
The importance of forging a shared political language in the con-
text of Palestinian theatre cannot be overstated. Both Woolland and
Walling state in their interviews that being in Ramallah and witnessing
the occupation firsthand shaped how they responded to discussions in
the rehearsal room. Walling mentions how the British actors’ readiness to
witness their Palestinian colleagues’ experiences informed his own pro-
cess as director. Specifically, he mentions how the experience of going
through the Qalandiya checkpoint, which divides the West Bank from
East Jerusalem and limits Palestinians living there from accessing the city,
gave him an embodied reference point to listen to how the Palestinian
actors were responding to the play. This is echoed by Saba who mentions
how discussions became increasingly nuanced the more time the British
team spent in Palestine because they started to establish interconnections
between the aesthetic and political languages through their own experi-
ences of moving through occupied spaces. He says:
242  G. Varghese

The thing is that, if you want to talk about something, you have to expe-
rience it first. You have to go there. If I want to write [a play] about
Palestine, and I’ve never been to Palestine, and all I know about it is what
I’ve heard through the media, from books or from people, I shouldn’t
write about it. […] You have to come and you have to see [for yourself]. 15

Aoun, too, states that every co-production between Ashtar and inter-
national artists begins with discussions about what a Palestinian com-
pany might bring to such a relationship. These discussions, she says, are
not just about the artistic concept driving performances but also their
‘political background’.16 According to all the theatre-makers I spoke to,
constructing a shared political language was crucial to establishing rela-
tionships based on mutual trust in which participants felt able to con-
tribute to or challenge the aesthetic language. Furthermore, in contexts
where what gets produced is driven by issues of international funding,
and where such funding comes from foreign donors who have little
experience of conditions ‘on the ground’, establishing a shared political
language with international collaborators determines whether such part-
nerships succeed or fail.
Aoun also identifies a number of qualities she believes collaborators
should demonstrate in order to create fruitful co-productions. The abil-
ity to listen to each other is the key ingredient, she says.17 Furthermore,
mutual respect between collaborators also eases tensions and disagree-
ments over artistic approaches. These suggestions resonate with Walling
for whom the decisive factor in ensuring a healthy collaborative relation-
ship lies in the director’s ability to create ‘an equal and open collabora-
tive space’.18 Part of his role, he says, was to navigate his way through a
‘complex nexus’ of statuses in the rehearsal room—not least that one of
the actors under his direction, Aoun herself, is also the artistic director of
Ashtar under whom the other Palestinian actors had trained. He says:

I had to respect Iman’s position as an artistic leader in her own right (and
somebody with an extraordinary depth of knowledge about Palestine and a
passion for the cause), at the same time as empowering the younger actors
to feel like equal partners in the process.19

Aoun also mentions how collaborators’ personal ambitions and opin-

ions about themselves can hinder effective collaboration. This occurred,
 12  HOMER IN PALESTINE  243

she says, during a past project between Ashtar and theatre-makers from
Jordan and Tunisia in which four directors were working to produce
a single play. Even though the division and allocation of roles was dis-
cussed at the beginning, Aoun explains that the partners each consid-
ered themselves to be ‘the director’. (Aoun’s own role in this project
was that of producer.) Difficulties were exacerbated further by the fact
that they interpreted their allocated roles, such as dramaturg or chore-
ographer, as a reduction in status. In the end, equilibrium was restored
through open dialogue and re-establishing common ground, what I have
previously identified as a shared language. For Aoun, the ability to listen
to each other in order to create this common ground is complemented
by the ability to embrace silence. As she says: ‘Sometimes we have to
stop negotiating, debating, [and] take a step back and let things reso-
nate. In the silence many things fall or rise because it’s part of the new
space we create and step into.’20

Conclusion
The involvement of international practitioners in the Palestinian theatre
scene presents Palestinian theatre-makers with both logistical and dis-
cursive challenges. The extensive range of collaborations is a phenom-
enon that has become most pronounced recently and for many reasons,
not least that theatre in Palestine is being produced in the interstices
of a settler-colonial occupation and in the absence of structural sup-
port from the Palestinian Authority. Their navigational tactics allow
Palestinian theatre-makers to elicit a range of positive outcomes for their
own benefit, from actor training to solidarity formation. By studying the
processes that shaped the adaptation of This Flesh is Mine, this chap-
ter has attempted to demonstrate why Palestinian theatre-makers estab-
lish international relationships, why they adapt classic texts, how they
address the challenges with which such relationships present themselves,
and how they employ diverse tactics to disrupt the inherent power
imbalances. The guiding logic behind such relationships appears to be
theatre-makers’ commitment to cultural resistance because, as Aoun
asserts, Palestinian theatre-makers’ aesthetic practices would mean little
without their political commitments. ‘Otherwise,’ she asks, ‘why are we
doing it?’21
244  G. Varghese

Notes
1. That collaboration in such NGO-ized contexts as the West Bank is medi-
ated, mainly, by Western donor organizations and patronage reflects the
global flow of cultural and economic capital as well as the lack of local
structural support for arts development. Over the last three decades, all
the major theatre companies in the West Bank have managed to estab-
lish professional relationships with individual artists and theatre compa-
nies from (mainly) Western countries. Relations between Palestinian and
Western practitioners have become so extensive that it is no longer an
exaggeration to say that Palestinian theatre companies are better known
around the world than they are in their own localities. In the spring of
2016, for example, I spent three months working at The Freedom
Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp. In the ten years since its founding,
the theatre has achieved worldwide critical acclaim as well as established
positive relations with the camp itself. Yet, within Jenin city itself, located
only a ten-minute walk away, the theatre remains scarcely known. There
are a number of reasons for this, which it is beyond the scope of this
chapter to discuss in great detail. For example, social relations between
the camp and the city remain strained—not simply as a result of the
events of the second intifada but also as a reflection of city-dwellers’
negative stereotypes of refugee camps as the loci of petty and organized
crime, of violence, drug abuse, and so on. As a result, many residents of
Jenin city refuse to enter the camp and remain completely unaware of
cultural activities taking place there. For more on international solidar-
ity in the context of the Palestinian liberation struggle, see, for example:
Seitz (2003, pp. 50–67); Sawalha (2008, pp. 197–202); Stamatopoulou-
Robbins (2008, pp. 111–160); and Landy (2014, pp. 130–142).
2.  Michael Walling quoted in Ellie Violet Bramley, ‘This Flesh is Mine:
Homer, car bombs and Jack Bauer’, The Guardian, 23 May 2014,
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/may/23/this-flesh-is-mine-
border-crossing [Accessed: 21 April 2016].
3. Michael Walling, interview with author, 11 February 2015.
4. Ibid.
5. Michael Walling, e-mail to author, 24 February 2015.
6. Michael Walling, interview with author, 11 February 2015.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Michael Walling, interview with author, 11 February 2015. Due to other
commitments, Woolland was only able to be present in Ramallah for the
fourth and final week of rehearsals. So, the conversations with him took
place on Skype.
 12  HOMER IN PALESTINE  245

11. Brian Woolland, e-mail to author, 2 March 2015.

12. Iman Aoun, interview with author, 20 February 2015.
13. Emile Saba, interview with author, 15 February 2015.
14. Brian Woolland, interview with author, 17 February 2015.
15. Emile Saba, interview with author, 15 February 2015.
16. Iman Aoun, interview with author, 20 February 2015.
17. Ibid.
18. Michael Walling, e-mail to author, 20 February 2015.
19. Ibid.
20. Iman Aoun, interview with author, 20 February 2015.
21. Ibid.

References
Bramley, Ellie Violet, ‘This Flesh is Mine: Homer, Car Bombs and Jack Bauer’.
The Guardian, 23 May 2014, online at: http://www.theguardian.com/
stage/2014/may/23/this-flesh-is-mine-border-crossing, Accessed 21 April
2016.
Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York:
Routledge, 1993.
Etchells, Tim, Certain Fragments. London: Routledge, 1999.
Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, trans Charles Lam Markmann. London:
Pluto, 2008.
Landy, David, ‘“We don’t get involved in the internal affairs of Palestinians”:
Elisions and Tensions in North-South Solidarity Practices’. Interface: A
Journal for and about Social Movements, 6, 2, 2014: pp. 130–142.
Mermikides, Alex, ‘Clash and Consensus in Shunt’s “Big Shows” and the
“Lounge”‘, in Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart, eds. Devising in Process.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 147–164.
Sawalha, Aseel, ‘Reply: Solidarity: Solidarity or Charity: International Support for
Palestinians in the Post-Oslo Era’. Dialectical Anthropology, 32, 3, 2008: pp.
197–202.
Seitz, Charmaine, ‘ISM at the Crossroads: The Evolution of the International
Solidarity Movement’. Journal of Palestine Studies, 32, 4, 2003: pp. 50–67.
Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia, ‘The Joys and Dangers of Solidarity in
Palestine: Prosthetic Engagement in an Age of Reparations’. CR: The New
Centennial Review, 8, 2, 2008: pp. 111–160.
Woolland, Brian, This Flesh Is Mine. London: Oberon, 2014a.
Woolland, Brian, ‘Part 1: Approaching a Classic’. 2014b, online at: http://
thisfleshismine.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/part-1-approaching-classic.html,
Accessed 21 April 2016.
246  G. Varghese

Woolland, Brian, ‘Part 2: From Workshop to Performance,’ 2014c, online at:

http://thisfleshismine.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/part-2-from-workshop-to-
performance.html, Accessed 21 April 2016.
Woolland, Brian, ‘Part 3: The Dramatic Process of Rehearsals.’ 2014d, online at:
http://thisfleshismine.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/part-3-dramatic-process-of-
rehearsals.html, Accessed 21 April 2016.
 PART IV

Postmodern Meta-Theatrical Adaptation,

Introduced by Kimberly Jannarone

Postmodernism carries within it the element of ‘meta’—meta-artwork,

meta-canon, meta-modernity. By collaging, juxtaposing, altering, and
explicitly positioning itself alongside or against, postmodern art ques-
tions the notion of an artwork as a stable entity. It tears into aesthetic
universes striving for wholeness and exposes them as contingent objects
whose meanings and constituent parts change over time, no matter the
originator’s intent. The chapters in this part demonstrate that the the-
atrical production process itself carries within it the seeds of postmod-
ernism. To répéter—the French word for both ‘repeat’ and ‘rehearse’—is
always to repeat with a difference, and productions are always adapta-
tions and re-contextualizations of their source texts.
Pedro de Senna makes the case for production and postmodernism’s
close ties in his chapter on Ensaio.Hamlet, a production that insists
that an ensaio is always both its meanings: an ‘essay’ and a ‘rehearsal’.
Senna argues that the metatheatrical production of Hamlet by Brazilian
ensemble Companhia (Cia) dos Atores demonstrates how production
and adaptation are born in the same moment, and that any rehearsal is
an act of both research and criticism. Adaptation is inherent in staging
plays, his chapter suggests: a production team cuts, interprets, reveals
and conceals, favours and elides, personalizes and intellectualizes.
The original script is always seen through new eyes of interpreters and
248  PART IV  POSTMODERN META-THEATRICAL ADAPTATION ...

audiences—indeed, it is even eaten by contemporary artists and audi-

ences: anthropophagy, one of the central tropes of Brazilian literary criti-
cism, suggests that texts are eaten, partially absorbed, and spit back out
into the world whenever they are staged.
Eugene O’Neill appears, with his lengthy and prescriptive stage
directions, to have attempted to forestall the vagaries of time, interpre-
tation, and changing contexts from altering his play, and yet, as the Neo-
Futurists demonstrated with their production of Strange Interlude and as
Adrian Curtin argues in his chapter, O’Neill’s lengthy work of psycholog-
ical introspection becomes postmodern by the mere act of staging it with
excessive fidelity. Curtin demonstrates that the Neo-Futurists created a
‘postmodern but not post-dramatic’ O’Neill in their production through
taking the script at its word: reading the stage directions aloud, staging
the intimate asides intimately, following emotional stage directions with
precisions, etc. They heightened the work’s strangeness rather than gloss-
ing it over, making the work mean anew: they created an adaptation by
examining every part of the work with a magnifying glass, creating a
production that is even more fully O’Neill’s play than a naturalist stag-
ing of it would be. Nora J. Williams’ chapter on the Young Vic’s 2012
Changeling supports this reading of fidelity as adaptation: by taking seri
ously Middleton and Rowley’s vastly different dramaturgies and pushing
each to their far reaches, the production creates dramatic collisions invis-
ible to those who attempt to smooth over the play’s jagged edges.
Making another case for production as adaptation, Scott Proudfit
argues that Bill Rauch and Tracy Young’s Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, by
staging each canonical play in a contemporarily uncontroversial style, cre-
ates an adaptation by doing so simultaneously. For a generation used to
styles of visual appropriation, musical sampling, and meme-ing, a theatri-
cal mash-up may feel more a hommage, an assemblage, than an altera-
tion, but Proudfit argues that the theatrical ‘mash-up’ re-contextualizes
each piece by staging it alongside the others, illuminating each through
productive moments of congruity and incongruity. Metatheatricality is
built into such a simultaneous performance, forcing audience members
to compare three products of three different theatrical traditions; but
meta-canonicity is, too, as the juxtaposition enables a bird’s-eye view of
three ‘classics’ of the Western tradition—as different as they are—all at
once.
Perhaps the most clearly adaptative of the works discussed in this
section, Rupert Goold and Ben Power’s Faustus (2004)—which
 PART IV  POSTMODERN META-THEATRICAL ADAPTATION ...  249

incorporates Christopher Marlowe’s text and the Chapman Brothers’

visual work Insult to Injury—takes the idea of postmodern canonicity
to its furthest extremes. If staging a text re-inscribes that text into the
canon (as the chapters in this part suggest), that staging may not come
from a place of adoration: it may also be a work of aggression. As Sarah
Grochala argues, Goold and Power stage their love/hate with Marlowe’s
play in the same spirit as the Chapmans ‘rectified’ Goya: crossing out,
defacing, altering, substituting, arguing with, spitting on, and, ultimately,
situating that work ever more firmly into the collective imagination, add-
ing layers of meaning and cultural accumulation as they do so. In fact,
hating a work so much you have to exhume it in order to scream at it
face-to-face (as Goold, Power, and the Chapmans did), brings us back
to the opening image of anthropophagy: the intimate act of eating and
digesting, taking something into yourself in one form and parting with it
in another.
Repeating and eating; rehearsing and critiquing; producing and
adapting: the chapters in this part demonstrate that the act of live per-
formance—with its fleet of actors and producers and bodies in rehearsal
rooms, on stages, and in seats, with its absolutely contemporary minds
and contexts and cultural referents—questions the canon and the notion
of a stable work of art through its very enactment. Whether by displaying
the thought behind rehearsal, by creating a collage or a mash-up, or by
committing to an inflexible fidelity, the works discussed here situate the
performance process as intimately tied to adaptation and reflexivity, shad-
ing different colors into the living art of performance.
 CHAPTER 13

The Neo-Futurists(’) Take on Eugene

O’Neill’s Strange Interlude

Adrian Curtin

In 2009, the Goodman Theatre in Chicago presented a two-month fes-

tival of Eugene O’Neill’s work. Billed as a global exploration of his plays
in the twenty-first century, the festival included productions by various
companies of plays from the early to middle part of O’Neill’s career.1
The aim was to re-examine these challenging, problematic plays and
offer new interpretations of them, revitalizing texts that might otherwise
seem passé. The Neo-Futurists (founded by Greg Allen in Chicago in
1988) offered their take on O’Neill’s 1928 play Strange Interlude. The
five-and-a-half-hour-long production was both rapturously and ranco-
rously received, prompting standing ovations and walkouts in its short
run. At the first performance, an audience member—an older man
apparently moved to anger—voiced his displeasure from the balcony
at the end of Act 2, rhetorically asking the performers why they were
‘butchering this play, this beautiful play’ (or words to that effect), before
storming out. It was a thrilling moment. I was sitting behind him and
was tickled to have witnessed what appeared to have been a classic case
of épater le bourgeois. Funnily enough, there was another disruption at

A. Curtin (*) 
University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
e-mail: A.Curtin@exeter.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 251

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_13
252  A. Curtin

the following performance, which might lead one to suppose that the
audience malcontents were planted there, but Greg Allen, the direc-
tor, denies this. Why, then, did the production generate such polarized
responses?
The Neo-Futurists’ used their distinctive aesthetic, which is inspired
by Italian futurism, dadaism, surrealism, absurdism, and fluxus, to adapt
O’Neill’s play. Known for their long-running show Too Much Light
Makes the Baby Go Blind, a topical, eclectic, hour-long collection of
short, newly written plays, the Neo-Futurists do not ask audience mem-
bers to ‘suspend their disbelief’. Instead, they acknowledge and make
a virtue of theatrical artifice. They abjure the so-called ‘fourth wall’.
Typically, they do not act characters but perform truthfully as themselves
and undertake ‘real’ actions. The Neo-Futurists delight in brevity, spon-
taneity, spoofing, audience interaction, and game playing—not character-
istics one would readily associate with O’Neill or his work. They usually
write or devise their own plays, which are sometimes physically led or
abstract. Strange Interlude is then, on the face of it, a peculiar match for
the Neo-Futurists given the play’s earnestness, verbiage, and length (nine
acts, hundreds of pages), but this aesthetic mismatching may be what
made the production so rewarding for some and infuriating for others.
This was a twenty-first-century, ironic take on Strange Interlude that
exploited and revelled in the play’s strangeness by revealing it anew. The
Neo-Futurists subverted a subversive play; they theatricalized an anti-
theatrical drama.2
Strange Interlude interrupts mimesis through sustained diegesis in the
form of extensive, recurrent, psychoanalytically tinged character asides
that puncture and suspend the action, lending the play a novelistic qual-
ity. The characters tell us what they are thinking, or rather they verbal-
ize their thoughts to themselves. This is the play’s central conceit. Allen
found clever ways of staging these side commentaries, changing tactics
each act, and added to the weight of words by voicing O’Neill’s copi-
ous, literary stage directions as well.3 The production offered a meta-
commentary on the act of staging this ‘problem’ play—a play that seems
to have an idealized existence on the page, in O’Neill’s imagining.
Consequently, The Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude offers insight not
only into O’Neill’s play but also into his authorial presence in the text,
the construction of his authority and canonicity (i.e. his cultural cachet),
and the legacy of modernist experimentation. This chapter ponders the
way in which modernist play-texts can be ‘re-made new’ for the stage, to
 13  THE NEO-FUTURISTS(’) TAKE ON EUGENE O’NEILL’S …  253

adapt Ezra Pound’s famous dictum, using this inventive, irreverent pro-
duction as a case study.

The Strangeness of Strange Interlude

Strange Interlude occupies an uneasy position in O’Neill’s oeuvre and
in dramatic criticism. First produced by the Theatre Guild at the John
Golden Theatre on Broadway in 1928, the play was a critical and com-
mercial triumph, earning the author his third Pulitzer Prize and enhanc-
ing his popular recognition and notoriety. It was banned in Boston and
Provincetown on account of its supposedly scandalous and immoral con-
tent, and was performed in the suburbs instead. It enjoyed a 17-month
run on Broadway (414 performances in total), had two successful tour-
ing company productions over the course of three seasons, and became a
best-selling book and then a 1932 MGM film starring Clark Gable and
Norma Shearer (Dowling 432). Groucho Marx made comic reference to
it in Animal Crackers (1930).4 The Broadway production inspired repeat
attendance and devoted audiences, and had unique event status (its dura-
tion meant that the performance included a dinner break).5 In short, the
play was a cultural phenomenon. It was arguably O’Neill’s most success-
ful play in his lifetime.
The play’s reputation subsequent to O’Neill’s death (in 1953) has
generally been unfavourable, however. It has been infrequently staged in
comparison with O’Neill’s later work and so is little known.6 Critics have
lambasted it, contradicting the generally rave reviews for the original
Broadway production. Richard Gilman, writing about the 1963 Actors
Studio revival directed by José Quintero, called it ‘the most atrociously
ill-written and ill-conceived play of our time, the falsest “masterpiece” in
the theatre, as very likely the worst play that has ever been written by a
dramatist with a reputation’ (Gilman 68). This was not the only excoria-
tion, but it was probably the harshest. O’Neill’s artistic experimentation,
his effort at serious and intense characterization, his plethoric excess, and
his treatment of Freudian ideas were originally lauded but later appeared
misconceived and dated. The play has subsequently become ‘the scandal
of the O’Neill canon’, according to Robert F. Gross; it is considered an
embarrassment of sorts, melodrama masquerading as high art (3). In the
estimation of cultural arbiters and those who wish to maintain hegem-
onic norms, modernism and melodrama are uncomfortable bedfellows;
254  A. Curtin

their potential collusion between the sheets, as it were, must be criticized

or else hidden from view.7
Strange Interlude tells the soap operatic story of Nina Leeds, whose
unhappy love life, unfortunate circumstances, and unstable personality
provide fodder for O’Neill’s extended psychological dramatization. A
brief synopsis is in order. The play is set in a small New England town.
In Act 1, we learn that Nina, who is 20, had been engaged to Gordon
Shaw, an air force pilot who was shot down two days before the end
of World War I. His death has devastated her. She has a strained rela-
tionship with her father, a professor. Gordon never appears in the play,
except in portrait form, as a recurrent point of discussion, and an implicit
absent-presence. Throughout the play, Nina toys with the affections of
three male suitors/companions: an ineffectual novelist named Charles
Marsden (coded gay), Sam Evans, an amiable chump, and Edmund
(Ned) Darrell, a clinical physician. Nina marries Evans and becomes
pregnant, but aborts the pregnancy on the advice of Evan’s mother, who
tells Nina a terrible secret (unknown to Sam): insanity is hereditary in
the Evans family. Nina decides to become pregnant by Darrell and pre-
tend the child is Evans’. She falls out of love with Evans and in love with
Darrell, but nevertheless remains married to her husband. Twenty-five
years pass as the nine acts proceed. Nina’s son, Gordon Evans, grows up
and gets engaged to a Miss Madeline Arnold. Nina confesses the tortur-
ous secret of her son’s parentage to Marsden. Evans (unrelatedly) dies of
a heart attack. Nina acquiesces to marry Marsden, who serves as a com-
fortable old slipper. Nina concludes by musing, distractedly, that ‘our
lives are merely strange dark interludes in the electrical display of God
the Father!’ (347).
Synopsizing the play foregrounds its melodramatic content as well as
the peculiarity of some of its plot points: notably the congenital insan-
ity storyline, which appears to harken back to Gothic literature. Yet, as
Tamsen Wolff has argued, the play’s engagement with hereditary theory
(e.g. Mendel) and popular ideas about eugenics had special resonance
for O’Neill and may have contributed to the early appeal of the play.8
The drama might also be considered a study of protracted and unre-
solved trauma: Gordon Shaw’s death destabilizes Nina and prompts her
epic moroseness and erratic behaviour; she never appears to recover fully
or be ‘truly’ happy. O’Neill documents her contrary mental state along
with the internal conflicts of those in her orbit. This can make for uneasy
engagement on the part of the reader/audience member, especially when
 13  THE NEO-FUTURISTS(’) TAKE ON EUGENE O’NEILL’S …  255

Nina turns vaguely schizoid (referring to herself in the third person as

‘Sam’s wife’ in Act 4) or pontificates on metaphysical themes. There
are many odd and inscrutable lines in this play that leave one scratching
one’s head. As Nina remarks to Darrell: ‘There are so many curious rea-
sons we dare not think about for thinking things!’ (293). Quite.
It is clear from reading the play that it is meant to be a serious drama.
O’Neill’s authorial commentary makes this plain. The stage directions do
not contain the slightest indication of levity. To a contemporary reader/
audience member, however, the play may be thought to take itself too
seriously, or else it fails to acknowledge its own potential for humour.
O’Neill was reportedly adamant that the first production would not be
played for laughs (Shafer 237). The characters often appear overblown
and exaggerated. It is almost embarrassingly earnest.9 The drama is
frequently pitched to an extreme (exclamation points are de rigeur) or
pushed into pregnant pauses (recurrent ellipses) as though parodying
expressionism, or not using it effectively. The play is nonetheless capti-
vating, despite—or perhaps because of—its stylistics. It is full of choice
phrases that showcase O’Neill’s literary flair, and weird digressions such
as Nina’s metaphysical meditations. The play veers between disturbing
and surprising incidents, such as Nina deciding to abort her baby on the
dubious counsel of her mother-in-law, and humdrum domestic drama,
as exemplified by Nina’s endless mooning about her dead fiancé or wor-
rying about her marital duplicity. Moreover, O’Neill’s conceit of verbal-
izing character thoughts is often unintentionally amusing, as the interior
monologues demonstrate the artificiality of the characters’ social masks
(they say one thing but think another). Brian Friel does something simi-
lar in his 1964 play Philadelphia, Here I Come!, where the main character
is split into a public and private self, but Friel mined the dramatic and
comedic potential of this device; the comedy of O’Neill’s play is acciden-
tal. It might make us laugh, but this does not appear to have been the
author’s intention.
Audiences can derive pleasure from the strangeness (read: theatrical-
ity, excessiveness, occasional ridiculousness) of O’Neill’s play even if this
is an accidental by-product of its design. Robert F. Gross has written
about the ‘camp appeal’ of Strange Interlude—‘its low, soap opera-like
complications, its exclamation point-ridden invitations to melodramatic
acting, and the indecorous shifts from melodrama to comedy (often
by way of bathos) and back again’—and suggests it has a ‘queer pres-
ence in the predominantly male heterosexual (not to mention sexist and
256  A. Curtin

heterosexist) ethos of the O’Neill canon’ (4). O’Neill scholars have tra-
ditionally been reluctant to acknowledge these elements, Gross notes,
even though they have contributed to the play’s popularity. Strange
Interlude is suffused with irony, aestheticism, theatricality, and humour;
it lends itself to a queer reading very easily, especially given the charac-
ter of Marsden, whom O’Neill famously describes in stage directions
as having ‘an indefinable feminine quality about him, but it is nothing
apparent in either appearance or act’ (12). It is Marsden who ends up
with Nina at the end of the play—an ambiguous resolution to the play’s
fraught sexual dynamics. O’Neill’s play is multiply subversive, and makes
an effort to explore modern American womanhood via the character of
Nina, showing the complexities of her inner life (despite the fact that she
is completely oriented toward her function within patriarchy).10 In his
reading of the play, which is ostensibly ‘against the grain’, Gross con-
cludes that ‘in its extreme theatrics, deflation of machismo heroics, ironic
view of the nuclear family as a place of deception and incipient insan-
ity, and ultimate decentering of heterosexuality, Strange Interlude can
be appreciated as a queer interlude’ (19). Gross is right to highlight the
queerness of O’Neill’s play, but its hegemonic superstructure is just as
important. O’Neill stokes the fancies of readers and audience members
with his aesthetic strategies but he also strives to police the drama and
dictate its effects with absolute control (an impossible task). Strange
Interlude may be highly theatrical in performance, depending on how
it is staged, but its dramatic design is anti-theatrical, or at least anti-
performative. The meta-drama of this would-be closet drama is that the
dramatist plays all the parts; hence the lengthy, authoritarian-sounding
stage directions.
O’Neill’s penchant for providing prescriptive, elaborate stage direc-
tions is well known, as is his antipathy for actors and the business of the-
atrical production. ‘Outside of the financial aspect, productions are only
nerve-wrecking interruptions to me—‘show business’—and never have
meant anything more’, he stated in 1937. ‘The play, as written, is the
thing, and not the way the actors garble it with their almost-always-alien
personalities (even when the acting is fine work in itself)’ (qtd. in Bogard
and Bryer 467). For O’Neill, the play-as-dramatic-text was ‘the thing’;
the play-as-performance was an inferior copy, a less-than-perfect realiza-
tion of the dramatist’s original conception. This text-centric perspective,
which places performance in a subsidiary, ministerial position to drama,
 13  THE NEO-FUTURISTS(’) TAKE ON EUGENE O’NEILL’S …  257

has plagued both theatre and adaptation studies. Elevating the play as a
high-culture literary artwork positions performance as a knock-off, para-
sitic on the text. Performance adapts the text by necessity, but this act of
adaptation (transposition, transformation, recreation) is not always val-
ued for its own sake.
O’Neill was not unique in advancing this ideology. Anti-theatricality
is a major component of modernism (see Puchner). Modernist drama-
tists such as Stein, Brecht, Beckett, and O’Neill made their apprehension
about theatricality into a driving force of their aesthetics. Theatricality
was something they creatively worked against by opposing (or infusing)
mimesis with diegesis and enhancing the authority of the page. In writ-
ing plays that frustrated or complicated the mimetic function, modernist
dramatists worked to ensure their vision of the play; they made the page
perform, so to speak, adopting the positions of de facto director and
author-God. The ideology of print supported them in this endeavour:
the idea that the printed text effects unitary stability of meaning across
time and space in contradistinction to the scrappy, multiform ephemeral-
ity of performance ‘texts’. W.B. Worthen explains:

The insistence that these palpably distinct objects [various reproductions

of printed texts] are the same thing, or—to use the rather theoretical jargon
of editing—that they transmit the same substantial work, clothed in the
merely accidental differences of punctuation, capitalization, type style, lay-
out, words on the page, marks the deeply ideological working of print in
print culture. (7)

The printed text, it must be said, can be just as versional as other itera-
tions of a work, such as performance. Nevertheless, the notion of print
authority is pervasive. Modernist dramatists sought to use it to their
advantage by occupying the territory of the page-as-stage, rendering it
overtly literary. Worthen’s account of G.B. Shaw’s mise-en-page is indica-
tive of O’Neill’s approach in Strange Interlude. He writes:

Shaw’s stage directions describe the play from the perspective of the
reader-as-spectator. Shaw’s plays occupy the [page] much as novels do, as a
single block of type, the white page blackened from margin to margin. […]
Shaw’s page materializes the play as complete in its reading: reading line
to line, margin to margin, the reader enacts the pace of the play. […] The
individualized Author is everywhere in view, from the title page to the
258  A. Curtin

extensive prefaces to the idiosyncratic tone with which the stage directions
address the reader. (55)

O’Neill, like Shaw, presents a novelistic drama in Strange Interlude in

which the author goes to extreme lengths to supply the reader with the
finest points of detail about his characters’ appearances (which change
over time) as well as their every last thought and inflection, moment
to moment. There is hardly a single line of speech in the play that does
not have a stage direction that explains, typically using an adverb, how
the line should be uttered or what motivates it. These stage directions
are frequently super-specific and difficult, on the face of it, to commu-
nicate and distinguish (e.g. ‘thinking frightenedly’, ‘thinking distract-
edly’, ‘thinking wearily’, ‘thinking torturedly’, ‘thinking bitterly’) (18,
27, 27, 28). If casting directors were to follow O’Neill’s precise charac-
ter descriptions to the letter, the pool of potential actors would be very
small indeed. Most likely it would be impossible to find an actor who
could match O’Neill’s descriptions completely; they can include a char-
acter’s eye colour and skin hue (Darrell is described as having acquired
skin that is ‘Mongolian yellow’ in Act 9) (329). O’Neill’s stage directions
are so lengthy and detailed that they are collectively difficult to execute
with complete fidelity, and may be a hindrance. Director Arvin Brown, in
conversation about O’Neill’s ‘overtly explicit stage directions’, says that
they are a trap for actors; following the precepts of psychological realism,
he encourages actors to block out O’Neill’s ‘emotional blueprints’ until
they can find the ‘truth’ of the characters and their actions for them-
selves, temporarily bypassing O’Neill’s instructions in order to arrive at
the intended result ‘faithfully’ and ‘honestly’ (177).
Prior to the Neo-Futurists’ version of Strange Interlude, productions
of this play tended to tiptoe around its manifold peculiarities of design
and content, choosing not to draw attention to these elements for their
own sake. The Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude was not the first pro-
duction to exploit the play’s accidental humour—a 1984 London revival
directed by Keith Hack featuring Glenda Jackson as Nina also made light
of its melodrama—but it mounted a more blatant tone and genre shift
than had previously been attempted. Allen transformed O’Neill’s play
into an ironic, dark comedy with tragic elements by metatheatricalizing
it, foregrounding its artifice, and ventriloquizing O’Neill through his
stage directions.
 13  THE NEO-FUTURISTS(’) TAKE ON EUGENE O’NEILL’S …  259

Neo-Futurist Estrangement
Allen’s production of Strange Interlude contained a bagful of theatrical
tricks: each act was staged in a slightly different manner or had some
new twist. This kept the audience engaged and entertained through-
out the 5½ hour performance—at least those audience members who
considered the Neo-Futurists’ game-playing and theatrical conceits
ingenious and fun rather than disrespectful and gimmicky. Presenting
each act of O’Neill’s nine-act play in a distinctive fashion defamiliarized
both the text and the conventional procedures of dramatic theatre. The
Neo-Futurists approached the staging of Strange Interlude as though
they were unfamiliar with, or chose not to follow, standard protocol for
putting on a play. They made their own rules instead.
This was made apparent from the outset. One of the actors, Jeremy
Sher, began the performance by entering a bare stage, sitting on a stool,
and smiling as he acknowledged the audience.11 He began to read,
amidst slight audience tittering, from a small, old-looking hardcover
book: ‘Strange Interlude—a play by Eugene O’Neill. First part. Act One.
Scene: The library of Professor Leeds’ home in a small university town
in New England …’12 Sher proceeded to read selected stage directions
for the rest of the act, serving as a de facto narrator, the voice of the
author. Sher spoke some of the stage directions; other actors, in and
out of character, spoke the rest. The directions provoked some laugh-
ter, and not just when Sher ‘mispronounced’ the word ‘sedulously’ (he
‘mistakenly’ put the emphasis on the second syllable), at which point
he was corrected from offstage by another performer, and then said it
properly.13 The word, along with a pronunciation guide, was projected
above the portrait of Gordon Shaw, which overlooked the stage (act and
scene numbers, as well as occasional words are phrases were projected in
kind).14 The actors brought out items of furniture onto the stage as Sher
mentioned them; the audience was therefore privy to the creation of the
stage setting, minimal though it was.15
When the characters began speaking to one another, the actors pref-
aced their speech with their character name and accompanying stage
directions. This had the Brechtian effect of distancing the actor from
their character and exposing the constructed nature of the enterprise.
True to form, the Neo-Futurists did not ask the audience to suspend
their disbelief and pretend the actors really were the characters they were
playing; rather, they drew attention to the fact that they were playing
260  A. Curtin

parts while playing themselves (or some version of themselves) onstage.

This allowed for ironic commentary both on O’Neill’s character descrip-
tions and the actors’ abilities to portray them—or not, as the case may
be. In a comic routine, Joe Dempsey as Marsden tried to illustrate the
various features listed in the stage directions as Sher read them out
(‘His face is too long for its width, his nose is high and narrow, his fore-
head broad, his mild blue eyes those of a dreamy self-analyst, his thin lips
ironical and a bit sad’) (12). He responded with confusion to the men-
tion of Marsden’s ‘indefinable feminine quality’ that is not ‘apparent in
either appearance or act’, getting Sher to repeat this direction, before
shrugging it off as something he did not apparently have to worry about,
given that it is ostensibly auratic. The performers had sport with the
stage directions throughout. Upon mention of the fact that Marsden
‘never liked athletics’, Dempsey fumbled to catch a ball that was, without
warning, thrown at him from offstage; this became one of a number of
running gags used throughout the show to generate complicity between
the performers and the audience in the form of shared in-jokes, conti-
nuities, and rituals (the ball was thrown at Dempsey/Marsden at the
beginning of Act 2 for no other apparent reason than to pick on him; the
actor, mock upset, protested) (12). The performers regularly came off
the stage and wandered (read: clambered) among the audience, some-
times sitting on people, discovering a prop, or projecting a character
onto someone (Dempsey singled out an audience member to serve as a
focal point for Marsden’s recurrent flashbacks about a prostitute he once
had relations with in his youth).16
In the first act, the actors delivered their spoken thoughts—the dra-
matic asides that are the central feature of the play—straight to the
audience and faced one another when delivering dialogue, pointedly
switching between the public and private sides of their characters, and
not attempting to smooth over these transitions. In the second act, cer-
tain asides were spoken (sometimes simultaneously) into a microphone
held by Dean Evans, who played multiple roles in the production. Evans
took over the principal narrator job from Sher in this act. Still costumed
as Professor Leeds, whom he played in the previous act, Evans ghosted
his former character (Leeds’ death occurs before Act 2) while continuing
to serve as Mary, the maid, when the occasion demanded by putting on
a maid’s hat and changing his physicality and voice. The levels of per-
formativity involved here and elsewhere in the production were consider-
able, as characters, personae, and selves were stacked on, and swapped
 13  THE NEO-FUTURISTS(’) TAKE ON EUGENE O’NEILL’S …  261

with, one another. The performers did not emphasize these complexi-
ties, however, but simply engaged in a spirit of play, acknowledging, but
not fixating on, the performative puzzles of the proceedings. Evans was
not fazed when, serving as the narrator rather than a named character,
other actors sat on him while he sat on a chair (he was simultaneously
both ‘there’ and ‘not there’). Merrie Greenfield, who played Nina, did
not look askance when Dempsey as Marsden produced a Cabbage Patch
doll near the end of Act 2 and used it to double Nina in a paternalistic
fantasy of her as his ‘little girl’, speaking Nina’s lines in the text (77).
The Neo-Futurists were able to compound the serious (in this case, the
mildly disturbing) with the ridiculous, having their cake and eating it
too, so to speak. They cannily switched in and out of the text’s melo-
drama, playing it ‘straight’ in certain sections (i.e. not ironizing or dis-
tancing it) and then sending it up. Act 2 concluded with Dempsey as
Marsden trying and failing to carry a sleeping Nina offstage in his arms
(following O’Neill’s impractical stage direction). Dempsey, buckling
under Greenfield’s weight, eventually dragged her off like a limp doll or
theatrical corpse, to audience guffawing.
Act 3 further revelled in artifice and fakery. In this act, the asides
were presented in the form of recorded voiceovers, to which the actors
artfully mugged (‘showing’ their thought processes in their faces and
actions, or idly whistling along). Juxtaposing the live and the recorded
lent the scene a cinematic or televisual quality, turning the stage into a
virtual screen by using an old, now somewhat hackneyed, filmic trope.
(The 1932 MGM adaptation of the play used the same device for the
asides, with mixed results.) Voiceovers in classic Hollywood cinema
were typically used to create a sense of intimacy between character and
viewer. The Neo-Futurists were more interested in estrangement, how-
ever—allowing the audience to recognize the oddities of the charac-
ters and their thoughts and actions, even when the characters do not
fully recognize or acknowledge this about themselves or, indeed, each
other. They used the surrealist-inspired aspect of their aesthetic to high-
light this. Dean Evans appeared in drag in Act 3 as Mrs. Evans (Sam’s
mother), portraying this formidable character, who seems like she wan-
dered in from a Tennessee Williams play, in a Southern Gothic style with
an accent to match and a recurrent cackle (Fig. 13.1).
Having a male actor perform this role in drag emphasized the char-
acter’s grotesqueness as well as the hoariness of her plot line (i.e. inher-
ited madness). The fact that the character’s surname is the same as the
262  A. Curtin

Fig. 13.1  Brendan Buhl as Sam Evans and Dean Evans as Mrs. Evans in Act 3
of the Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude (photo by Charles Osgood)

actor who played her is pleasing, but coincidental. Allen, the director,
enhanced the production’s theatricality and the darkness of the text at
the end of the act by staging Nina’s abortion. In the text, the act con-
cludes with Mrs. Evans consoling Nina maternally, having cajoled her
into terminating her pregnancy. At this point in the production Evans
as Mrs. Evans reached under Greenfield’s top and removed the inflated
balloon that signified Nina’s baby. Tenderly, and terribly, with Greenfield
as Nina watching with anguish, Evans released the air in the balloon. It
let out a protracted, death-rattle squeak before conducting a brief, fateful
flight across the stage, quickly falling flat, deflated. The theatrical abor-
tion was simultaneously hilarious and horrific to behold.
In the following act the actors dropped the procedure of announc-
ing their characters’ names before saying their lines, and delivered their
asides to the audience again, thus resetting the presentational framework,
 13  THE NEO-FUTURISTS(’) TAKE ON EUGENE O’NEILL’S …  263

making it seem more like conventional dramatic theatre. However, they

continued to speak the stage directions, dividing this text among them
and ensuring that it was spoken, even when an actor/character was
‘unwilling’ (at one point, Evans and Dempsey made a ‘reluctant’ Sher
read O’Neill’s full account of his character’s alteration since the previ-
ous act). The Neo-Futurists’ presentation of these characters lent them
a Pirandello-like quality, as though the characters were seemingly aware
of the fictional nature of their existence and resisted, ever so slightly,
O’Neill’s authorial control over them.
Act 5 saw perhaps the most radical adaptation of the text. In this act,
the characters’ speech was cut almost entirely (with the exception of
about six lines here and there, some of which were slightly modified);
principally the stage directions were read. The performers acted out the
scene, going from one stage direction to the next, prefacing it with their
character name, sometimes delivering the stage direction in the manner
it suggested (e.g. stammering over the word ‘stammeringly’). This would
seem to be a recipe for incoherence and confusion but the performers
were still able to convey the sense of the scene (the handful of spoken
lines clarified key plot developments). O’Neill’s stage directions are so
plentiful and specific that the basic plot points were communicated.
Spotlighting his text in this way drew attention to the wonderful vari-
ety of adverbs and adjectives used to direct the drama. Furthermore, it
defamiliarized the business of putting on a play, making the dramatic text
uniquely present in performance, as though an acting exercise had been
taken too far.
Allen took a different tack again in Act 6. The principal presentational
mode of this act was that the performers spoke only their asides, not the
dialogue or stage directions. As with the preceding act, the fact that a
lot of the text was cut did not impede the sense from emerging, even
if the characters’ public selves were muted. Singling out just the asides
effectively and humorously demonstrated the characters’ self-absorption
as well as the often-unknowable nature of another’s thoughts. The actors
were seated at two adjoining tables and were positioned in front of table
microphones. They each had a hardcover book (an old edition of the
play) to hand and were individually spot lit (Fig. 13.2).
The actors were generally only illuminated when they were speaking
or about to speak soon; this meant that each of them was periodically
put into darkness as the sequence of asides proceeded. They mostly dis-
regarded each other and spoke into their microphones, not embodying
264  A. Curtin

Fig. 13.2  (L to R) Jeremy Sher, Merrie Greenfield, and Joe Dempsey in Act 6

of the Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude (photo by Charles Osgood)

their spoken thoughts. This made them seem disconnected from one
another, and rendered them as existentially free-floating conscious-
nesses, like the figure in Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel L’Innommable
(The Unnameable), or else fatefully trapped, like the three urn-bound
protagonists of Beckett’s play Play (1963).17 The scenario was thrown
into relief near the end of the act when Sher and Greenfield pushed their
microphones aside and delivered dialogue to one another, feelingly and
without irony, getting up from their seated positions. The dialogue was
played out straightforwardly for a while before the actors reverted into
isolated asides again.
The final three acts continued to shake up the presentational arrange-
ments. In Act 7, the actors spoke their asides into a microphone held by
Dempsey. He would rove from person to person, Geraldo Rivera style,
presenting them with the microphone, into which they would utter
their character’s private thoughts; the dialogue was spoken as normal.
In one section of the text, the characters’ asides were intercut: the per-
formers would continue to mutter their own thoughts sotto voce while
 13  THE NEO-FUTURISTS(’) TAKE ON EUGENE O’NEILL’S …  265

Dempsey dashed between them, picking up snatches of babble. About

midway through the act, and several hours into the performance as a
whole, Allen pulled off a typically Neo-Futurist coup de théâtre. Dempsey,
having just exited as Marsden, bounded back onto the stage, and, along
with the rest of the cast (except Sher), led the audience in a seventh-
inning stretch: a baseball tradition in which attendees stand and stretch
their limbs. Dempsey led the standing, stretching audience in a rendition
of the chorus to ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’. Sher, who remained
in character as the ever-rational Darrell, was left looking perplexed, as
though he could not comprehend the performative antics (this was, of
course, a performance of confusion on Sher’s part).
In Act 8 Allen employed the staging device used by Philip Moeller,
the first director of Strange Interlude, to differentiate the dialogue from
the asides: he had the performers freeze whenever an actor uttered an
aside. This device, which now seems contrived, was mined for humour:
at one point Sher/Darrell had to shake Greenfield/Nina out of her
freeze-stupor. The Cabbage Patch doll also made a re-appearance in
this act, this time representing the character of Madeline Arnold. Dean
Evans, who, in the preceding act portrayed the eleven-year-old Gordon
Evans (the stage direction ‘He looks older than he is’ got a laugh), here
manipulated the doll and spoke Madeline’s lines (234) (Fig. 13.3).
Unusual performance dynamics emerged when Sher took over as
Madeline’s puppeteer, leaving Evans with nothing to do onstage but
watch a fictional rowing race as himself; Brendan Buhl, in character
as Sam Evans, looked at him bemusedly as though seeing him for the
first time. The Neo-Futurists’ self-reflexive, non-illusory, often absurd-
ist performance style enriched O’Neill’s text by adding to its inherent
strangeness.
The final act began with Sher reading the stage directions, as he did
in Act 1. This time, however, he trailed off after the first three sentences
and left the stage saying ‘blah blah blah’. The troupe had finally dis-
pensed with this procedure. The presentation still resisted convention-
ality, however. Cabbage Patch Madeline Arnold, manipulated by Buhl
and Evans at different points in the act, gave a star turn. The sight of
these men puppeteering and speaking for the doll—indicating the char-
acter’s asides by raising the doll into the air, standing the doll on the
stage floor or perching it on an actor’s shoulders to conduct conversation
with human scene partners, endeavouring to make the doll carry a bunch
of roses given to the character—was highly amusing and quite absurd.
266  A. Curtin

Fig. 13.3  (L to R) Jeremy Sher, Joe Dempsey, Brendan Buhl, and Dean Evans
(with a Cabbage Patch doll) in Act 8 of the Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude
(photo by Charles Osgood)

Allen and the performers extracted maximum comedy from the puppet,
staging an outré sequence in which Evans (as Gordon Evans) simulated
various sex acts with the Cabbage Patch doll—his character’s bride-to-
be—to the visible discomfort of Buhl, Madeline’s puppeteer, while
Dempsey as Marsden droned on with one of his asides, appalled. Allen
and company took great liberty with the following stage directions: ‘He
takes her in his arms. They kiss each other with rising passion’ (324). They
made what might be considered a rather trite romantic scene into some-
thing ribald and prurient. This was unfaithful to O’Neill in one respect
yet strangely faithful to him in another, in that they arguably staged the
characters’ physical desires with the same forthrightness that O’Neill
investigated the characters’ thoughts in his copious asides. Despite the
general tone of frivolity and playfulness with which the Neo-Futurists
performed the text (Cabbage Patch Madeline exited by ‘flying’ off like
Superman; the doll later reappeared as part of an airplane pantomimed
by Dean Evans), the actors periodically played the drama ‘straight’, tak-
ing it seriously as O’Neill evidently intended. In doing so, they amplified
 13  THE NEO-FUTURISTS(’) TAKE ON EUGENE O’NEILL’S …  267

the play’s sinister undertones. Allen gave some of Nina’s final lines, in
which she apparently makes peace with her decision to pair off with
Marsden, to Marsden, thus subverting the couple’s ‘happy’ union and
making it seem like another act of patriarchal control—an illusion of
freedom.

Modernism’s Neo-Future
The Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude provided a controversial conclu-
sion to the Goodman Theatre’s O’Neill festival, provoking debate about
artistic license, fidelity to the text, auteurship, and audience expectations.
Robert Falls, the Goodman’s artistic director, welcomed this debate and
considered it part of the festival’s goal of exploring O’Neill’s earlier work
in the twenty-first century: ascertaining what these plays—some of which
are now over 90 years old—mean today and how they might engage a
contemporary audience.18 The Wooster Group, who were also part of
the festival, have been deconstructing O’Neill, along with the work of
other authors, since the early 1990s.19 If O’Neill’s work—and, more
generally, modernist drama—is to have a continued future on the stage,
then one cannot be precious about it or ignore its historicity. One has to
appreciate the irony of calling work that is nearly a century old ‘modern-
ist’. The act of reproducing this work, of creatively and self-reflexively
remaking (or adapting) it, highlights its potential as work-in-process.
O’Neill’s work, like the work of any other historical dramatist that is
still produced, is put into flux when staged; it is destabilized and pos-
sibly defamiliarized. Margaret Jane Kidnie, writing about Shakespearean
adaptation and Hamlet’s ontological existence, argues that text and per-
formance co-construct and reciprocally engage one another. She writes:

Performance is […] never incidental to an idea of Hamlet—it is not an

embellishment of, or deviation from, the ‘real’ thing. It is a basic part of
the way the next synchronic point (and the next, and the next) are con-
structed in a diachronic process called ‘Shakespeare’s play,’ thereby cre-
ating and thus perpetuating an illusion of relative canonical stability.
Shakespeare’s plays change over time, and in a particular place, under the
ongoing pressure of cultural and creative processes. It is in part through
performance, above all through the ways performance is brought into a
relational tension with text, that one can arrive at all at a provisional and
subjective knowledge of the ‘real’ thing. (115)
268  A. Curtin

This is not only true for Shakespeare. The work of other playwrights,
including O’Neill, also changes over time, or rather is revealed anew
when revived at a later stage, even when the author has advanced an ide-
ology of print that strives to make the ‘book’ of the play the last word, so
to speak, the ‘real thing’. In theatre, the ‘real’ is never entirely knowable
or straightforward, nor is the surreal for that matter, as the Neo-Futurists
demonstrate. Their take on Strange Interlude prompted a conversation
about this play (to which this chapter contributes) that extends its exist-
ence as a theoretical work-in-process into the present day.
The Neo-Futurists complicated O’Neill’s construction of his charac-
ters’ interior lives via asides that supposedly demonstrate their thought
processes. In O’Neill’s play, characters have a public self and a private
self that are generally discrete and autonomous. They are fully able to
verbalize their thoughts and feelings, if only to themselves; as such,
their unconscious is a knowable entity, something to which they read-
ily have access and are able to articulate. By ironizing O’Neill’s dramatic
conceit, the Neo-Futurists implicitly critiqued the notion that psycho-
logical interiority can be represented so neatly. They highlighted the
collusion between public and private personae and the complex web of
performativity through which this operates. Furthermore, they exposed
the play’s gender and sexual politics: highlighting Nina’s character as a
male-authored fantasy, parodying Mrs. Evans as a melodramatic type,
making Madeline’s puppet qualities literal, and emphasizing Marsden’s
coded queerness as well as the play’s overall camp appeal.20 Most signifi-
cantly, perhaps, they contested O’Neill’s textual authority by figuratively
including him in the dramatis personae courtesy of his stage directions,
thereby foregrounding his patriarchal script. In making the dramatic text
into an overt, displayed part of the production rather than an invisible,
unacknowledged guiding force, the Neo-Futurists defamiliarized the
procedures of dramatic theatre and engaged alternative, resistant ways
of utilizing text in performance, in line with contemporary writing and
staging practices.
Ezra Pound’s modernist dictum ‘Make It New’ remains an artistic
imperative, even when the ‘it’ in question is modernist art, the moder-
nity of which inescapably recedes with the passage of time. O’Neill’s
modernity is not our own; his modernism can seem strange to us now
by dint of historical circumstance alone. Theatre-makers are justified in
approaching historical texts from a present-minded perspective; there
is arguably little point in doing otherwise, notwithstanding efforts at
 13  THE NEO-FUTURISTS(’) TAKE ON EUGENE O’NEILL’S …  269

reconstruction, which can only be partial and approximate. Embracing

modernism’s historicity, recognizing its temporal distance from the here-
and-now, as the Neo-Futurists did with Strange Interlude, need not
entail a superior attitude on the part of theatre artists and audiences—
a shared amusement at, and exploitation of, artwork that now appears
dated. Some audience members, like the aforementioned heckler who
bemoaned the fate of O’Neill’s beautiful play, may have felt that the
Neo-Futurists were simply being glib and exploitative, but this over-
looks their artful, self-reflexive engagement with the text. By signal-
ling the play’s peculiarities—those that are part of its aesthetic design as
well those that are a product of its historicity—the Neo-Futurists made
O’Neill’s play productively strange (again); they exploited its lapsed
modernity in order to make it new in an ironic manner.
The idea of an historically informed futurity that is itself a repetition
(with a difference) is implied in the very name of this particular com-
pany, which is, after all, a neo-avant-garde, a refashioning or adapta-
tion of historical futurism. Innovative productions of modernist drama
may come from recognition of modernism’s slippage, its temporal para-
dox (the ‘modern’ that is no longer modern but obviously historical).
This makes the work strange in ways it would not have been originally,
thereby suggesting new interpretive possibilities for theatre artists willing
to engage this conundrum. The cultural and ideological biases of mod-
ernist drama, which may be easier to discern retrospectively, can provide
fodder for creative interrogation and politically inclined performance.
This means that modernist experimentation is not aesthetically defunct.
It can take new forms as it flashbacks and flash-forwards, remaking mod-
ernism anew.

Notes
1. The Wooster Group presented The Emperor Jones. Toneelgroep, from
Amsterdam, staged Rouw Siert Electra (Morning Becomes Electra).
Companhia Triptal, from São Paulo, mounted Homens ao Mar (‘Sea
Plays’). The Chicago-based company The Hypocrites put on The Hairy
Ape. Robert Falls directed a production of Desire Under the Elms.
2. This was not the first time Greg Allen had directed, adapted, or parodied
the work of a canonical modernist author, as indicated by the titles of
two of his shows: The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett As Found
In An Envelope (partially burned) In A Dustbin In Paris Labeled ‘Never
270  A. Curtin

to be performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I’ll Sue! I’LL SUE FROM THE
GRAVE!!! (first produced in 1999 as part of the Rhinoceros Theater
Festival in Chicago) and The Last Two Minutes of the Complete Works of
Henrik Ibsen (premiered in 2005 at the Neo-Futurarium in Chicago).
3. Interestingly, O’Neill considered having recorded stage directions accom-
pany live dialogue as a soundtrack for his 1941 play Hughie (Sheaffer
523).
4. ‘Pardon me while I have a strange interlude’, Groucho remarks, freezing
a conversation with two actors and delivering a private monologue (in
which he mentions the character of Marsden from O’Neill’s play). A clip
of the scene is currently available on YouTube.
5. Tamsen Wolff makes the point about repeat attendance and devoted audi-
ences (220–1).
6. Its fortunes are improving, however. The National Theatre in the UK
staged an abridged production of the play in 2013, directed by Simon
Godwin and starring Anne-Marie Duff as Nina. The production, which
had a running time of three hours and fifteen minutes (including an
interval), was well received.
7. Modernism and the musical are equally unharmonious in critical terms,
yet consideration of connections between them makes for a richer, more
complicated, theatre history. David Savran writes: ‘[Musicals] are neither
outside the tradition of theatrical modernism nor transparent cultural
texts. Indeed, because of their status as popular entertainments, they
often take up—more explicitly and pointedly—many of the same histori-
cal and theoretical problematics that allegedly distinguish canonical mod-
ernist texts’ (215).
8. Wolff writes: ‘In the course of introducing common eugenic assump-
tions and contesting those assumptions in Strange Interlude, O’Neill
challenges the role of the audience and stretches the bounds of dramatic
form’ (218).
9. Robert Falls, in conversation, remarks: ‘[O’Neill is] so un-ironic, he’s so
out there, and he’s so desperately…truthful in what he’s doing that it
actually becomes embarrassing for an audience. His purity of emotion is
so embarrassing that it’s very difficult for the actors to go there and it’s
difficult for the audiences to go there’ (Weber).
10. Dowling observes: ‘There is no question that Nina Leeds is one of
[O’Neill’s] most fully realized female characters, and her needs supersede
those of her men. But in the end, there is little to Nina as a gendered
being than her desperate need to procreate in pursuit of self-fulfilment
and happiness’ (441).
 13  THE NEO-FUTURISTS(’) TAKE ON EUGENE O’NEILL’S …  271

11. My account of the Neo-Futurists’ production of Strange Interlude is

based on a video recording of one of the live performances that was pro-
vided to me courtesy of the Goodman Theatre and Greg Allen. I am
grateful to both parties for letting me access the recording.
12. This recalls Elevator Repair Service’s production of Gatz, which pre-
miered in 2006, a several-hour-long performance in which the entirety
of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was read aloud and acted
out.
13. Later on, in Act 7, Joe Dempsey as Marsden similarly pretended to
misread the text, in this instance not attending to punctuation prop-
erly. Dempsey overlooked a comma when speaking the stage direction
‘Marsden comes in from the rear, smiling, immaculately dressed as usual’,
misreading it as ‘smiling immaculately’ before registering his ‘mistake’
and then repeating the line correctly (O’Neill 251). The fact of Marsden
entering the stage ‘from the rear’ was sometimes emphasized when
another actor spoke this stage direction—a nod to the character’s implicit
queerness.
14. ‘Some of [the] text was projected onto the screen above Gordon’s por-
trait, accentuating at times the juxtaposition between text and meaning,
or, at other times highlighting the dated language—but always keeping
an eye toward the deliciousness of O’Neill’s language’ (Johnson 117).
15. The portrait of Gordon Shaw, which hung above the stage, was present
prior to Sher’s entrance. The stage floor was full of scuffmarks and criss-
crossing strips of masking tape—a legacy of the actors’ work upon it, in
line with the Neo-Futurists’ presentational aesthetic.
16. As the performance proceeded, the actors highlighted the passage of time
when reading O’Neill’s references to previous acts in the stage directions.
It is part of the Neo-Futurist aesthetic to acknowledge the real conditions
in which performance takes place. At one performance, when an audience
member had a sneezing fit during one of Nina’s speeches, Greenfield as
Nina worked ‘bless you’ into the conclusion of the speech. If an actor
flubbed a line they sometimes acknowledged their mistake and ad-libbed
around it. In Act 8, Greenfield acknowledged the titular phrase ‘strange
interlude’ in her character’s aside, inflecting it archly and delivering it to
the audience. Offstage voices declaimed the phrase with her. Greenfield
curtseyed in reaction to the audience’s laughter and applause.
17. Dean Evans performed as the maid in this act. This mostly involved pre-
tending to be asleep and then getting up to answer the door—rudimen-
tary actions that Evans made brilliantly comic. The maid, it should be
noted, does not have any textual asides. Evidently O’Neill did not care
about her interior life or wish her to have one—a potential case of class
bias.
272  A. Curtin

18. Robert Falls: ‘I’d hoped that there would be controversy. I’d hoped that
there would be a dialogue. I wanted to provoke a dialogue. I think that
theatre is only exciting if there is a dialogue. What’s been remarkable to
me has been the extent and the breadth of the dialogue. You go to blog
sites, you go the internet, you look in the newspapers: this dead white
man … created with these plays an extraordinary controversy in this
city for two and a half months, you know, and I think that’s fantastic’
(Weber).
19. The Wooster Group first presented work-in-progress performances of The
Emperor Jones at The Performing Garage in 1992 and work-in-progress
performances of The Hairy Ape at the same venue in 1995. In 2012 the
group performed Early Plays, based on O’Neill’s ‘Glencairn’ plays at St.
Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.
20. As Johnson notes about the production: ‘While Mrs. Evans at first
appeared ridiculous in her spinster drag and southern drawl as played
by [Dean] Evans, when the audience hears the stage directions describ-
ing her […] it becomes clear that the use of drag is spot on, revealing
how Mrs. Evans’s femininity is underwritten by the voice of patriarchy’
(Johnson 120).

Works Cited
Bogard, Travis, and Jackson R. Bryer, eds. Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Print.
Dowling, Robert M. Eugene O’Neill: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work.
Vol. 2, 2vols. New York: Facts on File, Inc, 2009. Print.
Gilman, Richard. Common and Uncommon Masks: Writings on Theatre,
1961–1970. New York: Random, 1971. Print.
Gross, Robert F. “O’Neill’s Queer Interlude: Epicene Excess and Camp
Pleasures.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 12.1 (1997): 3–22.
Print.
Johnson, Katie N. “When Strange Is Good: A Neo-Futurist Strange Interlude.”
The Eugene O’Neill Review 31 (2009): 114–21. Print.
Kidnie, Margaret Jane. “Where Is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation.”
A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (2007): 101–20. Print.
O’Neill, Eugene. Strange Interlude. London: Jonathan Cape, 1928. Print.
Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama.
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002. Print.
Savran, David. “Towards a Historiography of the Popular,” Theatre Survey 45.2
(2004): 211–217. Print.
 13  THE NEO-FUTURISTS(’) TAKE ON EUGENE O’NEILL’S …  273

Shafer, Yvonne. Performing O’Neill: Conversations with Actors and Directors.

New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Print.
Sheaffer, Louis. O’Neill: Son and Artist. Boston: Little Brown, 1973. Print.
Weber, Anne Nicholson. “Talk Theatre in Chicago.” March 16, 2009: Robert
Falls and Greg Allen. Web.
Wolff, Tamsen. “‘Eugenic O’Neill’ and the Secrets of Strange Interlude.” Theatre
Journal 55.2 (2003): 215–34. Print.
Worthen, William B. Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.
 CHAPTER 14

Theatrical Mash-up: Assembled Text

as Adaptation in Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella

Scott Proudfit

This chapter focuses on a particular kind of textual assemblage in the

scripts of recent devised theatre productions in the USA, exemplified by
Bill Rauch and Tracy Young’s Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella (M/M/C). In
these productions, the cultural divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ sources
is not emphasized or seemingly of interest to the assemblers, as if the
postmodern impulse to bring together such theoretically distinct regions
of culture, typified by the work of the Wooster Group, had lost its
urgency. By contrast, all material assembled into the spoken text of a play
such as M/M/C is familiar to, and celebrated by, the audience and the
assemblers—all sources are considered as culturally undifferentiated. In
addition, while acknowledging a contemporary culture of radical plural-
ity, these recent productions de-historicize their subjects and perform-
ers with the goal of finding ‘universals’ performers can share with their
audiences. This de-historicization clearly distinguishes this work from
the assembled-text productions common in modern documentary thea-
tre, which seek to present an authentic ‘truth’ of their subjects’ expe-
riences grounded in a clearly delineated socio-historical moment.1

S. Proudfit (*) 
Elon University, Elon, USA
e-mail: sproudfit@elon.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 275

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_14
276  S. Proudfit

Most importantly, the pleasure audiences derive from productions such

as M/M/C, unlike from documentary theatre or other assembled-text
devised productions, seems largely a result of the ways in which they are
encouraged to pay attention to the similarities and differences among the
production’s source materials.
For these reasons, the term best used to describe these productions
might be ‘mash-up’, a term borrowed from recent trends in popular
music, specifically hip-hop. An exemplary mash-up, Medea/Macbeth/
Cinderella was most recently presented in 2012 at the Oregon
Shakespeare Festival (OSF), under the co-direction of Bill Rauch and
Tracy Young. M/M/C simultaneously stages Euripides’ Medea (in Paul
Roche’s translation), Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and the Rodgers and
Hammerstein musical Cinderella in an overlapping mélange. This chap-
ter argues that this mash-up and others like it actually have more in com-
mon with pop-music tracks from, for example, Danger Mouse’s The
Grey Album or the Electronic Control Committee’s ‘Whipped Cream
Mixes’ than with these plays’ theatrical antecedents, the postmodern
‘collages’ and ‘pastiches’ of late twentieth-century US theatres—such as
the Wooster Group’s Route 1&9 (1981)—or with assembled-text doc-
umentary theatre such as the Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie
Project (2000). In their ‘purposeful reassembly of fragments to form a
new whole’ theatrical mash-ups should be considered adaptations of
their source texts, as Julie Sanders suggests in her 2006 book Adaptation
and Appropriation. Nevertheless, in a number of significant ways, these
plays are distinct from those single-source adaptations common in con-
temporary theatre. Tracing the similarities between musical mash-ups
and theatrical mash-ups helps explain the mixed reception M/M/C has
encountered in its production history and helps pinpoint what different
audiences expect from adaptations that rely heavily on the direct quota-
tion of canonical sources.
At first glance, Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella may seem similar to the
assembled-text theatrical collages or pastiches presented by US avant-
garde collectives since the 1980s. For example, Young and Rauch con-
structed the text of M/M/C by cutting and pasting together canonical
plays in the same way that the Wooster Group’s members quoted exten-
sively from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in constructing Route 1&9 and
the way that SITI Company assembled the spoken text of Small Lives/
Big Dreams (1995) entirely of lines from the plays of Anton Chekhov.
 14  THEATRICAL MASH-UP: ASSEMBLED TEXT …  277

Moreover, Young and other members of the Los Angeles theatre com-

pany, the Actors’ Gang, who helped devise M/M/C trace a meth-
odological lineage to SITI Company, at least in terms of their devising
processes, as they have trained with Anne Bogart and her company over
the years.2 Young, in particular, has often modelled her devising process
on Bogart’s, for example with her Actors’ Gang production DreamPlay
(2000). However, unlike at SITI Company, the way in which M/M/C’s
creators assembled their script does not imply that certain sources are
culturally ‘high’ or ‘low’. The sources in the assembled text are presented
as different but culturally equal, not as a postmodern juxtaposition of
a lightweight ‘low’ Broadway musical with the canonical ‘high culture’
plays of Shakespeare and Euripides. When the Wooster Group members,
in Route 1&9, juxtaposed portions of Wilder’s play with a scatological
comedy routine from Pigmeat Markham, among other ‘low’ sources,
they seemed to be making a point that there were a lot of things missing
from Wilder’s Our Town: sexual desire, race relations, the physiological
workings of the human body (The Wooster Group 10). Assembled-text
devised works such as Route 1&9, then, are often more an example of
appropriation than adaptation. As Sanders has described it, in these cases
the assembled text’s relationship with its sources is ‘oppositional, even
subversive’. Companies seek out opportunities ‘for divergence [as much
as] adherence, for assault as well as homage’ (Sanders 9). In Route 1&9,
Wilder’s Our Town is at times presented as anemic and distant. At other
times, the Wooster Group seems to sincerely credit the enduring value of
Wilder’s ‘classic’. The assembled text of M/M/C in performance on the
other hand is, to recall Sanders, more adaptation than appropriation, a
homage to all three sources and an assault on none.
While the three-source mash-up Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella has
been altered slightly with each version, the play, in a form quite similar
to its latest, was co-produced by Cornerstone Theater Company and
the Actors’ Gang at the Actors’ Gang Theatre in Hollywood in 1998
(2 April–9 May). This 1998 adaptation was made together by direc-
tors Rauch and Young. The play was presented once previously without
Young in a much different form by Rauch and his fellow undergraduates
at Harvard University in 1984.3 The group of creators on this produc-
tion two years later became the core of Cornerstone Theater Company,
of which Rauch was artistic director from 1986 to 2007.4 One of the
major differences between the original version of M/M/C and all sub-
sequent productions is that the first version had what Rauch has called
278  S. Proudfit

the company’s ‘terrible’ choice of performing the Medea portion of

the mash-up in a ‘Country & Western’ style.5 In all subsequent ver-
sions, M/M/C has been styled to reflect ‘traditional’ productions of
the works, including in its various incarnations in Los Angeles and at
the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2002
(26 September–12 October). The Greeks are costumed as vaguely Ancient
Greek; the Scots are costumed to reflect medieval/Renaissance dress; the
costumes for Cinderella look fairytale-ish and Broadway-musical flashy.
In M/M/C, the three plays share stage space and time. Indeed, if
audience members could simply concentrate on one play for the dura-
tion of the performance, they would recognize large chunks of each of
these three plays unchanged and in sequence. However, M/M/C chal-
lenges spectators to follow all three shows at once. On one level, M/M/C
is an exploration of thematic intersections among three theatre ‘classics’.
As Rauch and Young wrote in their program notes for the OSF produc-
tion, in laying these three plays side by side ‘[t]he counterpoints but
especially the shared rhythms were revelatory’ (16).6 In terms of con-
gruities, M/M/C revolves around a central interest in ‘ambition’ in these
three plays, exploring the idea that ‘wishes can come true’, for better or
worse. Often the characters perform their scenes unaware of the paral-
lel universes beside them. Cinderella might be singing ‘In My Own
Little Corner’ while next to her Medea plots revenge against Jason, their
words overlapping. At other times, characters acknowledge one another
in the shared space. When Macbeth asks, ‘Is this a dagger I see before
me?’ Medea holds the dagger he sees as she contemplates killing her chil-
dren. (Macbeth sees only the floating dagger, not Medea holding it.) In
this way, M/M/C makes corporeal what Marvin Carlson in The Haunted
Stage claims audiences experience metaphorically in the theatre, the way
in which ‘every play is a memory play’ because the ‘present experience is
always ghosted by previous experiences and associations’ (2). At the same
time, the tone of the play is not weighty or reverential. Rather, the pro-
duction is playful and populist. Nor are the three source plays spliced and
recombined in a way that make them hard to identify, as is often the case
in the assembled-text collages of the Wooster Group and SITI Company.
Rather, M/M/C is accessible, and, at turns, broadly comic. Like other
mash-ups, M/M/C relies on the alternation between moments of con-
gruity and moments of incongruity across its ‘tracks’ to create this mixed
tone, a tone that has proven challenging to some audiences despite the
overall accessibility of the source material.
 14  THEATRICAL MASH-UP: ASSEMBLED TEXT …  279

Musical Mash-Ups
Before explaining why ‘mash-up’ is the best term to describe contem-
porary devised work such as M/M/C, it is useful to describe briefly the
origins of this form of popular music. A mash-up is made when recorded
selections from more than one song are mixed together to form a new
song. Mash-ups trace their lineage to early hip-hop music, which ‘sam-
pled aggressively in building beats’, and disco, which in order to pro-
vide ‘a continuous flow of sound piped onto the dance floor’ featured
‘seamless segues built upon songs bleeding into one another’ (Serazio
80). The earliest mash-up may have been the 1986 hit ‘Walk This Way’,
Run-D.M.C.’s rap cover of the Aerosmith rock song of the same name
from 1975. Much like mid-1980s rap artists, Steven Tyler in the original
version of the song delivered his verses, packed with internal and end
rhymes, in a rapid-fire, syncopated manner. In the cover, the group Run-
D.M.C. rap Tyler’s lyrics, sampling the Aerosmith instrumental track
underneath, with the addition of a drum machine and turntable scratch.
Tyler sings/screams the chorus, and eventually joins the group in sing-
ing the final verses of the song. Charting higher than Aerosmith’s origi-
nal, the cover song combined two groups and genres that didn’t seem
to go together and yet did, a quality that has defined most subsequent
mash-ups.
While acknowledging this early proto-mash-up, critics often point
to The Electronic Control Committee’s (ECC) 1994 ‘Whipped Cream
Mixes’ as the first true mash-ups. These two mash-ups lay the Public
Enemy songs ‘Rebel Without a Pause’ and ‘By the Time I Get to
Arizona’ over two instrumental tracks from the 1965 Herb Alpert and
the Tijuana Brass album Whipped Cream & Other Delights. Most impres-
sive about these first mash-ups is that they were produced ‘analog’; the
ECC simply found the appropriate place to start Public Enemy member
Chuck D’s vocals playing as they recorded them over Alpert’s music.
They synced the tracks in order to have the vocals ‘fit’ the breaks in the
underlying music without digitally altering (compressing, stretching,
doubling, or mixing) the music or vocal track. Again, the contrast in
genre and tone between Chuck D’s angry rap protest lyrics and Herb
Alpert’s cheerful, playful jazz is key to this mash-up’s humour, appeal,
and perhaps meaning.7
280  S. Proudfit

The ‘Whipped Cream Mixes’ exemplify the most common type

of mash-up, the A + B form, in which an a cappella track is laid down
over an instrumental. Since the late 1990s, particularly with the advent
of Sony Acid software, the creation of mash-ups has become widespread
and the forms increasingly diverse. Many mash-ups, unlike the A + B
form, combine shorter, sampled cuts of instrumentals rather than using
an entire instrumental track, the most famous example of this ‘chopped-
up’ mash-up being Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (2004) , which
selected portions of songs from the Beatle’s White Album (1968) to
form the instrumental tracks beneath the vocals of Jay-Z’s The Black
Album (2003). Other mash-ups create ‘duets’ by playing multiple vocal
tracks simultaneously, or mix songs without stripping one track down to
an a cappella version, or sample instrumental cuts from numerous songs.
As mentioned earlier, the DJ and assembler of source materials, Danger
Mouse, does not seem to be operating in a ‘postmodern’ mode when
combining the music of the Beatles and Jay-Z. He does not consider one
artist as representative of ‘high’ culture and the other of ‘low’. Instead
he is celebrating both, and exploring congruities and incongruities across
genres and time.
Nevertheless, while Danger Mouse and fellow mash-up artists do
not seem to follow the assumptions of postmodern juxtaposition, in
describing the impetus and social significance of mash-ups, music crit-
ics often adopt language reminiscent of Fredric Jameson’s descriptions
of postmodern pastiche in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. For example, pop music critic Michael Serazio, writes ‘the
mash-up … as a definitive generational statement … hesitates to espouse
anything more than detached, wry commentary …’ adding, ‘[i]t exposes
the arbitrariness of styles and signs, which is an apolitical way of making
a political statement’ (91–92). Serazio’s characterization of ‘mash-up’
recalls Jameson’s oft-quoted definition of ‘pastiche’, which centers on
pastiche’s ahistoricism and inability to critique:

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic

style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But
it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior
motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any
conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily bor-
rowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists… (Jameson 17)
 14  THEATRICAL MASH-UP: ASSEMBLED TEXT …  281

According to Jameson, pastiche does not allow an artist to contrast her

voice with past voices, and therefore to engage in critical thinking by
challenging a past from which she sees herself as separate.
Yet when these same music critics specifically historicize the tech-
nology that enabled the widespread creation of mash-ups, this form of
assembling typically gets more usefully differentiated from earlier visual
works of collage as well as from the works of film, art, and architec-
ture labelled ‘pastiche’ by Jameson. Indeed in the same article in which
Serazio ventriloquizes Jameson, he also offers a hopeful view of mash-up
makers as culture ‘re-producers’, echoing Theodor Adorno’s more posi-
tive predictions of future consumers empowered to remake (and make
meaningful) existing and mass-produced cultural products, as opposed to
the dire Frankfurt School warnings that Jameson sees fulfilled in pastiche
(Adorno 362). As Serazio writes, ‘[T]he mashup is a response to larger
technological, institutional, and social contexts … Technology plays out
in this reading as the tool by which audience-creators fend off and pro-
duce contentious counterpoints to the corporate and institutional powers
of today’s culture factories’ (79 and 83).
The reason Adorno’s occasionally hopeful views are more applicable to
understanding the work of mash-ups than the Frankfurt School’s gener-
ally dire warnings may be due largely to the fact that mash-up makers of
the 1990s and 2000s had different technologies and audiences available to
them than did the collage artists of the first half of the twentieth century
or even the artists, filmmakers, and architects of the 1980s who are used as
examples by Jameson in Postmodernism.8 Pop music critics have suggested
that audio-cassette technology of the 1980s laid the groundwork, techno-
logically and culturally, for mash-up-making in the 2000s (Manuel 3). Any
teenager with a cassette player in the 1980s could make a mix tape and par-
ticipate in a process that ‘identifies the scattered pieces of pop detritus that
litter the media-soaked landscape (and, with it, identity) and manages to
make them coherent at the same time’ (Serazio 90). As it later was for the
mash-ups makers they spawned, for mix-tape makers the ‘songs themselves’
became ‘notes anew’ and ‘[t]he act of appropriating … represent[ed] a
kind of liberation from our status as helpless sponges’ (Serazio 90). These
mix makers were thinking in terms of ‘metamusic’, in the same way that
M/M/C is a piece of metatheatrically devised theatre. The scenes and
moments from the three source plays become ‘notes’ for the ‘song’ that is
M/M/C as composed by its assemblers. Moreover, in the same way that a
good 1980s’ mix tape might bring together different genres of music that
282  S. Proudfit

mainstream radio stations kept separate, so is any good mash-up ‘a culture

clash’ of sorts, as ‘Walk This Way’ and the work of the ECC exemplify—
and as is the case, I will argue, with Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella.
While pop-music critics frequently disagree over the efficacy of mash-
ups as political statements, or whether mash-up makers are interested in
political statements at all, there is consensus among critics that the tone
of mash-ups is almost always celebratory. ‘Their celebration of sources, as
opposed to the obscuring of them, [is] one of the key factors that distin-
guishes mash-ups from other sample-based music forms’, note Ragnhild
Brovig-Hanssen and Paul Harkins (91). In visual-art terms, unlike a
Picasso collage made of cigarette wrappers, for example, in which the
found materials blend seamlessly into the artwork and the materials are
often not distinguishable or ‘beautiful’ in themselves, mash-up makers
want audiences to recognize the works they are sampling and want them
to love these works as much as they themselves love them.
Besides the sense of ‘empowerment’ mash-up culture offers its par-
ticipants, pop-music critics have defined the central pleasure of mash-
up making and mash-up consuming as the opportunity the form offers
listeners to carefully attend to similarity and difference. As mass culture
becomes more uniform, the mash-up both highlights the ‘sameness’ of
all popular music and, at the same time, reveals the differences between
art works and genres, allowing for a kind of individualization of artists
and listeners. A mash-up ‘works’ when it is able to exploit and empha-
size ‘contextual incongruity of recognized samples and musical congru-
ity between mashed tracks’ (Brovig-Hanssen and Harkins 87). In other
words, a listener appreciates the Whipped Cream Mixes for two main rea-
sons: one, Public Enemy’s lyrics and Herb Alpert’s music seem to come
from different worlds, which creates humour; and, two, together the
lyrics and the music in these mash-ups actually make tracks that sounds
‘right’, as if Chuck D had written his lyrics to fit the music of the Tijuana
Brass Band. This inspires awe, appreciation, pleasure, and perhaps critical
thinking as strict but ultimately unstable categories are challenged.

Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella as Mash-up
When Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella was presented at the Actors’ Gang
Theatre in Los Angeles in 1998, the companies that came together to
co-produce it, the Actors’ Gang and Cornerstone Theater Company,
participated in a theatre-company culture clash that anticipated the
 14  THEATRICAL MASH-UP: ASSEMBLED TEXT …  283

mash-up they would create together onstage. The Actors’ Gang,

founded in 1981 by a group of UCLA alumni including Tim Robbins,
is a native Los Angeles theatre, one of the area’s most important in terms
of longevity and influence. Its early work had a reputation for being
loud, testosterone-heavy, and strictly representative of what the Actors’
Gang members have termed ‘the Style’. The Actors’ Gang’s Style is
based on the commedia-influenced devising methods of the Théâtre du
Soleil. In the Style, using stock commedia dell’arté characters, the com-
pany workshops scenarios, with or without a script, for which the per-
formers need to be in one of four states at all times: happy, sad, afraid, or
angry. Any actor not ‘fully stated’ as determined by whomever is ‘in the
chair’—whomever is directing the improvisation during any given work-
shop—is asked to leave the stage and try again later. Performers working
in the Style directly address the audience at all times and only interact
with other performers in order to ‘share states’ and ‘pass the food’, to
give another performer the chance to talk to the audience. Actors’
Gang members learned the Style from longtime Théâtre du Soleil
actor Georges Bigot during the 1984 US Olympics Arts Festival and, by
1998, had modified it for their own purposes and interests. In addition
to devising original work, the Actors’ Gang often took canonical dramas
and Style-lized them. The results were highly presentational and broadly
comical with a punk-rock aesthetic.
Director Tracy Young, a member of the company since 1984, and
a group of performers who were dedicated to her work as a director
had shifted the creative culture at the Actors’ Gang’s prior to M/M/C
(1998), bringing a queer sensibility to the work, diversifying the com-
pany in terms of race, gender, and sexuality, as well as introducing SITI
Company’s training method, Viewpoints, to the company.9 According
to Young, combining Viewpoints with the Style allowed the work at
the Actors’ Gang to shift from a competition of ‘who can dominate the
improvisation’ to one in which everyone is trying to share the food and/
or in which everyone is completely focused on everyone else getting his
or her say. For Young, the fully stated aspects of the Style are visceral
and emotional, complementary to Viewpoints. ‘[The Style] is blood,
shit, and all that stuff’, said Young, and, according to Young, it makes
for a great hybrid with ‘the cerebral quality of some of the things that
the Viewpoints offers and the coolness of it’ (Young). Young was known
in particular for her collectively devised work at the company, including
Hysteria (1992) and Euphoria (1995).
284  S. Proudfit

Cornerstone Theater Company, on the other hand, from its afore-

mentioned founding by Harvard University alumni in 1986 until
1992, had travelled around the USA co-creating theatre with different
communities before settling in Los Angeles. Unlike the Actors’ Gang,
Cornerstone is committed to seeking out non-traditional theatre audi-
ences, a commitment the company forged during its trek across the
nation in the late 1980s, as the company travelled from small town to
large city and back again adapting canonical plays with local communi-
ties. The decision to settle in Los Angeles after years on the road made
sense in terms of Cornerstone’s interest in finding new audiences and
energizing diverse communities towards co-creation. Moreover, the
size and the ethnic range of the small, mostly ‘White’ theatre company
increased immediately upon moving to Los Angeles. Two of the most
important additions to the company were Shishir Kurup and Page Leong
(Macbeth and Medea, respectively, in M/M/C in 1998), who along with
a handful of other actors formed the core of Cornerstone’s performing
company for many years in Los Angeles. While touring in its formative
years, Cornerstone developed a model of working one-by-one with a
series of diverse and often geographically distant communities and then
creating a ‘bridge show’ that brought these towns and theatre makers
together for a single, joint production. It continued to use and develop
this model in Los Angeles.10 Prior to M/M/C, then, both Cornerstone
and the Actors’ Gang had experienced significant cultural ‘mash-ups’
within their company membership and aesthetics as they developed and
diversified.
With its roots in the Style, the culture at the Actors’ Gang was one
that perpetually challenged the individual performer in confronta-
tional ways, in many ways the opposite of the community Cornerstone
strives for within its company and within its performances. As frequent
Actors’ Gang writer/director Mike Schlitt described it, the Style ‘is great
because you can be an ass to people. Sometimes I’m just very sadistic in
the chair. It’s therapeutic for me, because I’m a really nice guy in real
life. So when you yell at someone, “You suck!” that’s going to get a
reaction. It helps them be “stated” [fully happy, sad, afraid, or angry]’
(Schlitt). Cornerstone, on the other hand, models a collectivity founded
on bridge-building, tolerance, and dialogue. While performers from
both companies had appeared in the other companies’ shows occasion-
ally, and while Young had previously directed shows for Cornerstone,
the difference between the two groups’ cultures and methods were
 14  THEATRICAL MASH-UP: ASSEMBLED TEXT …  285

stark, and created the right atmosphere for a mash-up whose success,
like every mash-up, was based on balancing congruity with incongruity.
Cornerstone and the Actors’ Gang in the rehearsal room were a kind of
mash-up that anticipated their mash-up production onstage.
Choosing three shows from historical periods that might be consid-
ered pinnacles of populist theatre—the Ancient Greek, the Renaissance,
and the mid-twentieth century (the heyday of the modern American
musical)—was not arbitrary. In this way, M/M/C’s creators hoped to
examine what theatre can do as an art form. Not surprisingly, then, what
is most electrifying in this staged mash-up are the moments when the
three shows ‘sync up’, the unexpected congruities. For example, late in
the show, Medea confronts her fears about actually killing her children,
a deed she has plotted but now must perform. Simultaneously onstage,
Macbeth is receiving his second round of predictions from the witches
and facing his fears that, despite his efforts, Banquo’s descendants will
be crowned king. And also the Prince is wooing a frightened Cinderella
with the song ‘Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful?’ as the young
girl decides if she really wants what she thought she always wanted now
that it is being offered her.
While congruity in musical mash-ups can inspire thought and appre-
ciation of the mash-up maker’s skills, incongruity most often creates
the humour. Such is also the case with M/M/C. For example, during
many of the musical numbers from Cinderella, Young and Rauch have
the actors from the other shows stop what they are doing and join
in the chorus. Forcing congruity is what highlights the incongruities
in these moments, the most memorable of which is Banquo covered in
blood, smiling broadly as he sings along with the guests at Cinderella’s
Prince’s ball.
M/M/C’s script is a purely assembled text. Only the words from the
three source plays were used in the production, and the words were not
altered. While cuts were made to Macbeth, they were very much like
the cuts you typically find in contemporary productions of the play. For
example, the Hecate scene in Act Three has been removed. In this sense,
M/M/C is much like the A + B form of mash-ups, which use macrosa-
mples as opposed to cutting up and rearranging the source samples to
create the new track.
Very little commentary on the source plays, in terms of parody, is
offered by the production. Though presented at the Oregon Shakespeare
Festival, Cinderella, for example, is not presented as a lesser art form
286  S. Proudfit

than Greek tragedy or Shakespearean drama. There is no low art or

high art here. Indeed, at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where the show
was last presented, subscription audiences who make up the majority of
the house had been prepared by an eclectic yearly diet of Shakespeare,
canonical modern drama, Greek tragedy, musicals, and new works, to
accept all three genres as legitimate and worthy of attention. Unlike in
an assembled-text pastiche, no ‘normal’ tongue is privileged, as Jameson
would have it. Rather, like musical mash-ups, M/M/C denies the pos-
sibilities of marginality. As in ‘Walk This Way’ or the ‘Whipped Cream
Mixes’, M/M/C brings together different genres in a way that can be sat-
isfying for an audience member whose tastes are diverse. And, as with
mash-ups in general, the sources are celebrated, and audiences, unlike
those at Route 1&9 or Culture of Desire, are expected to recognize all
the works being sampled and recognize which sample comes from which
work.
In addition to the pleasure that tracing the congruities and incon-
gruities between these three sources gives audience members, M/M/C,
like all mash-ups, ‘exposes the arbitrariness of styles and signs, which
is an apolitical way of making a political statement’ as Michael Serazio
has said of the hip-hop musical form of mash-up. This can be seen in
the way in which M/M/C dealt with issues of gender. Medea was per-
formed by an all-female cast; Macbeth by an all-male cast, and Cinderella
by a cast of mixed gender, including some drag performances: most
notably Daniel Parker as the Fairy Godmother. The only exception to
this three-show gender-specific concept is the actor who plays the role
of the Herald in all three onstage realities. On one level, an all-male
Shakespeare cast and all-female Greek tragedy cast can be understood
simply as these companies trying faithfully to recreate performance
traditions (or the myth of performance traditions): in other words,
Shakespeare wrote for an all-male company, and the Greek drama
may have arisen out of all-female dance rituals: the Dionysian revels.11
However, the gender-specific divisions in M/M/C were also employed
to challenge notions of appropriate or ‘natural’ sexuality. The simultane-
ous or serial staging of love scenes between two male, two female, and
a male and a female performer, for example, enacted these pairings as a
series of options. Rather than highlighting gender, as contemporary all-
male or all-female productions are apt to do, M/M/C tried to eliminate
gender as a significant category, in the same way that musical mash-ups
try to eliminate genre as a significant category.
 14  THEATRICAL MASH-UP: ASSEMBLED TEXT …  287

This is what John R. Severn has described as ‘the queer potential of

adaptation, its potential to destabilize categories of identity’ (542). The
very form of the mash-up is committed to this type of destabilization.
In single-source adaptation, often ‘relocations of an “original” or source
text’s cultural and/or temporal setting [occur], which may or may not
involve a generic shift’, as Sanders notes (24). In M/M/C, however,
there is no single identifiable ‘source text’. All three source plays shift
genre in the course of performance—the musical comedy Cinderella
takes on tragic tones when surrounded by the bloody events of Macbeth
and Medea, the tragic Medea evokes bizarre moments of levity in juxta-
position to the celebrations of Macbeth or Cinderella, and so on—until
the shifting among the three sources begins to challenge the coherence
of generic categories.
In the same way that gender and genre categories are challenged
by the production, historical periods are blurred as well—in a way that
would frustrate Jameson and confirm some of his concerns about assem-
blage as a creative technique. By the end of this show, the historical
markers of costuming and period props are stripped away. All perform-
ers end up in black, unisex garb, as if the historical periods had melted
away into a single, uniform stage reality. This kind of de-historicization
is exactly Jameson’s problem with pastiche, and it applies to musical
and staged mash-ups as well. Yet de-historicization is the goal here, as
Cornerstone and the Actors’ Gang aim toward universals—such as the
lesson ‘Be careful what you wish for’—while recognizing a world of radi-
cal plurality. As mentioned earlier, this commitment to universal truths
also further differentiates M/M/C from postmodern assembled-text pro-
ductions at companies such as the Wooster Group and SITI Company.
The reception of M/M/C in Los Angeles in 1998 was ecstatic.12
However, the reception at OSF in 2012 was mixed, due in part to the
different demographics of the audiences. The Actors’ Gang audiences
in 1998 were generally young people—as in younger than 40—many
of whom were involved in the entertainment industry in one way or
another. As pop-music critics have noted, the reception of mash-ups may
depend on ‘a set of listening skills’ shared by the makers and their audi-
ences (Brovig-Hanssen and Harkins 87). Pop music had primed audi-
ences in Los Angeles to appreciate M/M/C. However, at OSF, many
older audience members in particular were perplexed: ‘We did not enjoy
Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella as it was too complex for our old minds’
wrote one patron, while another noted ‘Perhaps, I was too tired to
288  S. Proudfit

follow it, but Medea Macbeth and Cinderella [sic] was much too hard
for me to make sense of’.13 Of course, there were young people (at least
young according to their Facebook profile pictures) who did not appreci-
ate the show either, and their comments reflect problems many listeners
have with mash-ups in general: the fact that they combine genres some
fans insist should remain separate. As one patron wrote, ‘I was reminded
of secondary school papers that compare and contrast Shakespeare with
lets [sic] say Buffy the Vampire Slayer … it wasn’t an exercise made for
a stage and audience as smart as the OSF stage in my opinion’.14 These
postings echo outraged posts on YouTube from mash-up listeners upset
that, for example, a ‘classic’ Public Enemy track has been ruined by play-
ing it over ‘cheesy’ jazz music. Being a mash-up does not guarantee
that audiences, young or old, will have the listening skills to appreciate
the work, though it does suggest that those who have been exposed to
mash-ups in other media will be more receptive. Some audience mem-
bers will still insist upon categories of high and low culture, perhaps
because these categories are important for them in maintaining their own
stable identities.

Other Theatrical Mash-Ups (Few and Far Between)

Comparing a mash-up such as M/M/C to its pop-music counterparts
can help identify two largely separate audiences for contemporary the-
atrical adaptations as well as explain why productions such as M/M/C
are few and far between. The only place and time that M/M/C seemed
to ‘find’ its audience was in Los Angeles in 1998. The subsequent pro-
ductions at Yale Rep and OSF, while they had their fans, received tepid
response from audiences and critics. At OSF, in particular, many of the
audience members who did not appreciate the production seemed rever-
ential of the sources (whether Shakespearean or musical) and suggested
that the fidelity of these sources was compromised by the ‘mixing’.15
Responses sent anonymously to OSF’s ‘Comments’ page online or
posted on the company’s Facebook page included: ‘I’d like one play at
a time’; ‘Any one of the three constituent plays was well worth watch-
ing alone, but NOT as a blended composition’; and ‘I would ask could
you also put [any] three great works of art in a hat and randomly pull
them out to find things, text, themes, characterizations that overlap’.16
It is not surprising perhaps that regional-theatre audiences subscribing
to venues that present almost exclusively classical repertory are typically
 14  THEATRICAL MASH-UP: ASSEMBLED TEXT …  289

more receptive to a single-source adaptation ‘inspired by’ but distinct

from its source (Cheryl West’s musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night, Play On!, is a good example). Such adaptations appeal to
these audiences, it would seem, because they keep the original sources
intact. Audience members can feel ‘in the know’ as the canonical source
is alluded to but also feel comforted by the fact that the adaptation is
not ‘messing with’ or attempting to replace the original. Clearly, this
is not the ideal audience member for a ‘mash-up’. Neither, though, is
an audience member with little familiarity or affection for the sources.
Anne Bogart has noted that even if an audience member had never seen
a Chekhov production it would not hinder his or her enjoyment of SITI
Company’s Small Lives/Big Dreams (Bogart 2007). Likewise, one does
not have to love Our Town to love the Wooster Group’s Route 1&9.
Indeed, reverence for Wilder’s source text might prove a stumbling
block to enjoying its deconstruction. For audience members to enjoy
a theatrical mash-up, though, it would seem that the better they know
and love the sources the better they will enjoy the ways they sync-up and
diverge. The ideal audience for a theatrical mash-up, then, seems fairly
limited, composed of those deeply knowledgeable of the adaptation’s
sources and yet also willing to see those sources played with—indeed
to play with the sources themselves, as active cultural ‘re-producers’, as
Adorno would have it.
Not only is the reception of theatrical mash-ups a challenge for
contemporary adapters working in this vein, but also the production
of such mash-ups presents significant difficulties. Sources for musical
mash-ups are easily at hand. ‘Original’ songs are downloaded in an
instant and specialized software enables listeners to become culture re-
producers of mash-ups with little effort. Theatrical mash-up are not
so easily made. Onstage, mash-ups, particularly of the A + B type,
work best when the individual sources are ‘untouched’ before they are
mixed. Likewise, no one produces or listens to a mash-up of ‘covers’
of original songs. The pleasure derived from mash-ups is largely the
result of recognizing the similarities and differences among the pro-
duction’s source materials, which means the source materials—the
ingredients—must be distinguishable and recognizable: ‘classics’. It
must appear, for example in M/M/C, that if the Cinderella portions
of the production were not being mixed in with the other sources
they could stand alone as a Broadway-ready production. Finding a
company large enough and skilled enough to present three repertory
290  S. Proudfit

pieces of this calibre simultaneously is no easy task, one of the reasons

that the Los Angeles production was co-presented by two of the area’s
largest theatre companies.
While easier to create than theatrical mash-ups, musical mash-ups sim-
ilarly do not dominate the market. Jay-Z’s The Grey Album was down-
loaded extensively, perhaps more than any other mash-up, yet it did not
start a trend so that today one finds mash-ups topping the iTunes down-
load charts. One of the main reasons mash-ups (musical or theatrical) are
still at least partly under the mainstream radar is that their makers are
wary of visibility and the possibility of subsequent legal action because
of the materials they sample. For this reason alone, it would seem that
mash-ups in any medium will continue to be more of an underground
than a mainstream phenomenon. Even the producers of M/M/C admit
that, with the recent Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Cinderella, they doubt they would again be able to obtain the rights to
present the show.
Nevertheless, companies, often with an alternative theatre pedigree
like the Actors’ Gang or Cornerstone Theater Company, have devised
mash-ups similar to M/M/C in recent years. Examples include Les Freres
Corbusier’s Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which premiered in 2008 in a
Center Theatre Group production in Los Angeles and eventually played
on Broadway in 2010; New Paradise Laboratories and the Children’s
Theatre Company of Minneapolis’ Prom (2006); Mixed Blood Theatre’s
production of 1001; and the site-specific mash-up Shuffle, presented by
Elevator Repair Service at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public
Library in autumn 2014.
If theatrical mash-ups seem to be a larger trend, this may be due to
the fact that a number of recent productions appear to be mash-ups
(and even advertise themselves accordingly) but actually work against
the form’s strengths in ways that suggest they are better understood
as simply parody. Purely humorous, and relying on the most canoni-
cal works for their source material—often Shakespeare or Dickens’ A
Christmas Carol—these productions appeal to mainstream audiences by
assuming and then combining ‘high and low’ sources in ways that oddly
reinscribe them.17 In a production such as MacHomer, for example, it
is not always clear that the production views The Simpsons and Macbeth
on equal footing. While beloved, the lowness of the popular cartoon is
mocked as often as is the highness of Shakespeare’s work. Moreover, the
 14  THEATRICAL MASH-UP: ASSEMBLED TEXT …  291

presentation suggests that the source text is clearly Shakespeare’s play

(the high art), which has been given a ridiculous Simpsons’ makeover.
Theatrical mash-ups, then, are a small subset of the larger devised
theatre scene in the USA and will most likely remain a small subset.
Labelling these productions more accurately connects this work to move-
ments in other media as well as explains their appeal to particular audi-
ences. At the same time, acknowledging this particular subset of devised
theatre suggests that critics’ concerns about devised theatre entering
the mainstream or fears that ‘devised theatre’ has become simply a form
of branding disconnected from the political roots of collective creation
require some tempering. After all, the devised theatre mash-up cannot
be compromised by mainstream acceptance, because it has always been
a populist form aimed squarely at the mainstream. Moreover, as M/M/C
exemplifies, the mash-up is a form that can still be political in its own
way, through the destabilization of categories. In this way, it is a form
with more in common synchronically across media today than diachroni-
cally with its seeming theatrical antecedents, the devised work of avant-
garde collectives such as SITI Company and the Wooster Group.

Notes
1. Variously labeled ‘documentary theatre’, ‘docudrama’, and ‘verbatim
plays’, these include the works of Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic
Theater Project, Anna Deavere Smith, Marc Wolf, Theatre Passe
Muraille, and Culture Clash. Their roots are in the Living Newspapers of
the 1930s in the USA and Russia.
2. Young and a number of Actors’ Gang company members participated in
SITI Company’s Suzuki/Viewpoints workshops in Los Angeles in 1998
as part of the Oasis Theatre Company-sponsored Framework’ 98.
3. This first production of Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella opened on 13
February 1984, in the basement of the Harvard University dormitory
Adams House.
4. Cornerstone Theater Company was officially founded in 1986 as a travel-
ling ensemble. In addition to Rauch, founding members included: Tim
Banker, John Bellucci, Amy Brenneman, Alison Carey, Peter Howard,
Lynn Jeffries, Christopher Liam Moore, Douglas Petrie, David Reiffel,
and Molly White.
5. Kendt. Rauch thought the choice was ‘terrible’ because, with a show that
is already so complex, to set the Ancient Greek play in the American Old
292  S. Proudfit

West was asking audiences to process too much; besides, it muddied the
telling of the Medea myth.
6. It was this characterization of M/M/C that first suggested to me the con-
nection between this type of adaptation and the musical mash-up. Rauch
and Young themselves have not used this term to describe the play,
though in a recent email exchange with the author, Young wrote that she
was not opposed to the label: ‘As for the term “mash-up,” I suppose that
would be accurate in some ways (in a newfangled way all the kids can
relate to?)’.
7. While Salon writer Charles Taylor has suggested that the Whipped Cream
Mixes are supposed to send a message to Chuck D to ‘Lighten the fuck
up’ (Taylor), the ‘meaning’ of ECC’s mash-up might be the assertion
that the medium of popular music is not appropriate for Chuck D’s polit-
ical exhortation.
8. Andy Warhol, David Lynch, and John Portman, for example (Jameson 1,
287, 39).
9. Viewpoints are nine points of awareness that a performer/creator has
at her disposal while working in rehearsal. They are specifically: tempo,
duration, kinesthetic response, repetition, shape, gesture, architecture,
spatial relationship, and floor pattern. Sound is sometimes considered a
tenth Viewpoint.
10. For example, during the ‘B.H. project’, 1997–1999, Cornerstone collabo-
rated with four Los Angeles communities with the initials B.H.: the pri-
marily African-American South Los Angeles community of Baldwin Hills;
Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, a primarily Mexican-American com-
munity; Broadway/Hill, which is considered Los Angeles’s ‘Chinatown’,
and the affluent, primarily ‘White’ Beverly Hills. Performers from these
four community shows were then brought together in 1999 for a ‘bridge
show’ by Lisa Loomer.
11. The idea that the all-female Dionysian revels are the ‘origins’ of Ancient
Greek theatre is certainly problematic, though Rauch and his fellow
Harvard students could have encountered this idea in any number of
textbooks, from Oscar Brockett’s History of the Theatre to E.T. Kirby’s
Ur-Drama: The Origins of Theatre (New York: NYU Press, 1975) or even
in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.
12. Besides garnering positive reviews in almost every major Los Angeles pub-
lication that reviews theatre, M/M/C won multiple awards including a
number of Back Stage West Garlands for 1998.
13. E-mails sent to Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s ‘Comments’ page, anony-
mously, on 12 September 2012 and 24 September 2012.
14. Posting on Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Facebook page. From Jenny
Shadley, 16 October 2012, online at: https://www.facebook.com/
 14  THEATRICAL MASH-UP: ASSEMBLED TEXT …  293

photo.php?fbid=10150824260485763&set=a.10150764403635763.46
6760.66607615762&type=1, accessed 4 June 2014.
15. The recent furore over OSF’s plans to commission translations for the
entire Shakespeare canon shows that critics and audiences alike are as rev-
erential and protective of classical repertory as they ever have been. See
James Shapiro’s “Modernizing the Bard?” in The New York Times, A27
(7 October 2015) and Bill Rauch’s response: “Why We’re Translating
Shakespeare,” American Theatre (14 October 2015); http://www.ameri-
cantheatre.org/2015/10/14/bill-rauch-why-were-translating-shake-
speare.
16. E-mail sent to OSF’s ‘Comments’ page, anonymously, 21 August 2012;
postings on OSF’s Facebook page from Cliff Preen and Jenny Shadley,
online at: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150824260
485763&set=a.10150764403635763.466760.66607615762&type=1,
accessed 4 June 2014.
17. There have been: Rick Miller’s MacHomer (1995); the numerous
Shakespeare mash-up productions of the Los Angeles-based Troubadour
Theatre Company: All Kool That Ends Kool (2002), Fleetwood Macbeth
(2003), A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream (2013), and so
on; as well as the subgenre of Shakespeare mash-ups—Bryan Renaud’s
Twelfth Night of the Living Dead (2013) and John Heimbuch’s Land of
the Dead (2009), inspired from the success of the mash-up novel Pride
and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith. In terms of Dickens’
chestnut, there have been: The Illegitimate Players’ A Christmas Twist
(1992), combining the Carol with Oliver Twist, and Adam Brooks and
T. C. Cheever’s What the Dickens? (2011), combining it with A Charlie
Brown Christmas, and Reid Farrington’s A Christmas Carol (2012)
among others. (Farrington, interestingly, was formerly a video designer
for the Wooster Group.)

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann.
London: Routledge, 1984.
Bogart, Anne. Personal interview. Saratoga Springs, NY. 11 July 2007.
Brovig-Hanssen, Ragnhild, and Paul Harkins. ‘Contextual Incongruity and
Musical Congruity: The Aesthetics and Humour of Mash-Ups.’ Popular
Music 31.1 (2010): 87–104.
Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 2003.
Hoesterey, Ingeborg. Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, and Literature.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001.
294  S. Proudfit

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
Kendt, Rob. ‘Three for One.’ Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Illuminations.
2012.
Manuel, Peter. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India.
Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1993.
Rauch, Bill, and Tracy Young. ‘Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella: From the
Codirectors.’ Oregon Shakespeare Festival Playbill, vol. 2 (2012).
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York:
Routledge, 2006.
Schlitt, Mike. Personal interview. Hollywood, Calif. 7 July 1999.
Serazio, Michael. ‘The Apolitical Irony of Generation Mash-Up: A Cultural
Study in Popular Music.’ Popular Music and Society 31.1 (2008): 79–94.
Severn, J.R. ‘All Shook Up and the Unannounced Adaptation: Engaging with
Twelfth Night’s Unstable Identities.’ Theatre Journal 66.4 (2014): 541–557.
Taylor, Charles. ‘A Love Song to Bastard Pop,’ Salon. 9 August 2003. http://
www.salon.com/entertainment/music/feature, date accessed 4 June 2014.
Wooster Group, The. ‘Route 1&9.’ Benzene 5/6 (1982).
Young, Tracy. Personal interview, Hollywood, Calif. 11 July 2006.
 CHAPTER 15

Controversial Intentions: Adaptation as an

Act of Iconoclasm in Rupert Goold and Ben
Power’s Faustus (2004) and the Chapman
Brothers’ Insult to Injury (2003)

Sarah Grochala

In this chapter I intend to analyse the approach to adaptation that

Goold and Power developed through their work on a free adaptation of
Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, which combined Marlowe’s origi-
nal text with a contemporary narrative featuring the visual artists the
Chapman Brothers and their controversial rectification of a set of Goya’s
Disasters of War etchings for their 2003 series Insult to Injury.
Goold and Power’s Faustus originally premiered at Northampton
Theatre Royal in 2004. While the work is considered by both Goold and
Power to be ‘very much juvenalia’, their later adaptations (both working
together and separately) have become well known within the British the-
atre scene, most notably their adaptation of Pirandello’s Six Characters
in Search of an Author (Headlong/Chichester 2008) which had both
a successful run in the West End and toured internationally. Goold and

S. Grochala (*) 
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, UK
e-mail: sarah@headlong.co.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 295

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_15
296  S. Grochala

Power’s ‘extreme intervention’ approach to adaptation can be argued to

have played a major role in a siginificant shift in approaches to staging
the classical text in the UK during the 2000s, away from fidelity to the
source text and towards radical reinterpretation. (Haydon 80) Looking
closely at Faustus, one of their earliest collaborations provides us with
a valuable insight into the development of Goold and Power’s creative
process and working relationship.
My analysis in this chapter will focus mainly on the process of adapta-
tion as opposed to the final pieces produced. As Linda Hutcheon notes,
adaptation is both ‘the process and the product’. (Hutcheon 7) I will
argue that just as a product of adaptation can be thought of as an adap-
tation of a pre-existing product (the source text), so a process of adap-
tation can be thought an adaptation of a pre-existing process. I would
argue that artists frequently adapt the processes of other artists in the
creation of new work. Through this analysis, I intend to demonstrate
the ways in which Goold and Power’s dialectical approach to adapting
Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus can be read as an adaptation of the Chapman’s
approach to adapting Goya’s Disasters of War. Goold and Power import
an adaptation process pioneered in the medium of visual art into the
medium of theatre.
Throughout this chapter I will invoke the unfashionable idea of
artistic intentions. Intentionality was discredited as a decisive factor in
­establishing a particular reading of a text by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe
Beardsley in the 1940s. At the time, the prevailing critical tendency in
literary studies was for the critic to justify her reading of any text on the
grounds of her view of the author’s intention. Wimsatt and Beardsley
discredited this approach by arguing that it is impossible to determine
authorial intention purely from a text and that the worth of a text should
therefore not be judged on the basis of whether it fulfils its author’s sup-
posed intentions. (Wimsatt and Beardsley 3) The fate of intentionality
as a critical benchmark was sealed by Roland Barthes in 1970 with his
essay ‘The Death of Author’ in which he argues that the meaning of text
is found in the reader’s interpretation as opposed the writer’s intentions.
(Barthes 148)
Recently, there has been a move to rehabilitate the idea of artis-
tic intention in the field of Adaptation Studies. Hutcheon argues that
because adaptation is a process of rereading, rerelating and retelling—
an act that involves both the critical interpretation of the existing text
and the creative process of remaking it into a new text—the question of
 15  CONTROVERSIAL INTENTIONS: ADAPTATION AS AN ACT …  297

why a particular artist has chosen to adapt a particular story in a par-

ticular way is highly relevant to the analysis of adaptations. Adaptations
are comparative versions of the same story. Therefore, the artistic choices
made in the retelling of that story are more visible to the reader: ‘the
text bears the marks of these choices, marks that betray the assump-
tions of the creator—at the least insofar as those assumptions can be
inferred from the text’. These ‘variations function as indicators of the
adapter’s voice’. (Hutcheon 108–109) I would disagree with her argu-
ment that authorial assumptions found within the text itself can be read
as intentions on two counts. First, as Hutcheon recognizes, ‘intending
to do something is not necessarily the same thing as actually achieving
it’. (Hutcheon 109) The intentions that we read in a text may not be
the actual intentions that the author had in creating the work. Second,
many authorial assumptions are the product of what Frederic Jameson
terms the ‘political unconscious’. Instead of being the conscious inten-
tions of the author themselves, they are the assumptions of the social and
cultural context in which they live. (Jameson ix) I do, however, agree
with Hutcheon’s argument that if authorial intention can be clearly
established, as is often the case with contemporary artists, then ‘these
statements can and must be confronted with actual textual results’.
(Hutcheon 109) I would argue that this is particularly important in the
analysis of creative processes where the question is not so much ‘Why
adapt?’ but rather ‘How to adapt?’. In this case, artistic statements of
intent provide us with an important context for understanding the pro-
cesses through which an artistic idea becomes a fully realized work of art.

Rupert Goold and Ben Power: Finding a Dialectical

Method
Rupert Goold and Ben Power first met in a quiet area of the National
Theatre Foyer around 2003. At the time, Goold was the artistic direc-
tor of Northampton Royal and Derngate Theatres and was looking for
someone to help him create a stage adaptation of Milton’s Paradise
Lost. Power was working as administrator for a charity and trying to
work out ‘how to get a career as a writer of adaptation’ (Goold and
Power, “Personal Interview”). Power jumped at the opportunity and
so their working relationship was born. Their contemporarized version
of Paradise Lost, featuring Jesus as a ‘young hood-cum-narrator figure’,
298  S. Grochala

hell as a place of ‘inner-city blight’, and a garden of Eden resembling

‘Center Parcs without the bicycles’, premiered at the Theatre Royal
Northampton in January 2004. (Gardner) It was a surprise hit: ‘We were
outselling the Ayckbourn. It was incredible’. Goold and Power were
keen to capitalize on its success and immediately began work on another
production in a similar vein, Faustus, which premiered at Northampton
in November 2004 (see Fig. 15.1) (Goold and Power, “Personal
Interview”).
Goold and Power describe the process of creating Faustus as an
important step in developing their working practice; ‘part of a potential
new enquiry’. They developed a dialectical methodology whose starting
point was what Goold terms the ‘central inquiry’ and Power ‘a point of
contention’. This is the central question the play appears to be posing.
Having identified the question, they would then take opposing sides and
argue it out: ‘we would do a lot of “Okay you take this position and
I’ll take this position and then let’s let that argument be the heart of
it”’. Goold and Power articulate two conscious intentions for putting
the dialectic at the heart of their process. First, as artists their intention
was to find a way to transcend ‘humanism’ in their approach to making
theatre. Second, they wanted to create an experience that would give a
contemporary audience a visceral sense of the play’s impact on its the
original audience: ‘in making an adaptation of something you want to
try to go back to the moment of creation and the feeling for an audi-
ence at a first night of a performance’. In light of this second intention,
there was a need for the dialectic to bridge the gap between world of the
play and the modern world: ‘the reference point had to be in contem-
porary society’. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”) This approach
to adaptation has had a lasting impact on their work. Goold and Power
brought this dialectical methodology from Northampton to Headlong.
At Headlong, they further developed this approach by applying it to
contemporary as well as classical work: ‘all the new plays we did after-
wards [were] very much in dialogue with the political moment now and
had this sort of dialectic in them’. (ibid.)

Marlowe as an Iconoclast

The central inquiry or point of contention that formed the starting point
for creating Faustus was the question: ‘What does it mean to kill your
God?’ The question of iconoclasm stands at the heart of Goold and
 15  CONTROVERSIAL INTENTIONS: ADAPTATION AS AN ACT …  299

Fig. 15.1  Poster for Faustus, which premiered at Northampton in November

2004, used with permission of Scott Doran and Eureka! image design 
300  S. Grochala

Power’s interpretation of Marlowe’s play. (ibid.) The Oxford English

Dictionary defines iconoclasm as ‘the breaking of images’ or ‘the assail-
ing of cherished beliefs’. (Allen 584) Goold and Power identify both
Faustus and the Chapmans as attempting to challenge a set of cherished
beliefs within the social and political context of their different worlds:
‘The Chapmans wanted to be iconoclastic. Faustus wants to be icono-
clastic’. In pairing them together, Goold and Power attempt to provide
an understanding of what an iconoclastic act might look like in our con-
temporary secular world: ‘We wanted to find a modern situation that
replicated the controversy, the whiff of danger, that necromancy embod-
ied for Elizabethan playgoers’. (Power)
Marlowe is often imagined as an iconoclastic figure because there
is a tendency to conflate him with his most famous characters and to
recast him in their image. Traditionally Marlowe is seen as ‘a rebel, an
aetheist, a fiery soul whose works expressed his heady exuberance, aspi-
rations and despairs’. (Steane 9) There is, however, little historical evi-
dence for Marlowe’s iconoclasm. What there is takes the form of several
dubious and unsubstantiated accusations of atheism and iconoclasm
made against him in the aftermath of his death. For example, a docu-
ment was handed into the authorities in which a Richard Baines attests
to the dangerous opinions being spread by one Christopher Marly: ‘this
Marlowe doth not only hold them himself, but almost into every com-
pany he cometh he persuades men to Atheism, willing them not to be
afeared of bugbears and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both God and
his ministers’. (ibid.) The playwright Thomas Kyd, who was under arrest
at the time of Marlowe’s death, testified that Marlowe ‘would jest at the
divine Scriptures, gibe at prayers, and strive in argument to frustrate and
confute what hath been spoke or writ by prophets and such holy men’.
(ibid.)
While there is little reliable historical evidence of Marlowe’s icono-
clasm, in performance Dr. Faustus involves the staging of an iconoclas-
tic act, which could be read as an act of iconoclasm in itself. In Act IV,
the the signing away of Faustus’s soul involves the performance of what
C. L. Barber identifies as ‘in effect a black mass’ during which Faustus
gives ‘his blood and testament instead of receiving Christ’s’ (Barber
114). In his analysis of this scene, Daniel Gates argues that it contains
several wicked reversals of sacred ritual of the Eucharist. Faustus signs
his soul away with a the words ‘Consummation est’ (Marlowe I. v. 73)
quoting Jesus’s final words as he dies on the cross. With these words,
 15  CONTROVERSIAL INTENTIONS: ADAPTATION AS AN ACT …  301

Jesus gave away his blood to save mankind. In this reversal, Faustus uses
his own blood to damn himself for eternity. Immediately after sign-
ing Faustus’s arm is magically inscribed with the words ‘Homo fuge!’
(Marlowe I. v. 76). During the Eucharist, the word becomes flesh. Here
instead, ‘Faustus flesh literally becomes words’ (Gates 74). J. L. Austin
argues that some speech acts, particularly those associated with rituals
such as the Eucharist, are performative acts: ‘the issuing of the utterance
is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just say-
ing something’ (Austin 6–7). Based on Austin’s thinking, Gates argues
that the words uttered during the Eucharist are performative utterances
of ‘seemingly transcendental power’. (Gates 75) In the Catholic church
the words of the Eucharist are thought to literally, as opposed to sym-
bolically, transform communion bread and wine into the body and blood
of Christ. Thus the transgressive reversals that Faustus voices within this
scene to enact the pledging of this soul to the devil can be thought of
as ‘an extraordinary powerful instance of performative language’ (Gates
76). Though Marlowe’s biography fails to yield up any conclusive proof
of his iconoclasm, his representation of Faustus’s act of blasphemy can be
seen as an iconoclastic act in itself as it involves a performance that dis-
torts a set of cherished beliefs.

The Chapman Brothers as Iconoclasts

Whereas Marlowe can be considered an iconoclast on the basis that
his plays challenge cherished beliefs, the Chapman Brothers can be
accused of iconoclasm on both counts, for challenging cherished beliefs
and for the breaking of images. Brothers Jake Chapman (b.1966) and
Dinos Chapman (b.1962) graduated from the Royal College of Art in
1990 and began working together after an apprenticeship with Gilbert
and George. Like Gilbert and George, the Chapmans make their work
together without identifying specifically who creates what. The inten-
tion behind this practice is to challenge to the concept of individual
­authorship:

the work we make, I mean is, the interchangeability of the work, of the
techniques, of the abilities to do stuff is nothing to do with the signature
of the identity of a person. I mean the work is not really about our identity
so the idea that actually we can make separate work under the sort of guise
of one artistic agency is really what the work’s about (What Do Artists Do
All Day?)
302  S. Grochala

The brothers describe their working relationship as ‘a kind of critical

one-upmanship filtering process’:

When you have two people … you have your own critic and you also have
this whole other body that has a whole set of ideas that are often very
annoying to you but become part of the process of sharpening up an idea.

The brothers argue that, although this process might sound like a recipe
for chaos and disagreement, it actually helps them to work more effi-
ciently: ‘We actually arrive at decisions very quickly because we’re able
to expel all of the anxieties that a single person has in the production of
their own work’ (Ramkalawon 69).
In 2001, the Chapmans purchased a valuable set of Goya’s Disasters
of War etchings printed from his original plates. These etchings depict
acts of cruelty and suffering during the Peninsular War of 1808–1814.
The Chapmans rectified all 80 of the Goya etchings by adding clown
and puppy heads to the figures of the victims in each image to create
a new artwork entitled Insult to Injury. (Chapman and Chapman) The
Chapmans’ rectification of the Goya etchings caused controversy in the
art world, with some art critics positioning it as an act of sheer vandal-
ism. (Gibson) It is this desecration of another artist’s work that Power
positions as a contemporary secular act of iconoclasm: an ‘irrevocable
act, this deed which cannot be undone’. (Power)
The Chapmans’ breaking of Goya’s images can be positioned as an
iconoclastic act because of the God-like position that Goya occupies
in the Chapmans’ work. One of their earliest pieces, Disasters of War
(1993), is a recreation of the images in Goya’s Disasters of War as a series
of miniature tableaux featuring toy figures. The Chapmans first came to
public prominence with a life size sculpture of one of the images from
Disasters of War, which was included in the infamous 1997 Sensation
exhibition at the Royal Academy. Jake has stated that the brothers were
so obsessed that at one point they even considered changing their sur-
name to Goya. (Turner) They claim that one of their reasons for their
obsession with Goya is that his work, like Marlowe’s, grapples with the
idea of a godless world: ‘He points out this kind of sudden removal from
a state of grace. You suddenly are responsible for everything you do.’
(Bad Art for Bad People)
While Goya’s work is a productive source for the Chapmans, their
attitude towards Goya alternates between reverence and violent
 15  CONTROVERSIAL INTENTIONS: ADAPTATION AS AN ACT …  303

iconoclasm. Their 2005 rectifications of two sets of Goya’s Los Caprichos

etchings are entitled Like a Dog Returns to Its Vomit and Like a Dog
Returns to Its Vomit Twice. When once asked if he would have liked
to have met Goya, Dinos responded in violent terms: ‘I’d like to have
stepped on his toes, shouted in his ears and punched him in the face’.
(Turner) It is this destructive iconoclastic impulse that interests Goold
and Power: ‘The way the Chapmans talked about their relationship with
Goya, when you are so blinded by and enthralled to your inspiration, is
murder the only escape?’ (Goold and Power). This iconoclastic attitude
towards Goya is in keeping with the Chapmans’ view of art as a force for
destruction as well as creation. They state that one of their intentions
as artists is to challenge enlightenment ideas of the arts as an force for
the improvement of both the individual and society in which they live:
‘we’re trying to just ruin the assumption that art has some progressive
motion to it’. (Chapman and Chapman) The Chapmans’ reworkings of
other artists’ work are positioned as an effective method of achieving this
intention: ‘working on someone else’s work, it optimises the idea that
making art is a destructive act rather than a creative act, which is kind of
pretty much what we are probably about’. (Art Happens)
The Chapmans contextualize their work on Goya as a deliber-
ately destructive act. They repeatedly use the term ‘rectify’ to describe
their approach to adapting his etchings. The Oxford English diction-
ary defines the word rectify as meaning ‘adjust or make right; correct,
amend’, ‘purify or refine, esp. by repeated distillation’ or ‘convert’.
(Allen 1004) Dinos, however, identifies a specific and murderous etymol-
ogy for their use of the term: ‘that nice word from The Shining, when
the butler’s trying to encourage Jack Nicholson to kill his family—to
rectify the situation’. (Jones) There is a sense in which their continual
rectification of sets of Goya etchings, set after set after set, is an act of
murder, an attempt to destroy all traces of anything that could be posi-
tioned as an original Goya: ‘The whole kind of idea was to kind of do
as many of these as we could ideally until every single edition had been
done. And that is the intention’. (What Do Artists Do All Day?) Their
iconoclasm is positioned as being extreme. They don’t just want to shock
by defacing some of Goya’s etchings, they want to obliterate every trace
of them.
The Chapmans use two different tactics to defend their rectifications
of Goya’s etchings. First, they argue that they have improved the etch-
ings by defacing them. On their website they identify the Goya prints not
304  S. Grochala

as having been rectified but as having been ‘reworked and improved’.

(Chapman and Chapman) This argument holds particularly strongly
if you take the position that the Goya etchings, printed after his death,
are reproductions not originals. The Chapmans’ additions can then be
seen as transforming Goya reproductions into Chapman Brother’s origi-
nals. The Goyas are simply ‘very expensive colouring books’ used as
the material for the creation of a more valuable work of art. (What Do
Artists Do All Day?) Second, they defend their rectification of Goya’s
etchings by referring to a historical precedent. Christopher Turner clas-
sifies this as a ‘canonical defence’. They cite Willem De Kooning’s will-
ing donation of a valuable piece of his work to Robert Rauschenberg
so that Rauschenberg could erase it to create a new work of art, Erased
De Kooning Drawing. This act of reworking, the Chapmans claim, gives
precedent for their reworking of Goya’s etchings. (Turner) Whereas
Faustus doubts the wisdom of his actions and repents of his iconoclasm,
the Chapmans seem to revel in theirs.
The reference to Erased De Kooning Drawing, however, also high-
lights the complex relationship that artists creating new work have with
the canon, with the work that precedes them. When Rauschenberg
asked De Kooning (an artist who he highly revered) for a drawing, De
Kooning deliberately gave him a drawing in crayon and ink that would
be very hard to erase. The traces of the original can still be seen, if
only faintly, in Rauschenberg’s adaptation. Rauschenberg’s work, like
the Chapmans’ reworking of Goya or Goold and Power’s reworking
of Marlowe, can be read as both an act of destruction and creation. It
acknowledges the role the canon plays in providing the ground on which
artists make new work. In order to create new work, artists may have
to challenge or even attempt to obliterate the work that precedes them,
but traces of the influence of the canon are inevitably still visible in their
work.

Goold and Power’s Faustus

Goold and Power’s adaptation takes Marlowe’s play and cuts it down to
its bare bones. They indicate the level of licence taken with Marlowe’s
text in the published script by stating that this particular version of
the Faust legend is ‘after Christopher Marlowe’ as opposed to ‘by
Christopher Marlowe’. (Goold and Power, Faustus) They take what
Goold terms an ‘interventionist approach’ to adapting Marlowe’s play,
 15  CONTROVERSIAL INTENTIONS: ADAPTATION AS AN ACT …  305

weaving a contemporary narrative around the original text. Goold and

Power preserve the skeleton of Marlowe’s original play. Its pivotal turn-
ing points form a backbone onto which the contemporary Chapman
Brothers’ narrative is grafted. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”)
The production starts with Faustus in his shadowy study, lit by a sin-
gle candle (see Fig. 15.2). In the distance, monks take up a Gregorian
chant. Faustus goes through his books, rejects all forms of scholarly
inquiry and then decides to take up necromancy. He blows the candle
out and the dark walls of his study wheel around suddenly to reveal the
bright white cube space of the Chapmans’ studio. The chanting trans-
forms into dance music. The Chapman Brothers are being interviewed
by an arts correspondent, while being filmed by a camera woman,
Helena. They announce their intention to paint over the Goya etch-
ings (see Fig. 15.3). Jake invites Helena to film them doing the deed
the following night. We return to Faustus’s study as Faustus conjures up
the devil Mephistopheles. Faustus offers to give his soul up to Lucifer
if Mephistopheles will agree to serve him. In the Chapmans’ studio,
Helena is filming. The Chapmans are preparing to paint over the Goya
etchings. There are protestors outside. Helena tries to persuade Jake not
to paint over the images (see Fig. 15.4). In his study, Faustus is wavering
over his decision to sign away his soul (see Fig. 15.5). The Chapmans
appear above him. It is 1998 and they are with an art dealer sealing the
purchase of the Goya etchings. They view the etchings for the first time.
Dinos is so overwhelmed that he throws up. Below the Good Angel and
the Bad Angel fight for Faustus’s soul. Faustus turns back towards God
and Mephistopheles summons up Lucifer, who takes the form of the art
dealer, to persuade him to sign. Both the Chapmans and Faustus sign.
(Goold)
The second act starts with Mephistopheles showing Faustus around
hell, but the hell that he shows him is the opening night of the 2000
Apocalypse exhibition at the Royal Academy, where the Chapmans
are showing Hell, their ‘concentration camp diorama’. (Searle)
Mephistopheles introduces Faustus to the seven deadly sins who double
as guests at the party. The scene ends with the Chapman Brothers admir-
ing Maurizio Cattelan’s The Ninth Hour, a sculpture depicting the pope
struck down by a meteorite. Suddenly the Pope lifts off the meteorite
and rises to become the real Renaissance Pope surrounded by his fri-
ars. Mephistopheles makes Faustus invisible so that he can play tricks on
him. The friars transform into the guests at yet another art world party.
306  S. Grochala

Fig. 15.2  Faustus in his shadowy study, lit by a single candle. Photo credit
Manuel Harlan

The Chapmans are waiting to hear if they have won the Turner prize.
They lose to Martin Creed’s The Lights Going On and Off. While the
lights go on and off, they decide to start work on rectifying the Goyas.
Faustus enters having aged many years. An old man, one of the guests
at the Turner Prize party, encourages him to look to heaven for salva-
tion. Faustus decides that it is too late for him to be saved. As midnight
approaches, Faustus is still torn between repentance and despair. Below
him, the Chapman Brothers are preparing to paint over the Goya etch-
ings. Jake begins to waver in his purpose. Dinos accuses Jake of having
 15  CONTROVERSIAL INTENTIONS: ADAPTATION AS AN ACT …  307

Fig. 15.3  Jonjo O’Neill (Dinos) and Stephen Noonan (Jake). Photo credit
Manuel Harlan
308  S. Grochala

Fig. 15.4  Jake Chapman (Steven Noonan) and Helen/Helena (Sophie

Hunter) in the studio. Photo credit Manuel Harlan

succumbed to Helena’s pleas because he is blinded by his attraction to

her. Above, Mephistopheles warns Faustus that to repent would have
dire consequences. Faustus asks Mephistopheles to show him Helen
of Troy as her beauty will dissuade him from all thoughts of repent-
ance. Helena becomes Helen of Troy. Faustus descends to join Jake
and together they sing her praises. Jake comes to his senses and throws
Helena out. The brothers paint over the Goyas. Above them, Faustus
calls to God for help as his final hour approaches but he receives none.
When midnight strikes, Faustus is drawn into hell. (Goold)
The structure of Faustus is both diachronic and dialectic. Goold and
Power bring the world of mid-sixteenth-century Europe into debate
with the contemporary British art world to see ‘what connections and
collisions occur for an audience’. (Power) The play creates a Hegelian
dialectic between these two worlds. At first the worlds are placed in
opposition. The audience are bumped from the scholarly Renaissance
world into the contemporary art world and then back again. In the fifth
scene, the worlds begin to blend. This synthesis reaches its peak when
 15  CONTROVERSIAL INTENTIONS: ADAPTATION AS AN ACT …  309

Fig. 15.5  Faustus 2007—Jason Baughan (Mephistopheles) and Michael

Colgan (Faustus). photo Manuel Harlan

Faustus and Jake join together to voice their praise of Helen/Helena’s

beauty. Finally the modern world consumes the Renaissance world as,
in the final image of the play, Faustus has a clown mask pulled over his
head by Mephistopheles, becoming one of the defaced victims in the
Chapmans’ Insult to Injury. Goold astutely compares the overall archi-
tecture of the play to ‘the pyramid in the Louvre’. The contemporary
scenes, like the Louvre pyramid, are a modern ‘intervention’ inserted
into a classical edifice. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”).
Comparisons between the two worlds are clearly drawn as moments
of decision, doubt, betrayal, commitment, hedonism, and desire coin-
cide with each other on stage. Faustus announces his intention to take
up necromancy in the first scene, the Chapmans announce their deci-
sion to paint over the Goyas in the next. Faustus signs his soul away as
the Chapmans sign the papers sealing the purchase of the Goyas. When
Faustus’s blood congeals before he can sign, the ink in the Chapmans’
pen dries up. Jake’s moment of doubt coincides with Faustus’s calls for
God to save him at his final hour. Elements from one world are liter-
ally transformed into elements in the other. The Pope from The Ninth
310  S. Grochala

Hour becomes the Pope who Faustus torments. Goold recognizes this as
a habitual way of working for him:

My default, particularly at that point as a director, but full stop as a direc-

tor, is that if I see snap between two cards I’ll say snap even if there’s not
much joining them because I’m interested in what happens.

Goold identifies the Momart fire as a particularly strong snap moment

and one that was pivotal to the early development of the production. In
May 2004, a fire swept through the Momart warehouse in East London,
where many valuable works of modern British art were stored. Among
the works lost was the Chapmans’ Hell. For Goold, this event felt
‘Marlovian in all sorts of ways’. The Momart fire determined the initial
structure for the two parallel narratives. The painting over of the Goyas
would be equated with Faustus’s decision to sign his soul away. Then
‘just as Faustus goes on his big round the world journey and ends up
in hell, so would the Chapmans go on some post success journey which
would end in the Momart fire. These two fires would consume our cen-
tral protagonists’. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”)
Goold and Power soon discovered, however, that such a close mir-
roring of the arc of Marlowe’s story in the contemporary story simply
didn’t work. The story ended with the brothers being punished for the
iconoclastic nature of their work: ‘if we judge them in the same way and
make that complete equivalency between them and Faustus then they
should go to hell as well’. This narrative structure articulated a stance
that was in direct opposition to Goold and Power’s intentions. They
‘were pro-Chapman and therefore by default pro-Faustus’. Rather than
using the Faustus narrative to damn the Chapmans, they had intended to
use the Chapmans’ narrative to redeem Faustus and so bring into focus
what they rightly or wrongly perceive to be Marlowe’s true intentions.
Goold argues that Marlowe provides his religiously conformist ending
out of a ‘sense of generic social duty rather than out of a real belief in
that sensibility’. This argument is supported, Power confirms, by the fact
that Faustus only truly repents at the last minute and so Marlowe spends
most of the play revelling in all the fun and mischief that Faustus has
with the powers Mephistopheles has given him. Marlowe’s true inten-
tions are revealed by the fact that ‘the writing of the sin is far more
vital than the writing of the repentance’. (Goold and Power, “Personal
Interview”) (see Fig. 15.3).
 15  CONTROVERSIAL INTENTIONS: ADAPTATION AS AN ACT …  311

The solution was to create parallel narratives with opposing rather

than identical arcs. Goold and Power found an earlier point in the
Chapman narrative that could stand in parallel with Faustus’s decision to
sign away his soul:

We worked out that purchase of the Goyas could stand for the signature
moment. So we got a new equivalent for Faustus signing his soul away
and then a kind of freedom not to follow an identical arc in the Chapman
story. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”)

Faustus being dragged down to hell is now equated with the Chapmans’
act of painting over the Goyas. The final moment of the show is a pro-
jected statement affirming, that despite the fact that Hell was burnt in
the Momart fire, the Chapmans’ most iconoclastic piece ‘Their rectified
Goya sketches, Insult to Injury, survive’. (Goold and Power 85) By creat-
ing an ending that condones the Chapmans’ actions, Goold and Power
can also be seen as attempting to salvage Faustus himself.

Adapting the Chapman Brothers’ Insult to Injury

While the above description might suggest a balance between the two
narratives, in performance, the Chapman narrative, along with Goold
and Power’s pro-Chapman stance, dominates. The critic Alfred Hickling
observed that, unless the actor playing Faustus can take full command of
the role, the Chapman narrative is ‘so well realised that the Renaissance
episodes could begin to seem irrelevant’. (Alfred Hickling) Although
Goold and Power’s Faustus can ostensibly be read as an adaptation of
Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, it is more truly—in terms of its form and inten-
tions—an adaptation of the Chapmans’ Insult to Injury. As Goold and
Power note, central to adaptation process was the intention ‘to do to the
Marlowe what the Chapman Brothers had done to Goya’s Disasters of
War’. Like Goya’s etchings, Marlowe’s text becomes the object of an act
of iconoclasm. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”)
Goold and Power did consider abandoning the original text com-
pletely and appropriating the skeleton of Marlowe’s play as the basis for
an entirely new play: ‘We talked about the idea that if we don’t like it
enough then we should do a modern version. We should tell the story,
tell the myth and write a new play about someone selling their soul to
the devil in some form or another’. Power explains that the decision to
312  S. Grochala

retain the original Marlowe text was inspired by Goold’s initial interest in
the Chapmans’ rectification of Goya: ‘because of what your idea was for
what that modern story might be, then the idea of retaining bits of the
original came in.’ Faustus is an adaptation of an adaptation strategy, as
much as it is an adaptation of a particular story. An approach to adapta-
tion developed by the Chapmans in the visual arts is transposed to the
medium of theatre. Goold and Power take Marlowe’s work and perform
the theatrical equivalent of painting clown and puppy heads all over it.
(Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”)
Goold and Power define their act of adaptation as an iconoclastic
act. Both Marlowe and the Chapmans are positioned as artistic idols.
Power admits to being ‘very Marlowe’ at the time, while Goold identi-
fies Marlowe as major influence on his work: ‘the Marlovian anti-hero,
for better or worse, troublingly and undeliberately has basically been
the main character as a director that I’ve kept returning to’. Goold also
admits to having been in awe of the Chapmans and equates their work
with that of Goya’s: ‘I would put the Chapmans, certainly at that point
right up there with Goya’. Though the Chapmans allowed Goold and
Power to use their images and came to see the production during its run
at Hampstead Theatre in 2006, there was little contact between them.
There was, however, a sense of the Chapmans watching the progress of
the adaptation from above, ‘huge God-like figures over the Marlowe’.
This image is clearly captured in the Headlong publicity for the show,
which shows the huge figure of Jake Chapman looking down forensically
on the tiny figures of Faustus, Dinos and Jake, who are in turn looking
up at him from below. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”)
Whereas Goold and Power take a reverent attitude towards the
Chapmans, their attitude towards Marlowe is much more of a love/
hate relationship, mirroring the Chapmans’ relationship with Goya and
reflecting the complex relationship between the artist and the canon.
Marlowe’s play is positioned as a polluted text that needs to be recti-
fied, reworked, and improved: ‘yeah, it’s great Faustus, it’s a shame so
much of it is shit’. (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”) Dr. Faustus
exists in two versions. A shorter 1604 A version, which is traditionally
seen as closer to the play as it was performed during Marlowe’s lifetime,
and a longer 1616 B text, which is though to have been supplemented
with ‘new additions’ by other playwrights. (Steane, “Dr Faustus: The
Text”) Goold and Power’s intention in adapting Dr Faustus is to rec-
tify it by getting ‘rid of all the so called other hand stuff’, retrieving and
 15  CONTROVERSIAL INTENTIONS: ADAPTATION AS AN ACT …  313

distilling the original Marlowe out of the adulterated text. They defend
their actions, just as the Chapmans do, with a canonical defence. Citing
John Barton’s addition of 550 lines from Marlowe’s main source, Johann
Spies’s Historia von D. Johann Fausten, to his 1974 production of the
play for the RSC, Goold explains that Dr Faustus ‘has always been fid-
dled around with because it’s a complete disaster of a play.’ The produc-
tion, however, questions the ethics of both the Chapmans’ and Goold
and Power’s rectification of other artists’ work in its final image, rein-
scribing a dialectical position. Faustus is literally defaced, reiterating the
idea that Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, like Goya’s etchings has become the vic-
tim of its modern adaptors’ rectifications. The positioning of Faustus as
one of the victims in Goya’s original etchings raises a challenge to Goold
and Power’s predominantly pro-Chapman stance. (Goold and Power,
“Personal Interview”)
Goold and Power’s approach to adaptation extends beyond the adap-
tation of two works of art and the adaptation of a particular adaptation
strategy. During their development of Faustus, Goold and Power also
adapted elements of the Chapmans’ working relationship, in which the
two separate artists are merged into a single entity. Goold talks about
the adaptation process generating a ‘series of doubles’, not only between
the Chapmans and Marlowe, but also between the Chapmans and them-
selves. Goold states:

what the Chapman Brothers say about the way they make art and that
one of the reasons they make it together—and you can’t tell whose idea
is whose in the play. There’s an ability to de-biographise. You move fur-
ther away from everything you know about these artists. I think that was
appealing to us more out of nervousness, but it did appeal.

There is an interesting conflation of the Chapmans with Goold and

Power in this statement. It is difficult to clearly define at points whether
Goold is referring to the Chapmans or to Power and himself. Goold
sees the Chapmans’ partnership as a way to disassociate the individual-
ity of the artist from the work and, specifically for Power and himself as
‘nascent’ theatre makers, a way of providing a safety net for more risky
work. More importantly, Goold and Power’s partnership mirrors the
Chapmans’ partnership in terms of the idea of a critical and creative hive
mind. His description of Power and his working relationship resembles
the Chapmans’ description of theirs:
314  S. Grochala

We’d also developed an MO which was that we would walk around a lot
and talk. And then we’d write different bits. In general with the Faustus,
I’d take a stab at the Chapman stuff and Ben would rework the Marlowe
and then we’d pass it between us.

Talking to Goold and Power, this hive mind quality to their work
together is quickly apparent. For example, in a moment where they are
discussing a pre-Chapman version of the modern narrative whose traces
remain in the character of Helena:

BP:  T
 he ghost of the third world immigrant cleaner is unfortunately a
recurring trope. Actually, not just in us, to be fair.
RG:  Like in Lepage.
BP:  The working class.
RG:  The liminal figure seated against the major cultural force.
BP:  There in the background but who turns out to be at the centre.
RG:  Yes, exactly, they carry all of the Kurdish conflict with them in
their broomstick.
BP:  Yeah.
RG:  And unsurprisingly we struggled to get much traction off this.

Together, they raise, confirm, build on, refine, challenge and, in this
case, discard artistic ideas. It can be argued that Goold and Power both
recognized and adapted elements of the Chapmans’ working relation-
ship, during the process of creating Faustus, in order to refine their own
working relationship (Goold and Power, “Personal Interview”).
Many artists, like Goold and Power, adapt the creative practices of
other artists, both from within their own medium and from outside it,
to develop their own individual creative practice. Practices in literature
and the visual arts inform practices in drama and theatre and vice versa.
The study of adaptation needs to expand its scope to include the study
of these adaptations of processes, shifting the focus from the products
of adaptation to the creative practices that underlie it. Within this con-
text, the idea of artistic intention needs to be rehabilitated, not as a
benchmark by which to judge the success of a work of art, but rather as
a key to unlock the creative process. Where artistic intentions have been
directly stated or can be established in conversation with the artist, then
these intentions should be taken into consideration, not as the source of
all meaning, but as a valuable tool in helping us to understand the how’s
and why’s behind the production of an artistic work.
 15  CONTROVERSIAL INTENTIONS: ADAPTATION AS AN ACT …  315

Works Cited
Alfred Hickling. “Faustus.” The Guardian. 12 Nov. 2004. Web. 28 Feb. 2015.
Allen, R. E., ed. The Concise Oxford Dictionary. 8th edn. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990. Print.
Art Happens: A Major Exhibition of the Chapman Brothers at Jerwood Gallery.
2014. Film.
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1980. Print.
Barber, C. L. Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theatre of Marlowe and Kyd.
Ed. Richard P. Wheeler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Print.
Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana
Press, 1977. Print.
Chapman Brother’s Bad Art for Bad People. 2006. Film. Newsnight Review.
Chapman, Jake, and Dinos Chapman. “Insult to Injury.” Jake & Dinos
Chapman. 2003. Web. 27 Feb. 2015.
Gardner, Lyn. “Paradise Lost.” The Guardian. 5 Feb. 2004. Web. 7 Mar. 2015.
Gates, Daniel. “Unpardonable Sins: The Hazards of Performative Language in
the Tragic Cases of Francesco Spiera and ‘Doctor Faustas.’” Comparative
Drama 38.1 (2004): 59–81. Print.
Gibson, Eric. “Insult to Artistry: Modern Vandals Feed Off Greatness.” Wall
Street Journal. 8 Apr. 2003. Web. 27 Feb. 2015.
Goold, Rupert. Show Capture: Faustus. Hampstead Theatre: Headlong, 2006.
Film.
Goold, Rupert, and Ben Power. Faustus: After Christopher Marlowe. London:
Nick Hern Books, 2008. Print.
———. Personal Interview. 17 Jan. 2014.
Haydon, Andrew. “Theatre in the 2000s.” Modern British Playwriting: 2000–
2009: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations. Ed. Dan Rebellato. A&C Black,
2013. 40–98. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2012. Print.
Jake and Dinos Chapman: What Do Artists Do All Day? 2014. Film.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. London: Routledge, 1983. Print.
Jones, Jonathan. “Look What We Did.” The Guardian. 31 Mar. 2003. Web. 21
Feb. 2015.
Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays. London: Penguin, 1986. Print.
Power, Ben. “This Is Hell, nor Am I out of It.” Faustus: After Christopher
Marlowe. London: Nick Hern Books, 2008. Print.
Ramkalawon, Jennifer. “Jake and Dinos Chapman’s ‘Disasters of War.’” Print
Quarterly 18.1 (2001): 64–77. Print.
Searle, Adrian. “Apocalypse.” The Guardian. 21 Sept. 2000. Web. 7 Mar. 2015.
Spies, Johan. “History of Doctor Johann Faustus.” 1587. Web. 28 Feb. 2015.
316  S. Grochala

Steane, J. B. “Dr Faustus: The Text.” Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays.
London: Penguin, 1986. 261–262. Print.
———. “Introduction.” Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays. London:
Penguin, 1986. 9–37. Print.
Turner, Christopher. “I’d like to Have Stepped on Goya’s Toes, Shouted in His
Ears and Punched Him in the Face.” 1 Sept. 2006. Web. 7 Mar. 2015.
Wimsatt, William Kurtz, and Monroe Curtis Beardsley. “The Intentional
Fallacy.” The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. London: Methuen,
1970. Print.
 CHAPTER 16

Multivalence: The Young Vic

and a Postmodern Changeling, 2012

Nora J. Williams

This chapter analyses the 2012 Young Vic production of Thomas

Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling as a postmod-
ern adaptation of this notoriously difficult English Renaissance play.
The Changeling has, since 1960, become a staple of the Shakespeare-
alternative early modern canon. Despite the play’s relative popularity, its
text has long been criticized for perceived problems of unity and coher-
ence, and most contemporary productions have grappled with how to
reconcile its two, seemingly disconnected plot lines. As a result of these
disunities—this apparent ‘discourse of fragments’—The Changeling
offers postmodern theatre-makers an ideal stimulus for a fragmented
and collage-based approach to producing a classical play (Hassan 125).
Whereas Aristotelian dramaturgical models require attention to the
unities of time, space, and action, postmodernism encourages artists
to think in multiplicities and to see the ‘space for debate’ (Malpas 1).
Postmodernism requires an acknowledgement of the potentialities erased
by any act of choice, and an awareness that the narratives of history are
neither fixed nor inevitable. As a result, the very qualities that have made

N.J. Williams (*) 
Independent Scholar, Buffalo, NY, USA
e-mail: Nora.J.Williams@gmail.com

© The Author(s) 2018 317

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_16
318  N.J. Williams

The Changeling unpalatable to academics and audiences at various points

in its history—its perceived structural disunity, for example—also make it
a perfect canvas for a postmodern theatrical experiment.
More specifically, the 2012 Young Vic production and its revival the
same year embraced divergence in their staging choices, resulting in a
production that consciously created multiple, overlapping significations
and rejoiced in multivalence. Director Joe Hill-Gibbins and dramaturg
Zoë Svendsen described the intended aesthetic of their production as
one of ‘jarring dissonance’, which they strove to achieve at every level
of design, interpretation, and staging (Hill-Gibbins np). Speaking to
Theatre Voice ahead of the revival, Svendsen defines the setting and time
period of the Young Vic Changeling as self-consciously multiple: ‘We
weren’t going to create a kind of simple, empirical location that was one
world and one period’ (Svendsen np). Whereas most other twentieth-
and twenty-first-century productions have attempted to smooth over
the play’s rough edges, the Young Vic Changeling pushed the inherent
ambiguities and disjunctures of the play’s text to their logical extremes,
creating an excess of signification in which potential but unrealized
meanings existed—sometimes uncomfortably—alongside the meanings
actually signified.
This production was able to take on a multiplicity of meanings in
large part because of the status of The Changeling as a classical and even
canonical text. While adaptation theory has largely moved beyond what
Hutcheon and others identify as the ‘fidelity debates’, adaptation as sub-
sumed under Shakespeare studies and early modern studies more broadly
still grapples with questions of faithfulness to a lost or even imagined
‘original’ text (xxvi). Unlike intermedial adaptations—movements from
novels to films or from films to video games, for example—theatrical
productions adapted from plays by Shakespeare and other early modern
playwrights are inevitably intra-medial, springing from an existing theat-
rical text and performance history, and therefore obsessively preoccupied
with and ghosted by their previous incarnations (Carlson 7). As M. J.
Kidnie points out, ‘academics, students, theatregoers, theatre practition-
ers, [and] interested general readers’ still invoke a given play’s text as a
benchmark for discriminating between ‘Shakespeare and Shakespearean
adaptation’ (5). Since The Changeling is less familiar to contemporary
audiences, it sits uncomfortably between canonicity and obscurity. As a
result, The Changeling both participates in and resists the debates around
adaptations of Shakespeare.
 16  MULTIVALENCE: THE YOUNG VIC AND A POSTMODERN …  319

Particularly in the wake of the 2007 Oxford Collected Works of Thomas

Middleton—a volume seemingly designed to re-make Middleton as a
poetic genius in the image of Shakespeare—The Changeling and its con-
temporaries are still subject to the limiting and excluding forces of the
author as identified by Foucault (159). Hill-Gibbins’s and Svendsen’s
irreverent treatment of the play’s text, however, underlines the extent
to which their production departed from both the textual and perfor-
mance histories of The Changeling. The treatment of The Changeling at
the Young Vic, therefore, more closely resembles Barthes’s dead author
than Foucault’s limiting one: scenes were cut, swapped, and/or com-
bined, jokes were updated and rewritten, whole characters were excised.
While these, in themselves, are not postmodern interventions, they
attest to the adaptive spirit of the Young Vic production. Furthermore,
the production’s playful use of food and beverages and its multi-casting
across the two plots accentuated rather than obscured the play’s gaps
and fissures, creating a postmodern aesthetic and an undeniably adaptive
Changeling.
Some background on The Changeling and its performance history
will be useful here to foreground my analysis. Written in 1622 and set
in Alicante, the play hinges around two thematically connected but
‘superficially divergent’ plots (M. Neill x). One, usually dubbed the
‘main’ or ‘castle’ plot, focuses on Beatrice-Joanna, an heiress who falls
in love with another man on the eve of her wedding. Seeing no route
out of her predicament, she enlists her father’s disfigured and loath-
some servant, Deflores, to murder her fiancé. She promises Deflores an
ambiguous ‘precious’ reward without realising that he harbours a secret
lust for her (2.2.130). He takes his payment for the murder in the form
of Beatrice’s virginity, kick-starting a chain of events that eventually
leads to their murder-suicide. In the parallel plot, usually referred to as
the ‘hospital’, ‘madhouse’, or ‘sub’ plot, Isabella has been confined to
her husband’s madhouse because he fears she will be unfaithful to him.
Unbeknownst to her husband Albius, two gallants have disguised them-
selves as his patients in order to seduce Isabella. These two—Antonio
and Franciscus—are joined by the madhouse keeper Lollio in their pur-
suit of Isabella. She plays them against each other and maintains her
chastity to the end of the play, at which point she berates her husband
for being a ‘jealous coxcomb’ (5.3.210). The castle and the madhouse
physically intersect at only three points in the play’s text: the inmates
of the madhouse are asked to perform a dance at Beatrice’s wedding
320  N.J. Williams

in Act 3; Antonio and Franciscus—the disguised gallants—are briefly

blamed for the murder of Beatrice’s fiancé in Act 4; and the madhouse
characters are present in the castle during the final moments of the play.
The Changeling has seen some thirty productions in the UK since
Tony Richardson’s 1961 revival for the Royal Court, which brought
the play back to English professional stages after a three-hundred-year
hiatus; the last known professional production prior to that point was in
1668. Following Richardson’s example, most mainstream twentieth- and
twenty-first-century productions have played it safe in design and inter-
pretation, retaining a traditional Spanish and often Goya-inspired setting,
cutting or changing very little of the quarto text, and employing a psy-
choanalytical interpretation via a broadly post-Stanislavskian acting style.
Although the madhouse plot was the primary attraction of the play for
early modern audiences, it has since been derided as irrelevant, offensive,
and poorly written. This is perhaps understandable given its out-of-date
portrayals of mental health and learning disabilities, yet most objec-
tions from the nineteenth century to the present have been made on
the grounds of aesthetics rather than politics. Even contemporary critics
seem to crave a greater degree of Aristotelean unity between the plots,
referring to the madhouse plot as a ‘perennial problem’ (Billington np)
and ‘dramatically unsatisfying […], commensurate with Rowley’s infe-
rior skill’ (Pringle np). Despite this, the madhouse plot has rarely been
entirely excluded—except in radio and television adaptations—and most
productions have been praised for their attempts to integrate the two
plots, to make the subplot ‘fit’: for example, Peter Gill was almost unani-
mously praised for achieving ‘unity’ between the two plots in his 1978
production (Scott 58).
Within the context of the play’s history, it is somewhat surprising that
the heavily adapted, deliberately disjointed, and distinctly non-naturalist
Young Vic Changeling was the play’s most commercially successful pro-
duction since the seventeenth century—and the only modern production
of the play to merit a revival. I suggest that the successes of Hill-Gibbins,
Svendsen, and their team arose from their willingness to cast aside the
narrative of what a ‘classic’ play should be or do—predominantly because
they were not worried about the audience reception of the play, as The
Changeling is less well known than Shakespeare. By rejecting the per-
formance tradition of The Changeling, the expectations placed upon a
canonical text in performance, and the dominant Stanislavsky-derived
approach to performance, the Young Vic team created an adapted
 16  MULTIVALENCE: THE YOUNG VIC AND A POSTMODERN …  321

Changeling that can be read as distinctly postmodern, full of multiplicity

and celebratory ambiguity.
In their efforts to cultivate this multivalence, Hill-Gibbins and
Svendsen manipulated the ‘source text’ of The Changeling in a number
of ways. While many of these changes were made to the script, the crea-
tive team’s work was most noticeable at the level of performance, par-
ticularly for audience members unfamiliar with the play. While Lyndsey
Turner was criticised in 2015 for making relatively minor adjustments
to the text of Hamlet at the Barbican, Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen
received no such comments from the press on their radical changes to
The Changeling’s script. Middleton and Rowley’s text may have been
the jumping-off point for Hill-Gibbins’s and Svendsen’s interpreta-
tion of the play, but text was not foremost in their audiences’ minds.
Reviewers almost unanimously described the production in terms of
extra-textual contradictions: it was variously ‘creepy, sexy, and at times
downright bonkers’ (Spencer 33), ‘flamboyant and frightening’ (Brown
np), ‘warped and ironic, hysterical and hideous’ (Trueman np). These
descriptions highlight the production’s postmodern aesthetic: it defied
tidy definitions and straightforward interpretations, and revelled instead
in the kind of divergence and multiplicity that defines the postmodern
movement itself (Kaye 144–145). Ironically, in responding to and build-
ing their production around the ‘dissonance’ that so many critics have
observed in the text of The Changeling, Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen cre-
ated an adaptation that seemed to eschew textual fidelity.

Postmodern/Classic/Adaptation
Although the Young Vic Changeling can and should be considered an
adaptation at all levels, the production did not announce itself as such.
Publicity materials cited only Middleton and Rowley as authors, and the
title of the play was not changed. The audience, too, seems to have
accepted the production as a ‘genuine’ instance of The Changeling,
rather than an ‘adaptive’ one; not a single review uses the word ‘adapta-
tion’ (Kidnie 29). Again, I would argue this is largely because audiences
were not familiar with the play. In addition, Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen
do not appear to have considered themselves adapters of The Changeling.
Indeed, they position themselves in relation to the 1653 quarto, claim-
ing that their aesthetic of ‘jarring dissonance’ was inspired by the text
itself: ‘[d]ifferent parts of the play have different dramaturgies […].
322  N.J. Williams

The language is different but more than that the actual, underlying style
is different’ (Hill-Gibbins np). Nonetheless, I insist that this production
is best treated as adaptation. The intention may not have been to adapt,
but the resulting production functioned ‘as adaptation’ in a number of
ways, not least in its use of postmodern principles to deconstruct and
forground the performance as a dynamic process rather than a polished,
monolithic, and predetermined product (Hutcheon). Although Linda
Hutcheon defines adaptation as an ‘acknowledged’ or self-identified
form, she also reminds us that ‘intending to do something is not neces-
sarily the same thing as actually achieving it’ (109). Hill-Gibbins’s and
Svendsen’s unintentionally adaptive strategies produced a piece of thea-
tre independent from, yet also intimately connected to Middleton and
Rowley’s Changeling.
Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen, then, become secondary authors in the
process of adaptation, and therefore (in Barthes’ terms) their intention
to remain ‘true’ to Middleton and Rowley’s play is irrelevant. What
emerges is a chain of authorship and readership from Middleton and
Rowley to Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen and, finally, to the audiences at the
Young Vic in 2012. The adapters’ identities as readers is overwritten by
their role as the authors of the adaptation, and the birth of the reader
(audience) continuously brings about the death of the author (Barthes
148). Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen’s dual roles—as Barthesian readers and
authors—are reflected in the structure of their Changeling, which was
defined by multiplicity and palimpsestuousness.

‘Hunger and Pleasure’ (2.2.150)

Perhaps the most visually memorable feature of this production was its
use of food and drink as substitutes for bodily fluids, weapons, and/or
sex toys. As Hill-Gibbins explains in an interview with Exeunt, he wanted
to portray a society ‘full of sexuality rolling out of control’ without
awkwardly miming ‘realistic’ intercourse; he hoped to show the play’s
violence, too, without resort to realistic blood and gore (Tripney np).
Picking up on thematic connections between sex, violence, hunger, and
desire in the play, Hill-Gibbins asked the audience to imagine trifle as a
weapon, chocolate sauce as sexual lubricant, tequila as urine, and straw-
berry sundae topping as blood. Food items throughout the production,
however, always retained their original food-ness as well, functioning
simultaneously as menu items in a wedding feast and opportunities for a
 16  MULTIVALENCE: THE YOUNG VIC AND A POSTMODERN …  323

playful stretching of reality. This unstable relationship between the obvi-

ous significations—trifle as dessert, tequila as booze—and potential sig-
nifications embodies the postmodern aesthetic, setting up a comfortable,
familiar world before thoroughly disrupting it.
For the first several scenes, the wedding banquet was set up in the
background, providing a relatively straightforward image of wealth and
extravagance, a doting but domineering father shelling out for his lit-
tle girl’s big day. The items chosen for inclusion in the feast, however,
also betrayed the metatheatrical practicalities of a props budget and the
necessities of mounting eight shows per week over the length of the pro-
fessional run. Despite the presence of a three-tier wedding cake, most
of the foodstuffs presented to the audience were self-contained, easy to
prepare ahead but serve cold, and relatively inexpensive, though present
in large quantities: a punch bowl, oranges, bunches of bananas, over-
flowing bowls of popcorn, champagne bottles. The exception to the rule
came in the form of individual portions of strawberry trifle served in pol-
ystyrene bowls, accompanied by self-serve toppings; these called to mind
a child’s birthday party as much as a society wedding. From their first
appearance, then, the props offered duelling significations: the extrava-
gance communicated by the context of a wealthy heiress’s wedding and
the volume of food presented was belied by the connotations of the food
items themselves.
These food props were present, passively, throughout the opening
scenes of the production as scenery. Although they had clearly been set
out in anticipation of a wedding, their first active use came in the form
of violence, as weapons in the murder of Alonzo. The murder was rep-
resented through a lengthy fight sequence choreographed by Alison de
Burgh, which made use of a number of the available food props. Deflores
attempted to drown Alonzo in the punch bowl; Alonzo fought back
using the cutlery set out for the wedding breakfast. When Deflores again
gained the upper hand, he reached for a banana, which he attempted to
shove down the screaming Alonzo’s throat, shouting ‘I must silence you’
(3.1.26). Alonzo was not killed onstage: Deflores dragged him off to fin-
ish the job as Beatrice, her father Vermandero, and her would-be lover
Alsemero entered for the next scene. Taking no notice of the disturbed
scene, complete with over-turned popcorn bowl and upset place settings,
Vermandero calmly poured himself a drink from the now-weaponized
punch bowl. The audience laughed, uneasily; at one of the performances
I attended, a soft ‘oh, no’ was audible from somewhere behind me.
324  N.J. Williams

Although Vermandero was still free to treat the punch as punch, its punch-
ness had been overwritten for the audience by its signification as a murder
weapon.
As the play progressed, the food on stage transformed into other
signifiers with more frequency. Towards the end of the play, Alonzo’s
would-be revenger brother Tomazo hurled a serving of trifle at Deflores,
accusing him of Alonzo’s murder. Deflores responded by readying his
own trifle attack before succumbing to his guilty conscience and refusing
to return fire. The exchange was both funny and surprisingly menacing;
it made use of the classic pie-in-face comedy gag while simultaneously
rippling outward to embrace the trifle’s multiplying significations.
Tomazo’s floppy, ineffective trifle-weapon emphasized his impotence as
revenger while echoing Deflores’s use of food items to kill his brother
Alonzo. The trifle and accompanying chocolate and strawberry sauces
had also used by Diaphanta (standing in for Beatrice) and Alsemero in
the wedding night sex scene, which cast the trifle as sexual lubricants
and toys. Blindfolded, the pair smeared and sprayed each other liber-
ally, sensually covering themselves and the white bed sheets in a sticky,
sickly mess of strawberry topping, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce.
Tomazo’s food-weapon of choice also foreshadowed the trifle-fling-
ing rage that Tomazo and Vermandero would unleash on Beatrice and
Deflores’s corpses in the final scene. These overlapping significations
made literal the play’s thematic connections between gluttonous hun-
ger and sexual desire, but they also highlighted the disturbing closeness
between sex, violence, death, and shame in the Young Vic production:
the same items used as sex toys were also employed as weapons and
as tools of humiliation and defilement. In addition, both Defloreses—
Daniel Cerqueira in the original production and Zubin Varla in the
revival—licked their lips after Tomazo’s trifle-attack hit them in the face:
food was always still food. The audience was therefore asked to see the
same prop (trifle) as a weapon used by Deflores and Tomazo, as an erotic
aid by Alsemero and Diaphanta, as a method of defiling the corpses of
Beatrice and Deflores by Vermandero and Tomazo, and as a tasty treat,
all within the space of half an hour of performance time. In this way, the
production denied its audiences any recourse to one, fixed meaning or
‘truth’ in any broad sense: the trifle constantly shifted between its sig-
nifications as dangerous and erotic, delicious and impotent, menacing
and celebratory. It never carried any of these significations without being
haunted by all of the others; it was always, inevitably, all of the above.
 16  MULTIVALENCE: THE YOUNG VIC AND A POSTMODERN …  325

This use of the trifle and punch echoes Geraldine Harris’s charac-
terization of the postmodern as a relationship ‘between multiplicity
and specificity’ (11). In generating meaning through a series of spe-
cific uses—uses that always multiplied but never entirely overwrote or
transformed previous significations—the food props in the Young Vic
Changeling also called attention to adaptation as both a ‘process of crea-
tion’ and a ‘process of reception’ (Hutcheon 8). The illusion of sponta-
neity and opportunism in the applications of trifle to violence and sex in
the production, combined with the imaginative power required by both
actors and audience in the constant re-purposing of props, foregrounded
performance as performance, as make-believe; this, in turn, invoked the
self-referentiality that is a staple of the postmodern aesthetic.

Casting Across the Plots

This metatheatrical self-referencing was also employed in Hill-Gibbins’s
use of multi-casting. Harris argues for a definition of postmodern-
ism as ‘a notion of subjectivity which is constantly being produced and
reproduced through competing discourses’ (11, 12). The Young Vic
Changeling’s use of multi-casting can be said to operate within just such
a postmodern framework: it created subjects in order to break them
down and re-arrange them, resulting in a playful, unstable and distinctly
non-naturalist approach to character. Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen not only
cast across the two plots, with most actors taking on at least one role in
each world, but they made no attempt to disguise this doubling (or tri-
pling) in the play’s design. Indeed, the staging highlighted multi-roling
at various points throughout the production, embodying Harris’s idea
of the postmodern as concerned with ‘subjectivity […] produced and
reproduced through competing discourses’ (12). Paul Taylor describes
the effect of this approach to the plots’ notorious disjointedness:

Hill-Gibbins hurls the two plots across each other’s paths in brilliantly
telling ways and without any change of scenery. In the asylum, there are
disconcertingly rattling boxes, cupboards, and trunks that seem to be
crammed with desperate, protesting inmates; the people who emerge are
highborn characters, waiting to take to stage and in an equivalent emo-
tional turbulence. (2012 np)

The ‘highborn characters’ emerging from within the confines of the

madhouse transitioned the scene to the castle by virtue of their presence
326  N.J. Williams

onstage, rather than through anything approaching a set change. A char-

acter’s connection to the castle rather than the madhouse was signalled
primarily through costume and manner: expensive-looking suits, day
dresses, shiny shoes, and leather gloves signified the wealth and status of
the castle against the clinical uniforms, latex gloves, and hospital gowns
of the madhouse.
Elements of the grotesque penetrated both of these overlapping
worlds, accentuating the sense of spillage from one into the other created
by the ‘rattling boxes’. Alex Beckett wore a partial fat suit as Lollio in the
madhouse plot, for example, giving him an outsized stomach; this was
removed when he played Jasperino in the castle plot. Similarly, Eleanor
Matsuura padded her breasts and bum as Isabella in the madhouse,
but not as Diaphanta in the castle. The primness of the castle and its
inhabitants was also undermined throughout, however: Jessica Raine as
Beatrice in the original production emerged from a madhouse cupboard
with her dress and hair rumpled before snootily telling the audience
that she would get Deflores sacked. As I note above, Howard Ward’s
Vermandero obliviously poured himself a drink from the punch bowl
used in the murder of his future son-in-law just moments before. These
elements of the Bakhtinian grotesque, of bodies unable to control their
own borders, frequently served to highlight the ‘jarring dissonance’ that
Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen wanted to infuse the play with: ‘We tried’,
Hill-Gibbins says, ‘to constantly evolve the style, to not have one con-
vention or one idea’ (2013 np). In most cases, the multiple conventions
and ideas sat uncomfortably, but productively beside each other in the
production.
The diversity of meanings and overlapping signifiers were not always
productively or positively evocative, however. Included in the grotesque-
ness of the madhouse plot, for example, was the portrayal of Antonio
by Henry Lloyd-Hughes in the original production and Nick Lee in the
revival. Both presented Antonio as suffering from cerebral palsy or a sim-
ilar neurological condition affecting motor function as well as a learn-
ing disability. This resulted in a problematic, even offensive portrayal of
a disabled body. Wearing a crash helmet, confined to a wheelchair, and
clearly unable to feed or clean himself, Antonio was played by able-bod-
ied actors Lloyd-Hughes and Lee, both of whom doubled as Tomazo in
the castle plot. This portrayal of Antonio was especially concerning for its
equation of bodily disability with intellectual impairment, although the
two are not linked scientifically. In addition, Antonio feigns his disability,
 16  MULTIVALENCE: THE YOUNG VIC AND A POSTMODERN …  327

using it as an excuse to enter the madhouse and seduce Isabella. This

results in additional, complicating layers of meaning: Antonio presents
his idea of a ‘madman’ and, however grotesque, that representation is
clearly convincing to Alibius, Lollio, and Isabella, at least initially. Are
we, the audience, then, meant to read Antonio as representative of a
popular image of ‘madness’? Are we asked to separate ourselves from the
mocking and infantilizing of Antonio? Are we complicit in his ridicule?
Or are we allowed to laugh at him because, after all, he is only faking?
While the questions prompted by the portrayal of Antonio arguably par-
ticipate in the multivalent, postmodern aesthetic of the production, the
carelessness with which the character was constructed undermined and
distracted in an unproductive way.
The production’s use of cross-casting between the plots climaxed in
the wedding masque sequence, which deliberately played across a vari-
ety of possible significations in its costuming and staging. This sequence,
not coincidentally, manipulated one of the few moments of connection
between the castle and madhouse plots in the play: the dance of fools
and madmen that is commissioned for a performance at Beatrice’s wed-
ding. Although the dance itself never materializes in the play’s text, there
is a dumbshow wedding that occurs several scenes later. Hill-Gibbins
and Svendsen manipulated and rearranged a number of scenes in order
to bring the wedding dumbshow and the ‘Madmen’s Morris’ together,
resulting in a literal, extended collision of main and subplots. The mash-
up of grotesque entertainment from the madhouse and the more austere
wedding dumbshow was created at the Young Vic with hip-hop-inspired
choreography by Maxine Doyle set to a blend of Beyoncé’s 2008 hit
‘Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)’ and Mendelssohn’s wedding march.
The double-signification of the music—traditional white wedding and
Beyoncé-brand feminism, nineteenth-century aristocracy and twenty-
first-century celebrity—was echoed by the presence of the entire cast
on stage, who were dressed in costumes that spanned the range of the
two plots. Lloyd-Hughes and Lee changed from Antonio into Tomazo
onstage during the course of the dance, leaving Tomazo’s military uni-
form coat half-buttoned such that Antonio’s hospital gown was partially
visible underneath. Svendsen notes that the production’s multi-casting
was deliberately manipulated in the wedding dance sequence in order
to muddy the waters, to create uncertainty: she says that because the
sequence begins in the madhouse, it can be interpreted as ‘the mad peo-
ple dressed up in wedding gear doing a kind of mimicry of the wedding
328  N.J. Williams

[…], but at the same time, they are also in the costumes that they would
be in, in the castle plot, in the rest of the play’ (np). Loud, confusing,
and protean, the sequence bombarded the audience with multiple, over-
lapping Bakhtinian significations, never allowing a comfortable sense of
what, precisely, was being communicated through the dance.
The sequence began with Alex Beckett as Lollio leading Antonio
through a rehearsal of the entertainment commissioned for Beatrice’s
wedding. Dressed in their madhouse character costumes, the two men
practised a simple step-touch movement (with Antonio performing from
a wheelchair) to the soundtrack of Lollio incessantly chanting ‘fa, la, la,
la, la’ (4.3.81). When Alibius, the master of the madhouse, arrived to
announce a full rehearsal with all of his patients, Lollio performed the
role of choreographer, shouting ‘a-five, six, seven, eight!’. On his cue,
the mashed-up recorded soundtrack came blasting in, along with the
production’s entire cast in wedding clothes. Lloyd-Hughes’s and Lee’s
onstage change from Antonio into Tomazo literalized the amphibi-
ous relationship between madhouse and castle. Beckett, as both Lollio
(madhouse) and Jasperino (castle) simultaneously, continued in his role
as dance master, which also took on the connotations of best man in
the context of the wedding. Still dressed in his fat suit and lab coat—his
Lollio costume—he was responsible for calling out both the next steps
of the dance sequence and the movements of a wedding celebration: he
cued Vermandero and Alsemero to give mimed speeches after everyone
sat down to dinner, and instigated a conga line once the faked meal had
finished. The dual roles of dance master and best man placed Beckett
firmly in both of the play’s worlds at once, the fulcrum of the motion
between madhouse and castle.
The dance also capitalized on the protean stage space created within
the production which, like the food props, functioned through multiple,
overlapping signifiers. What Taylor describes as Hill-Gibbins’ technique
of ‘hurl[ing] the plots across each other’s paths’ reaches its climax in this
sequence, with both sets of characters simultaneously, visibly, unavoida-
bly occupying the same physical space on stage, occupying the same bod-
ies moving through that space. The space therefore became fragmented
in the course of the frenzied dance despite its continuous occupation
by the production’s entire cast. As a celebratory conga line danced laps
around the playing space and the mashed-up music continued to blare,
Beatrice and Deflores had sex on the banqueting table: the public cele-
bration of the wedding and a covert sexual encounter occupied the same
 16  MULTIVALENCE: THE YOUNG VIC AND A POSTMODERN …  329

stage space, at the same moment in time. Alonzo’s ghost—played by a

body which only moments before had been playing the madhouse mas-
ter Alibius—menaced Deflores as the party carried on around them: a
private attack of conscience inserted itself into a public moment. As the
party exited the stage, Beatrice was left alone to stumble upon her new
husband’s ‘closet’, an intimate and personal space, while still breathing
heavily from the dancing and wearing her wedding dress; the party con-
tinued on the other side of a door, signalled by distant club music and
flashing lights. This juxtaposition of public and private life was in sym-
pathy with the production’s use of props, haunting the space—as the tri-
fle and punch bowl were haunted—with its previous significations, never
allowing any meaning to become dominant or singular.

Conclusions
The multivalence that infused the Young Vic Changeling spanned all
aspects of the production, resulting in a postmodern adaptation that
was very much in conversation with Barthes’ conception of modern
authorship. The ever-proliferating uses of food and drink and the result-
ing overlapping signifiers were echoed in the multi-casting across the
two plots: like the trifle and chocolate sauce, each actor’s body signified
multiple characters and both plots simultaneously. The instability and
changeability communicated by deliberate over-signifying was also self-
referential, calling attention to the process of theatre- and meaning–mak-
ing, presenting an illusion of spontaneity in its repurposing of ‘found’
objects (i.e. the food items) and a ‘limited’ number of performers. Thus,
moments such as visible costume changes and murders-by-punch-bowl
not only offered a playful approach to a classic play but equally forced
the play’s themes into productive and often uncomfortable relationships:
ritual, sex, death, and violence comingled throughout. Despite their pro-
testations that the play’s text was at the centre of their interpretation,
Hill-Gibbins and Svendsen created an eminently postmodern and unde-
niably adaptive Changeling.

Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author’. Image Music Text. Trans. S. Heath.
London: Fontana Press, 1977. 142–148. Print.
330  N.J. Williams

Billington, Michael. Review of The Changeling, dir. by Declan Donnellan.

Guardian 16 May 2006. Web. 6 Sept. 2015.
Brown, Georgina. Review of The Changeling, dir. by Joe Hill-Gibbins. Mail on
Sunday 12 Feb. 2012. Web. 5 Oct. 2015.
Foucault, Michel. ‘What is an Author?’ Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post
Structuralist Criticism. Ed. J. Harrari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.
141–159. Print.
Harris, Geraldine. Staging Femininities: Performance and Performativity.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Print.
Hassan, Ihab. ‘The Question of Postmodernism’. Performing Arts Journal. 6.1
(1981): 30–37. Print.
Hill-Gibbins, Joe. Personal Interview. 1 Feb. 2013.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd edition. London: Routledge,
2012. Print.
Kaye, Nick. Postmodernism and Performance. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994. Print.
Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London:
Routledge, 2009. Print.
Malpas, Simon, ed. Postmodern Debates. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Print.
Middleton, Thomas and William Rowley. The Changeling. Ed. Michael Neill. The
New Mermaids. London: Methuen, 2006. Print.
Neill, Michael. “Introduction.” The Changeling. Ed. Michael Neill. London:
A&C Black, 2006. Vii–xlv. Print.
Pringle, Stewart. Review of The Changeling, dir. by Joe Hill-Gibbins. Exeunt Jan.
2012. Web. 5 Oct. 2015.
Scott, Michael. Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling: Penguin
Critical Studies. London: Penguin, 1989. Print.
Spencer, Charles. ‘A creepy, sexy Jacobean extravaganza every bit as nasty as
today’s plays’. Review of The Changeling, dir. by Joe Hill-Gibbins. Daily
Telegraph 6 Feb. 2012: 33. Web. 5 Oct. 2015.
Svendsen, Zoë. Interview by Heather Neill. “Dramaturg Zoë Svendsen discusses
the Young Vic production of The Changeling.” Theatre Voice. Theatre Voice,
2012. Web. 13 Dec. 2012.
Taylor, Paul. Review of The Changeling, dir. by Joe Hill-Gibbins. Independent 6
Feb. 2012. Web. 5 Oct. 2015.
The Changeling. Dir. Joe Hill-Gibbins. Perf. Daniel Cerqueira, Jessica Raine. The
Young Vic, Jan. 2012. Play.
———. Dir. Joe Hill-Gibbins. Perf. Zubin Varla and Sinead Matthews. The
Young Vic, Nov. 2012 (revival). Play.
Tripney, Natasha. ‘Changing The Changeling’. Exeunt. 13 Nov. 2012. Web. 5
Oct. 2015.
Trueman, Matt. Review of The Changeling, dir. by Joe Hill-Gibbins. Culture
Wars 6 Feb. 2012. Web. 6 Oct. 2015.
 CHAPTER 17

Ensaio.Hamlet: Adaptation as Rehearsal

as Essay

Pedro de Senna

Especular se o dia é dia, se a noite noite, se o tempo é tempo,

Se o ensaio é ensaio e se a peça é peça
É desperdiçar o dia, a noite, o tempo, o ensaio e a peça.
(Polônio / Fernando Eiras)
To expostulate if day is day, night night and time is time,
If rehearsal is rehearsal and if play is play
Were nothing but to waste day, night, time, rehearsal and play.
(Polônio / Fernando Eiras)1

In 2004, Brazilian ensemble Companhia (Cia) dos Atores peered into

Shakespeare’s Danish tragedy and brought to the public a production
which is described in the company’s website as an ‘autopsy’ of the play.
The choice of word is interesting, given the history of Brazilian literary
and cultural criticism, one of whose most important tropes is the notion
of anthropophagy—the act of eating up a foreign cultural artefact in
order to half-digest it, and regurgitate it back to the world, somewhat

P. de Senna (*) 
Middlesex University, London, UK
e-mail: P.DeSenna@MDX.AC.UK

© The Author(s) 2018 331

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0_17
332  P. de SENNA

modified. There is, of course, a great deal of playful irreverence in this

cannibalistic attitude. Paradoxically, there is also an acknowledgement
that Brazilian culture takes much of its nourishment from abroad, and
that what we offer in return might not be in any way a superior product.
The fact that the company claim they are performing an autopsy of
Hamlet suggests that their approach is perhaps a little more refined than
a digestive process; that this may be a less messy, more systematic way of
dismembering the play. What remains, though, is the underlying assump-
tion that the original text is dead. Yet, and again paradoxically, this post-
mortem examination reveals that the play is very much alive; perhaps
the appropriate term might have been a biopsy, or an exploratory sur-
gery, exposing much of the play’s internal life. In Ensaio.Hamlet, Cia
dos Atores’ exegesis of this most hallowed of theatre texts, the polysemy
of the Portuguese word ensaio, meaning both ‘rehearsal’ and ‘essay’, is
deliberately appropriated by the company, who use the rehearsal process
as a means to examine the play, and adapt it into a staged essay, one that
not only illuminates Hamlet itself, but an essay on the nature of theatre
in general, and the company’s own working processes in particular.
In the opening scene of the performance, the actors are milling
around the space as the audience enter. They light candles, play with
mirrors, set out objects in a circle. They talk to audience members, greet-
ing them and talking about Shakespeare’s play. They take seats, change
seats; pick out champagne glasses from a box, lay out a costume rack.
The performance is still being prepared, and yet it has already started …
Eventually, all the cast sit down on chairs, forming a circle, alongside the
objects, toys, props laid out on the floor.2 They are ready, it seems—that
magical moment, pregnant with anticipation, when a performance is
about to begin. And yet: one of the actors (Cesar Augusto) stands up
and picks up a jacket, which had been previously placed on the back of
his chair; he wears it—he will play Claudius; another (Fernando Eiras),
taps his own head, willing concentration—he will play Horatio; a third
one (Marcelo Olinto), starts to recite Hamlet’s first soliloquy (Oh that
this too too sullied flesh would melt…)3 to himself. Are they still pre-
paring? This lack of a clear delineation of the borders of performance,
this blurring of the boundaries between the world of the theatre and
the world of the play is reflected throughout the show in the cast’s rela-
tionship with their roles which, just like the objects scattered around
the stage, are ‘almost “found objects” of theatrical culture’ (Saadi 110).
Neither are these roles fixed—at different points in the performance,
 17  ENSAIO.HAMLET: ADAPTATION AS REHEARSAL AS ESSAY  333

actors will play different characters. Like everything else in this piece—
time, place—identity is also fluid. And as found objects, the roles can be
held, examined, passed on.
This chapter argues that rehearsal processes, critical approaches, and
adaptation are inextricably entangled in this performance; which, it pos-
its, is exemplary of contemporary global theatre-making practices. A
word of caution is needed here: what this chapter will not do is to ori-
entalise, make exotic this Brazilian Hamlet. While acknowledging there
is something particularly Brazilian in the way the text has been canni-
balized, linguistic and ethnic difference and specificity are taken as a
given, and do not form part of this discussion.4 Moreover, (and this may
come as a surprise to some readers) we Brazilians consider ourselves as
part of the West. Director Enrique Diaz makes this very clear, when he
states that one of the objectives of the production was ‘to ask ourselves
how to appropriate a heritage to which we have the right, to do what I
want with it today’ (Belusi C14).5 In this way, the company’s process of
adaptation is one that is informed by a sense of cultural ownership and
entitlement, which is perhaps different to the more reverent positioning
generally associated with Shakespearean productions in the Anglophone
world. Here, the role of translation comes more prominently into play.
As Alfredo Michel Modenessi suggests,

For all the reverence that he may command anywhere, it is precisely out-
side the English-speaking world that Shakespeare thrives from being in the
company of many ‘others’ who perform and transform his texts – not only
writers, directors and players, but translators, dramaturgs and audiences.
(104 [emphases in the original])

Translations of Shakespeare remove the ‘threat’ of Shakespearean lan-

guage from a production. They are by necessity transculturations—with
culture understood here as being a product of place and time—and
tend to be overwhelmingly domesticizing, at least with regard to the
language. What this adaptation has done, nonetheless, is a domesticiz-
ing that brings the play not only into the country of reception, but liter-
ally in-house, to the domos of the company. Moreover, not only the text,
but the performance itself is made familiar and brought into the vocabu-
lary of the Cia dos Atores, interjected with the company’s own mem-
ory, and that of individual performers. Discussing the role of memory,
and present cultural memory in forming adaptations, Suzanne Diamond
334  P. de SENNA

suggests that ‘adaptations, like other recollections, are ultimately just

overtures, tentative gestures aimed at connecting now with then’ (108).
In Ensaio.Hamlet the connection is threefold: between the company and
the text, between the company and its own history, and between the
company and its (often faithful, and therefore also carrying a history)
audience.
The action in the opening scene continues with Bel Garcia picking
up a lamp, testing it, and lighting specific parts of her own body. She
lights her footsteps, as she walks across the stage. Cesar Augusto screams,
suddenly a focus of concentration and alertness in the room. The senses
are awakened. The lamp, which had been following Garcia’s footsteps,
finds another body, a man (Felipe Rocha); it silhouettes him, working
its way up his body, until it finds his face. ‘Who’s there?’, he shouts, as
Marcellus. Garcia, as Francisco, responds: ‘I’m the one who asks Halt!
And say who you are’. We are transported to the ramparts of the castle at
Elsinore. The scene (equivalent of Hamlet I, 1) is played out. Of course,
this is, it should be clear by now, never a straightforward ‘playing out’ of
the scene. Actors shift roles, positionings; all inhabit many places at once.
There is something significant in the metatheatricality of this adapta-
tion, within the wider context of adaptations of Shakespeare. ‘In prose
fiction re-visions of Shakespearean plays […] which deploy first-person
narration’, Julie Sanders suggests, ‘a conscious effort is made to give a
voice, and in turn a set of comprehensible motives, to characters either
marginalized on, or completely absent from, the Shakespearean stage’
(140). While Sanders is writing about novels, the postmodern stance she
describes applies here too: however, the unreliability of narrative high-
lighted by the attention given to particular vantage points is extended
to encompass the unreliability of performance itself. And as well as an
unpacking of the drama, there is an unpicking of the threads that con-
nect performer and character, company and text, performance and
audience. Moreover, in the self-consciousness of Ensaio.Hamlet, voice
and motives are given not to hitherto marginalized characters, but to
the performers themselves, who also behave like both novelist and nar-
rator, at once unreliable (by definition) and earnest (by necessity).
Frances Babbage suggests that in contemporary performance, follow-
ing the physical theatre tradition, ‘the actor/performer, as opposed to
the character, will likely be the heart of an adaptation’ (14–15). This is
only partially true in the case of the Cia dos Atores: at the heart of their
adaptation of Hamlet is not the actor/performer, but their relationship
 17  ENSAIO.HAMLET: ADAPTATION AS REHEARSAL AS ESSAY  335

with the characters; a practice we might call—after Nicolas Borriaud—

‘relational adaptation’. This is of course not unique to the performance
in question: Ensaio.Hamlet may be seen as a case-study for relational
adaptation as a process inherent to the act of rehearsing and staging con-
temporary global theatres, where complex webs of personal and cultural
interrelations, and emotional, critical and intellectual responses come
into play.
The duality of meaning in the word ensaio, then, does not only apply
to the signifier, but also to signified(s), and to this specific referent.
Fátima Saadi suggests that in Ensaio.Hamlet:

Artifice, theatrical fiction is laid bare, not only in the actor’s work but also
in the use of the other scenic elements. Through this move, Hamlet is
transformed into an essay/rehearsal, into an experiment which separates,
spreads out the elements with which it works, thus underlying their exist-
ence, their concreteness…6 (108)

This advances an understanding of how the performance might work as

ensaio: an opening up of the play, which becomes mutual for both per-
formers and audience. It is as if Hamlet and the act of making theatre
have become one, the adapted text and the process of adaptation imbri-
cated in such a way that makes them functionally indistinguishable: both
terms in the binomial Ensaio.Hamlet operate together, dissecting the
company’s own history and identity. Moreover, the all-important dot
in the middle of the title functions as a hinge, in a kind of see-saw: the
Ensaio has an effect on Hamlet; Hamlet affects the Ensaio. Or, to put it
another way: work done on a source text on the one hand; and the text
itself on the other—together, both shed light on each other and on the
individuals engaged in that work.
This is certainly true of canonical texts, which carry that aura of
authority conferred by history and by criticism—and yes, more often
than not (and undoubtedly in the case of Hamlet), by quality, that elu-
sive concept around which many debates have been raised. I would like
to propose, however, the following logical trail: first, Sanders proposes
that ‘adaptation becomes a veritable marker of canonical status; citation
infers authority’ (9). Adaptation here becomes a canon-building exer-
cise, as much as anything else. Second, Margherita Laera suggests that
‘the mechanisms of adaptation and those of theatricality have some-
thing fundamental in common’ (3). Any theatrical production will by
336  P. de SENNA

necessity operate an intersemiotic translation, from page to stage. If we

accept these two simple premises to be true, then the very act of stag-
ing confers canonicity upon a text. Still, history indeed confers not only
authority, but an archaeological record, which can be read as palimp-
sest. After so many editions and cultural iterations and mediations, asks
Margaret Jane Kidnie, ‘What is it that we call Hamlet?’ (Dancing 134).
A text with so long and varied a production history as Hamlet carries
with it the uncanny ghosts of productions past. And just as important as
the production history is the reception history, and the expectations that
any new version immediately raises in audiences and readers. Elsewhere,
Kidnie suggests that:

An encounter with an instance of dramatic production prompts one to

either find a place for it within an already-existing conception of a dramatic
work (or to make a place for it, if necessary, by adjusting one’s expectations
of the work), or to identify it as a first encounter with what seems, in one’s
own experience and according to one’s own historically and culturally con-
tingent criteria, a new work. (Shakespeare 32 [emphasis in the original])

Any reading of the play—and a production is a reading—will excavate

and reveal the many lives of the text, which constantly opens up and
unfolds itself, kaleidoscope-like, reflecting and refracting the gaze of the
reader/viewer.
It is this refractory capacity of production work that allows for the
duality contained in the word ensaio. John Gross suggests that by casting
academic criticism aside, one can ‘make room for alternative approaches,
for the more informal or discursive or—on occasion—more inspired tra-
ditions of talking about Shakespeare’ (x). Though Gross means writing
practices when he refers to ‘talking about Shakespeare’, the same argu-
ment applies with regard to performance practice—and practice for per-
formance, which is after all what a rehearsal is. A rehearsal is therefore
also a form of criticism, a testing out of ideas related to the text. I am
suggesting here, perhaps not controversially, that the much-bandied term
practice-as-research is pleonastic—at least in relation to theatre and per-
formance. Every artistic practice worthy of the name, every rehearsal, is
also a piece of research. Contemporary performance in particular is espe-
cially critical. In this sense, the essay on Hamlet that the Cia dos Atores
presents us with on stage is indeed ‘inspired’, and part of a long inter-
textual tradition. Writing about Robert Lepage’s Elsinore, for instance,
 17  ENSAIO.HAMLET: ADAPTATION AS REHEARSAL AS ESSAY  337

Kidnie points out that ‘we were witness to, and vicariously took part in,
one performer’s experiential encounter with “Hamlet” [both character
and play]’ (Dancing 140). Thus, Ensaio.Hamlet is a piece of criticism
that is also self-conscious: taking as starting points the company’s experi-
ence of, and attempts at, tackling the text, it openly discusses the dif-
ficulties involved in these processes. This gives us clues as to what the
aesthetics of the performance may be, a piece of theatre in which the
continuum that goes between performer and character is traversed before
the audience.
It is, moreover, a piece of presentist criticism—an acknowledgement
that it is not the past that informs the present; rather, the present shapes
our understanding of the past, and in fact constitutes it, in a relation that
is at the very least, dialogic. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes propose
that this critical stance, ‘[d]eliberately employing crucial aspects of the
present as a trigger for its investigations, its centre of gravity will accord-
ingly be “now”, rather than “then”’ (4). I argue that if a rehearsal is a
form of criticism, it is most certainly presentist, in that it is embodied,
living criticism. The see-saw of rehearsal and text is very much at work
in this instance. There is no escape from the here and now in the mate-
riality of the rehearsal room. In presentist criticism, proposes Hawkes,
the present is ‘a factor actively to be sought out, grasped and perhaps,
as a result, understood’ (3). In rehearsal, the artist is not only seeking
the present, but also actively seeking presence. And more than that: a
rehearsal, as the process of preparation for a performance, has the pre-
occupation of creating instances of criticism which are present, every
time they are repeated. It is this search that the company exposes, when
bringing their ensaio before the public. This is made clear in the inter-
lude created by the company between acts one and two. In this scene,
the house-lights go up, and the company begins to discuss some trivia
about Shakespeare and the play; this turns into a choreographed move-
ment with chairs, where the company travels around the stage, sitting,
lying down, standing up, walking. It is as if they are searching for some-
thing—a configuration, a positioning in relation to the text; a moment of
true presence. They play with a wind-up toy skull and observe it move.
The performers’ movements continue, except for one of them, Fernando
Eiras, who had thus far been playing Horatio. He addresses the audi-
ence: ‘it seems like we never arrive at Shakespeare. Not that we have to
arrive at exactly one definitive place […]’. French critic Georges Banu
writes of the rehearsal as the ‘crossing of a ford that separates the text
338  P. de SENNA

and the scene’, one which engenders a ‘veritable oral literature, gallery
of portraits and an inventory of gestures’ (126).7 The company here are
physically articulating this crossing, another continuum through which
they travel.
As mentioned earlier, after history and criticism, the third element on
the ‘tripod of canonicity’ (if I may call it so)—quality—is a very loaded
term. It is the attribute that allows a work to endure, in a self-perpet-
uating process. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith puts it: ‘Nothing endures
like endurance’ (50). I will not venture into the debate around its mean-
ings, assumptions surrounding it, and the implications of such assump-
tions, all too complex and contested for the scope of this chapter.8
Except, to say that for me a great piece of theatre, written or staged,
needs to do three things: it needs to (a) move—engage emotionally at
some level, be it character, narrative, situation, or aesthetic; it should
(b) entertain—through interest in the plot, the surface of the text, the
performances or the spectacle; and (c) educate—it must teach some-
thing about the world, humanity, theatre itself. A good piece of thea-
tre will do two out of the three; if it does only one, it does not interest
me. Ensaio.Hamlet, in my eyes, does all three. Not all reviewers agree,
though: the late Barbara Heliodora, one of Brazil’s most acclaimed thea-
tre critics and renowned Shakespeare expert, suggested that ‘there isn’t a
single moment that expresses, even if misguidedly, any insight into what
the author created’. She continues: ‘there is always the dubious excuse of
the “re-reading” but this also has to have some meaning’ (321–322).9
The insistence on gaining insight into the author’s work is of course
reflective of an implicit source-text bias that much of adaptation studies,
and indeed presentist criticism, has sought to dispel. Kidnie, for exam-
ple, suggests that ‘textual-theatrical instances are productive of the work’
(Shakespeare 65 [emphasis in the original]). In any case, even if a source-
text bias was assumed and embraced, Heliodora’s verdict is rash. Jeferson
Lessa, another reviewer, avers that ‘Hamlet is there: deconstructed, yes,
but there’. He explains: ‘Without wanting to be Hamlet, Ensaio.Hamlet
discusses questions about the act of staging d’aprés Hamlet, in an intel-
ligent, agile and extremely sophisticated interpretation’ (322–323).10
Of course, in a way, Heliodora is right. The company’s objective
was never to gain insight into ‘what the author created’. Artistic direc-
tor Enrique Diaz has stated that ‘The proposal is to truly reveal things
about us, to be penetrated by this heritage’ (Belusi C14).11 Eiras’ address
to the audience explicitly tells us that at the centre of the piece is the
 17  ENSAIO.HAMLET: ADAPTATION AS REHEARSAL AS ESSAY  339

company, engaged in an act of reaching out towards a non-definitive

bard. What follows the performer’s confession of the difficulty in dealing
with the author’s work is something remarkable. The performance dis-
tances itself further from the text, from Shakespeare himself, and elabo-
rates on the company’s relation with the Western canon. Eiras carries on
speaking:

With the great texts, it is like this, with Chekov (he stands and walks across
the stage) – we were doing a run of Chekov’s Three Sisters in São Paulo,
first Saturday of the run, twenty minutes into the show and nothing hap-
pened, nothing, nothing, nothing […] we felt like we were outside the
performance […]. I played Baron Tuzenbach (puts his hand on his chest), in
love with Irina, I would tell Irina – ‘Irina look what I brought you’, I’d go
inside and pick up a spinning-top, I’d bring it out… and put the spinning-
top centre-stage.

(He goes to the circle of objects, gets a spinning-top, winds it up. […] The
spinning-top makes a whistling noise, as it spins).

Everybody would stop and listen to the sound of the spinning-top.

(The whole cast stands around the spinning-top, watching it spin; it spins,
and little by little begins to wobble.)

It was a magical scene, I thought it could save the performance […] I

went, picked-up the spinning top, nervously, I picked it up, entered the
stage, the spinning top… ([…] Bel Garcia picks up another spinning top
from the circle of objects […] and falls onto the floor with it)… fell from my
hands, it shattered on the floor.

(All stop and look at Garcia, lying there, with the spinning-top in her hands)

That cast, who were nowhere, suddenly found themselves somewhere. A

place of danger, but it was real, something real happened on stage.

(He walks towards Garcia, picks up the spinning top from her hands, looks at
it, says)

That’s when the performance began.

And Act II, scene 1 of this very idiosyncratic Hamlet begins. Still, the
interruption is apposite. The breaking of the spinning-top in Chekov
provides the opportunity for a break in the action in Shakespeare. The
wind-up skull with which the company had been playing, reminiscent of
340  P. de SENNA

the iconic memento mori of Shakespeare’s play, is also a reminder to Eiras

of that other toy that belongs in the company’s repertoire and history; a
toy which, in turn, reminds him of the ephemeral and precarious nature
of performance, a memento mori of theatre itself. The company’s jour-
ney to Shakespeare runs past Chekov. The audience are asked to negoti-
ate the route of this journey with the performers, now in Russia, now in
Denmark, always in the theatre, in Brazil (or wherever the show is being
presented). In dealing with this most archetypal of texts, the Cia dos
Atores address questions of universality, memory, and adaptability, tak-
ing the Elizabethan play and filtering it through contemporary Brazilian
eyes—while making reference to the Western theatrical tradition to
which both company and text belong.
The relational nature of adaptation, then, is trans-historical and
multi-faceted. Many sources of course highlight a tendency towards
investigations of the relationship between performers and audiences in
contemporary theatre. For example, Sarah Gorman writes of Richard
Maxwell and his New York City Players: ‘His refusal to allow actors to for-
get the presence of the audience suggests that Maxwell intends to retain
the motivation, or rationale, for theatre-going as part of the evening’s
agenda’ (197). What differentiates the work of Cia dos Atores in Ensaio.
Hamlet is that in their agenda is also an exploration of the rationale for
theatre-making. In common with other contemporary companies is the
fact that their aesthetic is marked by an emphasis on the poetics of thea-
tre. So not only the rationale for theatre-making, but this making itself
becomes part of the aesthetic experience. Jen Harvie suggests that this
may be ‘[a]t least partly because the only shared international language it
can confidently presume is the language of theatre’ (4). Receiving inter-
national acclaim and numerous awards, the production’s wearing of traces
of its own creation on stage only reaffirms the company’s insertion into
a global system of production and consumption of theatre. I have criti-
cized this homogenizing ‘language of theatre’ mono-culture elsewhere, as
an elite endeavour which tends to erase real difference in the guise of a
superficial multi- or interculturalism (de Senna 204). Such criticism and
my earlier assertion that I would not orientalise the company’s work not-
withstanding, there is something inherently subversive in the hybrid mix-
ture of reverence and irreverence with which Cia dos Atores approaches
Hamlet. This is perhaps a characteristic common to Latin American prac-
tices, used to ‘incorporat[ing] global strategies in heterogenetic fashion’
(Modenessi 109). Modenessi opposes this heterogenetic approach to the
 17  ENSAIO.HAMLET: ADAPTATION AS REHEARSAL AS ESSAY  341

homogenizing tendencies I have identified. The piece becomes not only

metatheatrical but also postdramatic, in a way akin, but not identical to
that identified by Lehmann (2006). Here, the postdramatic operates like
the postcolonial: European drama, the metropolis, is commented on by
performance coming from a former European colony. The fact that the
production was then shown in Europe reinforces a sense of the uncanny—
a mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar.
Hawkes points out (11–12) that Freud’s blurring of the distinction
between heimlich and unheimlich carries over to the idea presented by
Foucault in ‘Orders of Discourse’: that ‘commentary’s only role is to
say finally, what has silently been articulated deep down’ (Foucault 13
[emphasis in the original]). Crucially and paradoxically, though, it must
‘say, for the first time, what has already been said, and repeat tirelessly
what was, nevertheless, never said’ (Foucault 13). The primary/second-
ary relation between texts is disrupted; the familiar exists within the unfa-
miliar, and vice-versa. The repetition (a word to which I will return),
then, contains the creation, the copy contains the original. Therefore
‘[c]riticism has at least a prima-facie case also to be seen as primary.
Or rather, the whole primary-secondary relationship begins to seem
ungroundable: perhaps there is, in respect of the literature/criticism
nexus, no primary, no resting place, no home?’ (Hawkes 12 [emphasis in
the original]). This of course has important implications for the notion
of staging as a form of criticism, the relationship between performance
and drama, and for the study of adaptations in general.
Back at the ramparts, in Act I, scene 1, this blurring is played out in
very concrete terms. Felipe Rocha, as Bernardo, is describing the appa-
rition of the ghost, ‘The bell then beating one’—Malu Galli places a
large transparent plastic bag she had been handling over her body; she
is playing the phantom of the dead king, and is lit by Bel Garcia’s lamp.
Rocha now takes Marcellus’s lines and exhorts Horatio (Fernando Eiras)
to confront the apparition. Horatio crawls towards a pile of books, and
picks up the first one he can get his hands on. He opens it, brings it close
to a candle and reads:

What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,

Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march?
342  P. de SENNA

The presence of ‘the book’ in theatrical adaptations is a common

trope. Here, though, the object seems to be performing a triple role: on
a narrative level, it appears as kind of holy book containing words capa-
ble of connecting with the dead king; on a meta-narrative level, it marks
the performance as an adaptation, in a way also performing a séance of
sorts with the dead playwright; and on a meta-theatrical level, the book
points to the fact that it is a rehearsal, lines are being read.
The action continues and as Malu Galli/the ghost walks away, an
agitated Felipe Rocha pulls the plastic bag out from over her head. The
eerie music stops, lights go up, and all seem disappointed that the ghost
story has been interrupted. Eiras walks back to the pile of books and
places it down. ‘Well…’, he says. Rocha, plastic bag in hand, speaks:

It happened exactly like this, exactly like this. Malu was here with this
plastic bag, there was a group of people gathered there. Some music was
playing, this lamp was on. These candles, these mirrors were there, exactly
where they are now. I was speaking to this group of people … I was saying
that the clock, exactly like now, struck one.

The light fades again. The same music returns. Rocha puts the plastic bag over
his own body, as Galli had done previously.

The scene proceeds with the cast rearranged. The planes of reality are
blurred. Performers speak as characters, but at the same time they refer
to fellow players by their names. It is as if the company themselves are
being haunted. Of course, they are indeed rehearsing the apparition of
the Ghost. The ghost scene is paradigmatic in that King Hamlet’s phan-
tom does himself return, establishing a pattern of repetition within the
narrative itself, which is then played with by the company. Once again,
the drama and the performance meet in the uncanny metatheatricality of
the ensaio.
Not coincidentally, the French word for rehearsal is répétition.
Through a linguistic and etymological web of associations, we see
rehearsal as a piece of criticism, which is itself a form of repeating, one
that is not secondary, but ‘whose aim is the generation of the new in
terms of the only kind of newness we can recognise, because its source is
the old’ (Hawkes 20). Every attempt at repetition is an exercise in differ-
ence and variation. It is, in other words, an adaptation. If, as pointed out
earlier, the rehearsal is a form of criticism, it is also a way of testing the
 17  ENSAIO.HAMLET: ADAPTATION AS REHEARSAL AS ESSAY  343

limits of a text. Contemporary rehearsal practices stretch, reduce, distil

plays into new dramaturgies, while still remaining, essentially, the same.
Director Ivo van Hove suggests his task is to ‘X-ray a text’ (54). This
chapter has argued that any rehearsal is also an exercise in adaptation.
Georges Banu suggests that ‘to rehearse [répéter] is to engage in the
battle of the same and the different’ (127).12 This is a process of which
theatre makers are more and more aware even if the production of differ-
ence in sameness has always been key to theatre practice. What contem-
porary practice uniquely exhibits—as exemplified by Cia dos Atores, but
also van Hove’s Toneelgroep or the New York City Players of Richard
Maxwell—in ‘a present day climate where theatrical and critical cultures
intersect’ (Hodgdon 157) is that relational aspect which turns the very
process of staging into a process of self-autopsy. In the Brazilian context,
Silvana Garcia proposes that, in a way, theatre groups or companies in
their concrete formations, facing all the vicissitudes of existence in an
under-funded environment and having to create models and praxes in
order to survive as entities, already are their own first product (220). I
would argue that this is not only a Brazilian phenomenon, but a ten-
dency that can be observed internationally, environmental differences
notwithstanding.
This process of self-definition and affirmation has a number of shared
characteristics, including a shift towards devising, a process commonly
associated with adaptation. Cia dos Atores oscillates between devising
and the text in this piece. In Brazil, however, the term ‘devising’ finds no
translation, and is seldom used: there is an understanding that devising is
simply staging, or perhaps that staging always involves a degree of devis-
ing, adapting. But, beyond sameness and difference, there is another
meaning implicit in Banu’s assertion, and that involves the role of mem-
ory. He explains:

Through the linguistic declension of the term [répétition], we find the

contradictory duality that founds the paradox of rehearsal: it is at first a
creative practice and then only an act of reminiscence, a discovery and then
a memory, a doing and a re-doing. A double interrogation animates it:
how to find and how to fix? (Banu 128)13

In this respect, adaptation is also a form of memory; rehearsal, a form

of historiography; memory, a repetition. In the case of Ensaio.Hamlet,
this is a memory of Shakespeare, a history of the Cia dos Atores and
344  P. de SENNA

its members, remembering. In the final scene of the production, the

equivalent of Hamlet V, 2, this double nature is enacted. The world of
the play (where characters live) and the world of the theatre (where the
text exists) meet again. The performers play and act in that intermedi-
ary, liminal space—the rehearsal. Fernando Eiras and Felipe Rocha are
sitting down. Eiras asks: ‘There was a duel, wasn’t there?’, which Rocha
confirms: ‘Yes, in the end’. Eiras then asks again: ‘And I was called,
wasn’t I?’. In the space of a line, he seems to have gone from commen-
tator to character, with the flick of a pronoun. ‘You were’, says Rocha;
is he replying to Hamlet or to Eiras? After a moment of silence during
which Eiras lights up a cigarette, he states: ‘I’ll go’. The other actors pull
up chairs and sit scattered around the space. Without standing up, they
recite lines from the scene, interspersing the intimate moments between
Hamlet and Horatio prior to the duel, when the former admits to being
unnerved, with lines from the duel itself. The scene is thus not played,
not read, but recited collectively. The continuum that goes between
playing a character and reading a text is again explored, with this simple
device. And yet, by the end, the audience are so invested in the moment,
in the characters’ and the performers’ journeys, that we cannot help but
be moved.14 In this adaptation as rehearsal as essay something new is
being created, just as something old is being dismembered, and remem-
bered.

Notes
1. I am grateful to Roberto Carlos Moretto (2009), who reproduced the
performance text transcribed by Daniela Fortes in his MA dissertation.
(My translation, always henceforth.)
2. The piece was conceived in the round, but also adjusted for different
spaces and performed end-on, as I saw it in the Teatro do Jockey, Rio de
Janeiro, in June 2004.
3. There is some controversy over this line in Shakespeare, with some schol-
ars and editors opting for ‘solid flesh’ over ‘sullied flesh’; I am guided in
my choice here by the Brazilian version, which used the word maculada
in Portuguese. The text of the performance was based upon the fluent
and poetic translation of Hamlet by Millôr Fernandes.
4. For a discussion of intercultural issues surrounding Shakespeare in Latin
American contexts, see Rick J. Santos, who has suggested that Brazil is a
‘most fertile territory where numerous productions, adaptations, parodies
and scholarship have bloomed’ (Santos 13).
 17  ENSAIO.HAMLET: ADAPTATION AS REHEARSAL AS ESSAY  345

5. ‘[Trata-se de] nos indagar como se apropriar de uma herança a qual temos
direito para fazer o que eu quiser com ela hoje’.
6. O artifício, a ficção teatral é posta a nu, não só no trabalho do ator mas
também na utilização dos demais elementos cênicos. Por este gesto,
Hamlet é transformado num ensaio, num experimento que separa,
espaceja os elementos com os quais trabalha, sublinhando assim sua
existência, sua concretude …
7. Original full quotation: ‘La répétition est un entre-deux, et lors de la
traversée de ce gué qui sépare le texte et la scène les aventures souvent
abondent, les personnalités se déclarent, les communautés se constituent
ou explosent, bref la création s’accompagne d’effets de vie au cœur même
du théâtre. C’est pourquoi la répétition engendre une véritable littéra-
ture orale, galerie de portraits et inventaire de gestes accomplis dans cette
recherche à plusieurs qui précède l’arrivée du premier spectateur’.
8. Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Contingencies of Value offers a detailed exami-
nation of canonicity and the value-judgements associated with it.
9. ‘Não há um único momento que se expresse, mesmo que enganada,
qualquer penetração maior no sentido do que o autor criou. […] sem-
pre existe a dúbia desculpa da ‘releitura’, porém também esta tem de ter
algum sentido’.
10. ‘Hamlet está lá: desconstruído, sim, mas lá. […] Sem querer ser Hamlet,
Ensaio.Hamlet discute questões sobre o ato de encenar a partir de
Hamlet numa interpretação inteligente, ágil e extremamente sofisticada’.
11. ‘A proposta é realmente revelar as coisas sobre nós, sermos penetrados
pela herança’.
12. ‘Répéter, c’est s’engager dans le combat du même et du différent’.
13. ‘A travers la déclinaison linguistique du terme, l’on retrouve la dualité
contradictoire qui fonde le paradoxe de la répétition : elle est d’abord
une pratique de création et ensuite seulement un acte de réminiscence,
une découverte et après une mémoire, un faire et un re-faire. Une double
interrogation l’anime : comment trouver et comment fixer?’
14. On the night I saw the performance, a man sitting in front of me could
not applaud in the end: face in his hands, he sobbed.

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 Index

A al-Alqqad, Abbas Mahmud, 225

Abdullah II, King, 215
Abjection, 239
Abusaada, Omar, 221, 222
Actor’s Gang, The (Dream Play,
Euphoria, Hysteria), 204
Adams, John (The Death of
Klinghoffer), 58
Adaptation, 5–9, 11, 13, 15, 22, 25,
28, 33, 50, 51, 56, 57, 70, 73,
79, 80, 85–87, 97, 104, 121,
122, 124, 128, 133, 136, 137,
139, 143–147, 150–152, 154,
156–158, 161–163, 166–168,
170, 171, 175, 179, 195, 199,
214, 227, 231, 236, 240, 257,
263, 269, 276, 277, 287, 289,
295–298, 311–314, 318, 321,
322, 325, 329, 333–335, 338,
340, 342–344
Adaptation studies, 9, 62, 162, 296
Adapturgy, 122, 137–139
Adorno, Theodor, 281, 289
Aerosmith, 279
Afghanistan, 162, 163, 165–172
Agency, 78, 238, 301
al-Assad, Bashar, 215
al-Assad, Hafez, 215, 219
alazzeh, Razan, 237
al-Kaseasbeh, Mutah, 216
Allen, Greg, 251, 252, 269, 271
Allen, Lori, 192, 226
Alpert, Herb and the Tijuana Brass
Band, 279, 282
American repertory Theatre, 204
Antigone, 222
Anti-theatrical, 252, 256, 257
Aoun, Iman, 231, 237, 238, 242, 243
Apocalypse Exhibition (2000), 305
Appropriation, 80, 226, 277
Arabic (fusha, literary arabic ‘amiyaa,
colloquial Arabic), 217, 218, 224,
225, 234
Arab World, 218
Artaud, Antonin, 128
Artistic intentions, 296, 314
Ashtar, 236
Ashtar Theatre, 2, 231, 232, 234, 236
Assemblage, 275, 287
Augusto, Cesar, 332, 334
Auschwitz, 145, 148, 151

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 349

K. Reilly (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation
in Theatre, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59783-0
350  Index
Austin, J.L., 301
Authority, 20, 26, 28, 76, 78, 162,
233, 240, 252, 257, 268, 335
B Breath, 102, 124, 137, 329
Babbage, Frances, 334
Baines, Roger, 300
Bakhtinian grotesque, 326, 328
Banu, Georges, 337, 343
Barber, C.L., 300
Barbie, 195, 204–206, 210
Barker, Stu, 10, 128
Barnette, Jane, 177
Barthes, Roland, 296, 319, 329
Barton, John, 313
Bay-Cheng, Sarah, 100, 108
Beardsley, Monroe, 296
Beatles, The, 280
Beckett, Samuel, 32, 200, 257, 264,
326, 328
Bedouin, 218
Beethoven, 102, 116
Benjamin, Walter, 162, 164, 165, 169,
170
Bergen Belsen, 144, 145, 149, 153,
154
Beyoncé, 327
Bigot, Georges, 283
Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 162,
163, 172
Birringer, Johannes, 70
Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, 290
Bloomgarten, Kermit, 146, 147
Boal, Augusto, 231
Boerman, Theu, 152
Bogart, Ann, 277, 289
Book, 20, 35, 36, 39, 82, 125,
138, 146, 154, 167, 170–172,
178–180, 182, 202, 242, 253,
263, 268, 304, 305, 342
Border Crossings, 231, 232, 234–236
Boucher, Étienne, 54
Böwe, Julie, 111, 114
Bowie, David, 179, 183, 186
Boyle, T.C., 168
Brantley, Ben, 114
Brater, Jessica Silsby, 326
Breur, Lee, 25, 326
Brisbin, David, 31, 32
British Sign Language, 199
Brovig-Hanssen, Ragnhild, 282, 287
Brown, Arvin, 181, 183, 258
Bryan, Karen M., 59
Buch, Achim, 83
Buhl, Brendan, 265
Bulbur, Nawwar, 224
C
Cabbage Patch Doll, 261, 265, 266
Calvino, Italo, 22
Canon, 256, 293, 304, 317, 318, 335,
339
Castorf, Frank, 71
Cavendish, Dominic, 200
Cerqueira, Daniel, 324
Changeling, The, 317–322, 325
Chapman Brothers (Dino and Jake),
301, 304–306, 311, 313
Cheatham, Wallace, 58
Chekhov, Anton, 104, 276, 289
Children’s Theatre Company of
Minneapolis, 290
Christensen, Inger, 111–113
Christmas Carol, A, 290
Cia dos Atores, 332–334, 336, 340,
343
Clarke, Paul, 102
Claycomb, Ryan, 172, 215, 227
Cleland, John, 175, 176, 182, 187
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 168
Collaboration, 5, 15, 16, 27, 30, 36,
38, 75, 78, 85, 98, 171, 208,

209, 231, 232, 237, 240, 242,
243, 296
Collage, 35, 73, 276, 278, 281, 282,
317
Collected Works of Thomas Middleton,
319
Collective, 6, 11, 20, 21, 25, 27, 28,
32, 35, 45, 50, 86, 114, 125,
276, 283, 291, 344
Congruity/incongruity, 278, 282, 285
Connor, J.D., 162
Cornerstone Theatre Company, 277,
282, 284, 290
Coward, Noel, 10, 11, 63, 123, 136
Crane, Hart, 122, 123
Crawford, Cheryl, 146–148
Creed, Martin, 306
Crimp, Martin, 82
Cubism, 98
Culturally offensive, 168, 171
Cultural politics, 214
Curie, Marie, 27–30, 32–35, 45
Cyrus, Miley, 182
D Elevator Repair Service, 290
D, Chuck, 279, 282
Danger Mouse (The Grey Album),
276, 280
Dari, 163, 165
Davis, Kirstie, 199
de Burgh, Alison, 323
De-historicization, 275, 287
Dempsey, Joe, 260, 261, 263, 264,
266
Descartes, René, 187
Devised adaptation, 6, 8, 26
Devising, 6, 8, 9, 11, 15, 17–22, 26,
28, 70, 74–76, 78, 79, 81, 82,
84–87, 103, 277, 283, 343
Diachronic, 177, 267, 291, 308
Dialectic, 62, 176, 177, 296–298,
308, 313
Index   351
Diamond, Suzanne, 333
Diaz, Enrique, 333, 338
Dickens, Charles, 290
Diegesis, 252, 257
Dionne, Craig, 43, 226
Disability/ability, 32, 34, 56, 74, 76,
78, 98, 107, 145, 154, 203, 204,
206, 215, 226, 242, 243, 280,
313, 326
Disasters of war, 295, 296, 302, 311
Documentary theatre, 275, 276
Dolls, 59, 112, 137, 205–208
Donnelan, Declan, 72
Dramaturgy (new play dramaturgy,
production dramaturgy), 73, 121,
122, 128, 137, 138, 200
Durlacher, Jessica, 144, 151–158
E
Eales, Alex, 77
Eiras, Ferdinand, 332, 337, 338,
340–342, 344
Electronic Control Committee, 276,
279
Eliot, T.S. (Four Quartets), 100
Empathy, 148, 227
Ender, Evelyn, 107
Ensaio.Hamlet, 332, 334–338, 340,
342, 343
Erased De Kooning Drawing, 304
Estrangement, 259, 261
Eucharist, 300, 301
European Commission, 236
Eurpides (Medea, Trojan Women,
Helen), 276
Evans, Christine, 195, 196, 204–206,
208, 210
Evans, Dean, 260–263, 265, 266, 268
Exeunt, 322
Ex Machina, 49, 51–53, 55, 56, 63,
209
352  Index

F Ghosts/ghosting, 41, 45, 113, 124,

Fairy tales, 6, 8, 11, 13 136, 157, 209, 232, 234, 260,
Falls, Robert, 267 278, 314, 318, 329, 336, 341,
Fanny Hill, 175–181, 185, 187, 189 342
Fedda, Yasmin, 221 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 80
Felipe, Liliane, 29, 36–39, 41, 42 Global south, 214, 224
Fibonacci sequence, 111 Globe Theatre, 6
Fidelity, infidelity, 6, 7, 9, 63, 70, 80, Globe to Globe Festival, 231
101, 143, 144, 148, 153, 156, Goldman, Derek, 222, 223
161, 162, 167–170, 172, 214, Goodman Theatre, 251, 267
267, 288, 296, 318, 321 Goodrich, Frances, 144, 147–153,
Fidelity reflex, 162 156, 157
Fifty-Nine Productions, 98 Goold, Rupert, 295–298, 303, 304,
Fillion, Carl, 51 308–314
Fischlin, Daniel, 50 Gorman, Sarah, 340
Foley, 69, 72, 77, 101–103, 111, 112 Gothic Literature, 254
Foot fetish, 175, 176, 183, 185, 186 Govan, Emma, 9, 17
Forced Entertainment, 76, 175, 241 Goya, 295, 296, 302–306, 309–313,
Foucault, Michel, 319, 341 320
Fragmentation, 102, 106, 110, 196, Grady, Hugh, 337
200 Graeae Theatre Company, 197
Frank, Anne, 29, 144, 148, 151–153, Green, Germaine, 178
157, 158 Greenfield, Merrie, 261, 262, 264,
Frank, Otto, 145–147 265
Frankfurt School, 80, 145, 281 Grose, Carl, 7, 10, 17, 21, 22
Freres Corbusiers, Les, 290 Gross, Robert F., 253, 255, 256
Freshwater, Helen, 73 Gussow, Mel, 59
Friedman, Sharon, 107 Guth, Lisa, 111
Fry, Gareth, 101, 102

H
G Habeas corpus, 196, 200, 211
Gallagher, Cheryl, 175, 177–179, Handke, Peter, 70, 73, 77, 79, 84
181–185 Harris, Geraldine, 165, 167, 325
Galli, Malu, 341, 342 Hartinger, Dorothee, 84
Garcia, Bel, 334, 339, 341 Hartmann, Andreas, 77
Garcia, Silvana, 343 Harvie, Jen, 78, 340
Gawlich, Cathleen, 111 Haverty, Michael, 121
Gaza Monologues, The, 231 Hawkes, Terence, 224, 337, 341
Georgetown, 222, 223 Headlong, 295, 298, 312
Gestic music, 177, 186 Heddon, Dee, 75, 77, 82, 84
 Index   353

Heliodora, Barbara, 338 Khan, Hanif, 164

Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara, 338 Kidnie, Margaret J., 267, 318, 321,
Hille, Anastasia, 103, 110, 209, 222, 336, 338
232, 233, 236–238 King Lear, 25, 224, 225
Hill-Gibbons, Joe, 318 Kite Runner, The, 161, 163, 165,
Hip-hop, 276, 279, 286, 327 168–172
Hitler, Adolf, 145, 152 Knowles, Jack, 77
Homer, 237, 239 Krebs, Katya, 71
Human rights, 226 Kubeck, Elizabeth, 187
Human rights industry, 214, 226 Kurup, Shishir, 284
Hussein, Sadaam, 217, 238 Kyd, Thomas, 300

I L
Iconoclasm, 298, 300–304, 311
Intermediality, 70, 103, 115, 318, 344
International collaboration, 240
Intertemporal adaptation, intratem-
poral adaptation. See Laera,
Margherita
Intertextuality, 8, 10, 13, 23, 76
ISIS, 216, 223
It’s a Wonderful Life, 147
Itzhaki, Tali, 50
J 60–64, 314, 336
Jameson, Frederic (political uncon-
scious, postmodernism), 200,
280, 281, 286, 287, 297
Jay-Z, The Black Album, 280
Jig, 131
K
Kapadia, Parmita, 226
Kaplan, Mordecai, 148
Kekis, Olga, 211
Kennesaw State University, 121, 122
Kent, Alan, 5, 6, 16
Kessissoyou, Stefan, 77, 80
Kettle, Liz, 101, 103, 107, 109
Laboratory for Global Performance
and Politics, 222
Labour, 84, 86, 87, 105, 111, 114,
123
Laera, Margherita, 80, 86, 335
La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 187
Lavender, Andy, 56, 78
Lehmann, Hans Thies, 50, 200, 341
Leong, Paige, 284
Ledger, Adam, 69
Leopold, Ronald, 153
Lepage, Robert, 50, 51, 53–58,
Lessa, Jeferson, 338
Levin, James, 57–59, 144, 147
Levin, Meyer, 145–149, 151–153,
156, 157
Little Angel Theatre, 19
LMDA (Literary Managers and
Dramaturgs of the Americas), 121
M
Mabou Mines
Bèlen: A Book of Hours, 26–29, 36,
38, 39, 43–45
Dead End Kids, 26, 28–35, 42–45
354  Index
Macbeth, 276–278, 282, 284–287,
290
MacHomer, 290
Macmillan, Duncan, 75, 79, 81
Manovich, Lev, 108
Marlowe, Christopher, 295, 296,
300–302, 304, 305, 310–314
Marquez, Gabrielle Garcia, 19, 20
Marx, Groucho, 253
Mash-up, 276–282, 284–291, 327
McBurney, Simon, 78
McLeish, Lily, 77, 78
Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, 276, 277,
282, 287
Mee, Charles L., 210
Melodrama, 202, 253–255, 258, 261,
268
Mermikides, Alex, 15, 18, 21, 22, 241
Metropolitan Opera, 49, 52, 57–59,
63
Middleton, Thomas, 317, 319, 321,
322
Miller, Arthur, 146, 165
Milling, Jane, 75, 77, 82, 84, 332
Milton, 297
Mimesis, 252, 257
Mirror, 19, 52, 53, 55, 109–111, 113,
114, 126, 133, 310, 312, 313,
332, 342
Mirror stage, 109, 110
Mitchell, Bill, 10, 19, 22, 69–75, 77
Mitchell, Katie
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, 70, 75,
77, 79, 83–85, 87
Attempts on her Life, 82
Fraulein Julie, 97, 110, 112, 114,
115
Night Train, 71, 72, 77, 82, 83
Some Trace of Her, 70, 73
Traveling on One Leg, 70, 72, 74,
75, 77–81, 84, 85
Waves, 69, 70, 72, 75, 80, 86, 97,
98, 100, 107, 109
Yellow Wallpaper, The, 70, 75, 80,
83, 85, 86
Mixed Blood, 290
Modenessi, Michel, 333, 340
Modernism, 253, 257, 268, 269
Modernist temporality, 100, 107
Moeller, Philip, 265
Momart Fire, 310, 311
Morris, Tom, 22
Morris, William, 103
Mortimer, Vicky, 102
Motherhood, 201, 203
Mrozek, Slavomir
The Emigrants, 213, 214, 216, 219,
221, 224
Müller, Herta, 70, 74, 80
Mulvey, Laura, 109, 110
Murphy, Anna Maria, 10, 19, 21
Myths, 6, 8, 13, 17
N
National Theatre, 6, 86, 101
Naturalism, 98, 101, 102, 104, 113
Nazis, 57, 145, 158
Necromancy, 300, 305, 309
Neumann, Fred, 33
NGOs, 214, 226
Nicholson, Jack, 303
Northampton Theatre Royal, 295
Novel, 69–71, 73, 74, 80, 81, 85,
97–100, 102, 103, 106, 114,
122, 123, 130, 139, 163, 166,
167, 169, 171, 172, 175, 211,
257, 318
Numinous, 124, 136, 139
O
Oddey, Allison, 74
Olinto, Marcelo, 332
Omran, Samar, 213, 214, 216, 220
Oral storytelling, 6, 8

Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF),
276, 278, 285
O’Reilly, Kaite, 46, 195–197, 199,
206, 209, 211
Otto, Rudolph, 124, 145–147, 157
Owens, Erick, 58–62, 65
P By the Time I Get to Arizona, 279
Palestine, 58, 226, 232, 236, 237,
239–242
Palestine-Israel Conflict, 232, 236,
240
Palestinian Theatre, 231, 241, 243,
244
Palimpsest, 13, 15, 195, 196, 211,
336
Pao, Angela C., 59
Paracelsus, 30, 46
Paradise Lost, 297
Parker, Faniel, 286
Pastiche, 26, 35, 44, 200, 276, 280,
281, 287
Pavis, Patrice, 71, 73, 86, 143
Performative, 85, 87, 261, 301
Performative object, 179
Phédre, 104, 105
Phelan, Peggy, 108, 140
Picasso, Pablo, 282
Pimentel, Luz Aurora, 37
Pirandello, Luigi, 263, 295
Pires, Pedro, 54
Pollesch, René, 72
Popular culture, 11, 179, 224
Popular music, 276, 279, 282
Populism, 291
Pornography, 177, 180, 185, 189
Porous, 38
Possner, Dassia, 125
Postcolonial, 341
Postdramatic, 50, 200, 341
Postmodern, 76, 104, 106, 196, 198,
200, 210, 229, 275–277, 280,
Index   355
287, 317–319, 321–323, 325,
327, 329, 334
Postmodern impulse, 275
Power, Ben, 295, 297, 298, 310, 312,
313
Print, 180, 257
Prospero World Charitable Trust, 221
Public Enemy
Rebel without a Pause, 279
Puppetry, 19, 125, 137
Q
Queer, 185, 189, 255, 256, 271, 287
Quintero, Josè, 253
R
R&D (Research and Development),
18
Racine, 104–106
Radosavljevic, Duska, 8, 9
Raine, Jessica, 326
Rap, 176, 177, 185, 279
Rauch, Bill, 275–277, 291, 292
Rectification, 295, 302–304, 313
Refugee, 171, 209, 213–221, 223–
225, 227, 237
Refugee chic, 225
Remix, 123
Repetition, 13, 27, 53, 108, 111,
138, 167, 177, 183, 269, 292,
341–343
Retellings, 5–11, 13–15, 17, 18, 20,
22, 23, 168, 170, 296
Rice, Emma, 5–9, 11, 13–15, 17, 19,
21–23
Richardson, Tony, 320
Ridden, Geoffrey M., 224, 229
Rifai, Omar, 216, 228
Rivera, Geraldo, 264
Robbins, Tim, 244, 283
356  Index
Rocha, Felipe, 334, 341, 342, 344
Royal Academy, 302, 305
Royal Courts, 320
Royal Cultural Center in Amman,
213, 216
Run D.M.C., 279
S Stanislavski, 82
Saadi, Fatima, 332, 335
San Jose Repertory Theatre, 171
San Jose State University, 171
Sanders, Julie, 13, 140, 143, 153,
162, 277, 334, 335
Sasanov, Catherine, 29, 36–39, 42, 44
Saylor, Eric, 59
Scenography, 49–53, 55, 57, 63, 64,
85
Schaubühne, 70, 80, 97, 115–117
Score, 35, 39, 52, 53, 55, 59, 63, 64,
84, 85, 101, 102, 107, 125
Screen, 11, 51, 54, 71, 73, 75, 78, 81,
85, 86, 103–105, 108–112, 114,
115, 127, 128, 137, 141, 152,
170, 199, 232, 261, 271
Seddon, Tess, 175, 177, 178, 186
Sensation Exhibition, 302
Severn, John R., 287
Sex work, 176, 186, 189
Shared language, 240, 241, 243
Shearer, Norma, 253
Shepherd, Mike, 6, 11, 15–20, 22
Sher, Jeremy, 259, 264, 265
Shining, The, 303
Six Characters in Search of an Author,
295
Smart, Jackie, 18, 21, 22
Smith, Roberta, 55, 61
Sony Acid Software, 280
Source text, 6–11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 23,
56, 57, 62, 126, 143, 150, 153,
158, 161, 162, 168, 172, 276,
287, 289, 296, 321, 335
Spangler, Matthew, 162–164, 167,
168, 170, 171
Spies, Johann, 313
Spirit of the piece, 124, 126, 133,
137, 139
Stam, Robert, 162
Stein, Gertrude, 108
Storytelling, 11, 19, 20, 27, 79, 125,
141
Strange Interlude, 252–259, 265,
267–271
Strindberg, August, 97, 112–115, 117
Sumud, 237, 240
Sunni, 217
Surrogation, 124, 140
Svendsen, Zoë, 318–322, 325–327
Syria, 213–217, 223, 225, 226, 228
Syria: The Trojan Women, 195, 197,
214, 221, 224, 226, 228
Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, 220
T
Tabla rhythm, 163
Tarkovsky, Andrey, 113, 114, 117
Taymor, Julie, 50
Technology, 52, 54–56, 63, 64, 71,
87, 98, 103–107, 152, 281
Tectonic Theatre Group
Laramie Project, The, 276
Terfel, Brynn, 61
Theater Amsterdam, 152
Theatre O, 73
Theatre of the Oppressed, 231
Theatre Studies, 5, 15
TheatreState, 175–177, 181, 182
Thin Man, The, 147
This Flesh is Mine, 231, 232, 234–236,
238, 240, 241, 243

Threading, 74, 77, 78, 85
Time (historical time, narrative time,
real time), 6, 8, 20, 44, 57, 85,
87, 100, 107, 114, 165, 167
Tompkins, Joanne, 162
Toneelgroep, 343
Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go
Blind, 252
Translation, 20, 37, 38, 80, 143, 152,
161, 162, 199, 276, 333, 343
Trauma, 123, 125, 177, 182, 189,
207, 254
Trauma of war, 226
Trojan Women, The, 196–201, 204,
210, 214, 222–224, 226
Troy, 196, 198, 205, 208, 209, 222,
233, 237, 308
Turner, Lyndsey, 75, 321
Turner Prize, The, 306
Tyler, Steven, 279
U Y
Uncanny, 124–126, 137, 187, 341,
342
Universal, 144, 147, 149, 275, 287
V
Valk, Kate, 105
Varla, Zubin, 324
Viewpoints, 36, 283
Voltaire, 179
Von Hove, Ivo, 72, 343
W
Wagner, Richard
Siegfried, 49, 52–55, 61–64
The Ring, 51–53, 57, 59, 63
Index   357
Walling, Michael, 233, 234, 236, 237,
242
Ward, Howard, 326
War in Syria, 213, 219, 224
War on terror, 168, 171
Weapons of mass destruction, 238
Weiss, Peter, 29
West, Cheryl, 177, 289
Wieninger, Julie, 77, 82, 83
Wilder, Thornton, 276, 289
Wilson, Melanie, 77
Wimsatt, W.K., 296
Wolff, Tamsen, 254
Woolf, Virginia, 69, 98–102, 106,
108–110
Woolland, Brian, 231
Wooster Group
Route 1 & 9, 276, 277, 286, 289
To You, the Birdie, 104, 106
Worthen, W.B., 257
Yale Repertory Theatre, 278
Ying Yang Twins, 184, 185
Young, Tracy, 248, 275, 276, 283
Young Vic, The, 318–322, 324, 325,
327, 329
Z
Zionism, 239
Zoukak Theatre, 235, 236