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Introduction

We need a new idea. It will probably be a very simple one. Will we be able to recognise it?

(Sontag [1966] 1994: 37)

After systematically dismantling a critical history that saw theatre and film as artistic forms diametrically opposed to each other, Susan Sontag’s article ended with the above challenge to readers. Turn the clock forward 50 plus years and a brief survey of the listings for local cinemas and theatres in Manchester, UK, shows how much adaptations between stage and screen have become intertwined. There is a projected adaptation of the Swedish film Let the Right One In (2008) at the Royal Exchange, in itself an adaptation of the book by John Ajvide Lindquist (2004). Meanwhile HOME, Manchester’s centre for contemporary art, theatre and film, is showing both a live broadcast of the latest Royal National Theatre production, direct from London, and a stage adaptation by Imitating the Dog of George A. Romero’s classic 1968 horror movie Night of the Living Dead. ¹ Yet since Sontag’s article there has been little work on adaptation between stage and screen that reflects this changed media landscape and takes on board fundamental changes in how theatre and cinema are produced, exhibited and consumed.² This book provides an introduction to adaptations between stage and screen that incorporates consideration of both art forms not just as texts but as performances and events. It argues that we need to see adaptations between stage and screen as distinct from literary adaptation, the ‘word’ to ‘image’ paradigm that has dominated the field of adaptation studies. My contention is that scholars working in adaptation studies have often failed to attend to the differences between novels and plays as factors in the adaptive process and that adaptation studies hasn’t addressed in any significant and sustained way aspects of performance that are connected with the move from stage to film or, as I argue in this book, from theatres to cinemas or film to stage.

One only has to look at the remarkable growth of the live broadcast of theatre plays to cinemas in the last ten years in the United Kingdom alone, to understand why a book that looks anew at adaptations between stage and screen is necessary now. Whilst cinema and theatre have always existed in relationship to each other and influenced each other’s development, we stand now at a point in history when challenges to both theatre and cinema’s ontological and institutional status are evident. What is ‘theatre’ and what is ‘cinema’ in terms of the ‘crisis’ bought about by the emergence of digital media are questions which have concerned scholars in both disciplines. In the latter field Gaudreault and Marion have pertinently asked, ‘[w]‌hat remains of cinema in what cinema is in the process of becoming? Or rather: what remains of what we thought, just yesterday, cinema was in what cinema is in the process of becoming?’ (2015: 2, original emphasis).³ Set against this background, cultural acts such as the adaptation of films to the stage can therefore use the form to memorialize cinema, to summon up its ghostly presence through a collective theatrical encounter and thus reflect on its current status as a medium. This suggests a sense that during moments of technological change, media are self-reflexive, using their forms to think through their place in a changed cultural landscape. Many of the works looked at in the screen-to-stage adaptation chapters share the trait of reflecting self-consciously upon a medium’s potentialities or limitations sometimes provoking, as Sandra Annett described it, ‘a kind of media melancholia’ (2014: 271). Modes of communication offered by stage and screen as performance media have also come together in an age marked by what has been termed ‘convergence culture’ (Jenkins 2006) as evidenced by a theatre director such as Ivo van Hove consistently using a screen within the stage space to transmit close ups of his actors. Adaptation between theatre and cinema therefore involves not just the textual but the spatial and temporal reconfiguration of a previously given work, articulating it using the dramaturgical systems of the new form and in this process potentially creating a hybrid aesthetic. Bolter and Grusin’s notion of ‘remediation’ (2000) is relevant here and this is particularly the case when examining contemporary phenomena such as live casting – the live broadcast of theatre plays to the cinema, where I will argue not only the performance, but the performance event itself is adapted for the cinema audience, resulting in a blurring of the boundaries between cinematic and theatrical viewing conventions.

Yet we must be wary of reducing the analysis to a simple technological determinism or of seeing convergence culture as only marking the present moment. Adaptation as a cultural practice has always been sensitive to contextual changes and developments in stage–screen relations. It is the intention of this book to demonstrate how a ‘hybrid aesthetic’ might also be applied to, for instance, the adaptation of plays to the screen in Britain’s early sound period, where the original spoken dialogue and/or preservation of the actor’s performance were integral to the final film. Therefore, what adaptation (re-)produces is always in the context of new conditions whether as a result of technological changes or as demanded by ever-changing socio-cultural and historical circumstances.

The book is arranged in two halves to embrace a range of perspectives on the stage–screen adaptation as a discrete area. Part One concentrates on ‘Practices’, taking a synchronic approach in reframing current and historical practice in stage–screen adaptation, whilst the second part, ‘Histories’, takes a diachronic approach, examining case studies from 1930 to the present with a focus on British films (as adapted to and from the stage) so as to engage with the performances and events of these adaptations within their temporal, geographical and cultural contexts.

The first chapter starts with the most commonly analysed of adaptations between stage and screen, that of the adaptation of play to film, but offers a reframing of analysis through aspects of performance to open up new avenues of exploration that include non-literary issues such as the treatment of space and place, design, sound and music, acting styles and star personas. For instance, Bola Agbaje’s Royal Court play Gone Too Far (2007) was adapted by the author for the screen in 2013. Whilst the film adaptation demonstrates classic elements of the transfer between these forms, such as setting the film in the actual South London location alluded to by the characters in the play, an examination of how costume is used in the Court production draws attention to how this element of the performance is translated on screen. On the other hand, an examination of two film adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s Play is used to explore what might be termed the ‘unfilmable’ play, because conditions of its live performance, such as a particular lighting effect, are integral to the meaning of the play.

The second chapter reverses this more conventional way of looking at adaptation between stage and screen by concentrating on the adaptation of films to the stage, arguing that they relate to each other in a post-literary way, by drawing on the images of the film rather than the spoken text. I will examine a range of works derived from art house to Hollywood films and consider how the performances reconfigure the fragmented space of the film to the continuous stage space of the theatre. Ivo van Hove’s theatre adaptations of American independent director John Cassavetes’ films will be used to demonstrate how stage adaptations of films raise questions of authorship in terms of the translation of an auteur’s film work into director’s theatre. I will also discuss how some stage adaptations can translate the haptic ‘affect’ of film effectively because of the physical encounter between performer and audience that live theatre promises.

Because I argue that developments in technology have led to the growth of live filmed theatre performances as an area distinct from plays adapted to film, but still understandable within the rubric of adaptation, this will be explored in Chapter 3. This means engaging with the ‘events’ of theatre and cinema and I see cultural products such as NT Live as very much implicated in the processes of adaptation because of how the ‘eventness’ of the theatre production is adapted to the cinema, particularly in the different ways that they inscribe the perceived ‘liveness’ of the theatrical encounter within the cinema ‘event’. This chapter also takes on board how digital technologies affect how audiences perform as audiences at these events through examining an RSC Live broadcast of Romeo and Juliet (2018) and looking at the way social media is used by producers to interact with actual and implied spectators.

The second half of the book takes a different approach to the subject, by looking at adaptations between stage and screen within a broader historical framework. This then positions the adaptation, as Hutcheon has described it, not just as a ‘product’ but as a cultural ‘process’ that can articulate issues specific to a particular place or idea of the nation (2006). With this understanding we can see how adaptations operate within a particular culture and are differentiated by historical specificity, so that issues of, for example, fidelity to the source material are seen as a function of a particular set of industrial and institutional circumstances. Such an approach has led to an enriched understanding of stage-to-screen adaptations in the United Kingdom in the period prior to sound film (see Burrows 2003; Gledhill 2003) but has had limited sustained application to thinking through how adaptations between stage and screen functioned after.⁴ As a full history of the period is not possible within the parameters of this book, these three chapters examine adaptation between stage and screen during three catalytic periods in British film and theatre history: 1929–33 and the introduction of synchronized sound to film; post 1956 with the British New Wave on stage and screen; and finally the growth of stage adaptations of specifically British films post 2000. These particular periods were chosen to illustrate the principle that adaptations have to be understood within the particular historical and cultural moment in which they are produced. Therefore, Chapter 4 looks at the work of Basil Dean, early British Hitchcock and the Aldwych farces as differently inflected responses in film adaptation to the coming of sound to cinema in Britain. These examples give insight into the cultural context because of the way that they foreground (or diminish) theatrical elements in the adaptation to the screen. In a similar way to the first half, I am particularly interested in actors’ performances in these adaptations because of the way that their presumed ‘theatricality’ has often been misunderstood by critics as ‘holding back’ British cinema, rendering it a second-order experience of a more culturally legitimated mode of dramatic expression. The work of actors can often be overlooked in adaptations and I contend that examining how acting is presented in the films can lead to a more nuanced understanding of its function.

In a different way, the British New Wave can be thought of as a movement that crossed between the performance media of theatre and cinema, with both plays and films challenging established norms not only in writing but also in acting and design. These were articulated within medium-specific frameworks such as translating theatrical naturalism into cinematic realism, but also by other strategies that moved towards a more poetic anti-naturalistic expression across both stage and screen. In Chapter 5, I will examine two well-known film adaptations of stage plays, The Entertainer (1959) and A Taste of Honey (1961), but also a lesser-known work, The Kitchen (1961) by Arnold Wesker to understand how these aesthetic experiments were played out.

The final chapter in the section reverses the process again to look at the adaptation of specifically British films for the stage. My argument here is that the accelerated changes in technology since 2000 have created a climate where not just the content of the film but the medium in which it is articulated are addressed as subject matter, and so in a different way these adaptations recycle questions about the relationship between theatre and cinema for British culture raised by the early sound films. Following on from Ellis who argued that ‘adaptation into another medium becomes a means of prolonging the pleasure of the original representation, and repeating the production of memory’ (1982: 4), I will investigate how the cultural memory of these films is woven through the adaptation, inviting the audience to repeat acts of consumption. However, in a political context dominated by discussions of national borders and ensuing identities, the staging of these films also offers the opportunity to interrogate these issues through a theatrical engagement with the products of British cinema.

My arguments will be explored in the first half by looking predominantly at examples from a range of English language plays and American and European films and in the second half through what has been described as ‘British’ cinema and productions within the English theatre.⁵ Particularly within British cultural history, there have, of course, been many links between popular cultural forms that cross between stage and screen such as music hall and variety, not to mention the links between theatre and television, but I feel that this is beyond the scope of my central argument so mention of this will be limited. Another further qualification is the absence of sustained discussion about Shakespeare on screen. This is because I feel that it has for a long time dominated discussion of screen adaptations of stage plays (and is beginning to dominate discussion of live theatre broadcasts too) to the exclusion of other plays and practices. Therefore, because it has been dealt with exhaustively elsewhere (e.g. Hatchuel 2004; Buchanan 2005; Jackson 2014), my discussion of this subject is restricted to discussion of the RSC’s live cinema broadcasts in Chapter 3. It should maybe go without saying that the case studies (with a few exceptions where the name has been translated) all share the same name so that whether the audience has seen the referred-to work or not, the fact that they are known by the same title, but in a different medium, usually implies a self-conscious desire to draw attention to their status as an adaptation. Adaptation studies has spent some time contemplating what is and what is not an adaptation and I feel it is unnecessary to replicate these points of view here, but rather to draw attention to Julie Sanders’ succinct and useful definition of adaptations as ‘reinterpretations of established texts in new generic contexts or […] with relocations of […] a source text’s cultural and/or temporal setting, which may or may not involve a generic shift’ (2015: 19).

Because of the fairly broad scope of the book in spanning the historical and the contemporary, it is difficult to identify one overarching critical theory or framework that can be used to analyse the play that gets adapted for the screen (recorded or live) or the film that is staged in the theatre. That is not to say that there hasn’t been an awful lot written over the twentieth century about film’s difference from the theatre as a dramatic medium. Susan Sontag’s 1966 article, ‘Film and theatre’ from whence the quotation that started this chapter was drawn, was a definitive intervention into an ongoing critical debate about this issue. Sontag argued that many of the positions articulated in the debate depended on an essentialist view of each art form or were determined by a critic’s need to assert cinema’s individual identity by distinguishing it from theatre. She concluded that this meant that ‘the history of cinema is often treated as the history of its emancipation from theatrical models’ ([1966] 1994: 24). Again it is not my intention here to rehash these different viewpoints, as they have been ably dealt with in several edited collections, namely Cardullo’s Stage and Screen: Adaptation Theory from 1916 to 2000 (2012) and Knopf’s Theater and Cinema: A Comparative Anthology (2005), and the reader is directed to these works to find relevant key works on the relationship between theatre and film. In particular, Cardullo’s introduction offers a useful summary of the differences between them in terms of object, creator and audience, and lays some of the ground work for this book in calling for attention to be paid to how their relationship is affected by elements that are situated in a particular culture and/or time (2012: 1–17). Roger Manvell’s 1979 Theater and Film also takes on board the difference in film adaptation of novels and plays and has a useful section on acting on stage on screen. However, it should be noted that both Manvell and the edited collections centre around the adaptation of plays to the screen, rather than adapting films to the stage or broadcasting live theatre to cinemas, and do little to move the discussion forward in terms of addressing a reconfigured media landscape or taking on board the increasing attention paid today in both film and theatre studies towards current processes of media convergence. A more recent work, Ingham’s Stage-Play and Screen-Play: The Intermediality of Theatre and Cinema (2016) is more inclusive of these practices. Its stated aim is to provide ‘a systematic attempt to map this stage drama–screen drama relationship across a spectrum of dramatic possibilities’ (2016: 9). Ingham proposes a broad continuum that takes on a range of intermedial exchanges between theatre and film and includes screen-to-stage adaptations and live casting as part of its remit. However, his adoption of intermediality as a critical framework to make sense of these stage–screen interactions means that his continuum goes beyond the practices of adaptation to encompass a whole spectrum of intermedial practice such as the representation of theatres on film and the use of screens on stage. Whilst intermediality is obviously a useful term in any investigation of stage–screen relations, because it refocuses attention on the operations of the media themselves, I contend that the specificity of adaptation between theatre and cinema is subsumed into this broader approach.

Centralizing performance and event

Consideration of performance is often elided in discussion of adaptation between stage and screen, with the stage treated as an adjunct of the page. This may seem surprising, with adaptation studies often claiming to move beyond the literary paradigms that have dominated the field (e.g. Leitch 2003; Cartmell and Whelehan 2010). One of the few critics to have looked more inclusively at adaptation is Linda Hutcheon who has asserted that ‘theatre shares much with film as both are “showing” mediums that can use visual and sonic means to construct stories, which then can be performed by actors’ (2006: 159). Hutcheon also provided the introduction for a collection of interviews and essays that consider the implications of live performance for adaptation (MacArthur et al. 2009), though this did not focus exclusively on film. Christine Geraghty has provided the most useful scholarship in this area so far with her monograph Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (2007) and her chapter contribution to Modern British Drama on Screen (2013). The former makes a clear distinction between literature and drama as sources in adaptation and applies this understanding to a revelatory discussion of film adaptations of Tennessee Williams plays in terms of the reconfiguration of dramatic space and actors’ performance styles. In the latter she applies the same principles to the screen adaptation of Ann Jellicoe’s stage play The Knack, analysing how the ‘theatrical origins of the film shaped some of its aesthetics’ (2013: 121). Indeed, the entirety of Palmer and Bray’s collection of essays, alongside their companion collection Modern American Drama on Screen (2016), provides useful models for examining screen adaptations of stage plays in terms of their shared identity as ‘performance media’ (2013: 8).

This book’s emphasis on performance and participation in an event also owes a debt to Raymond Williams, who argued that a film drama and a stage drama can be conceived as a total performance based on the elements of speech, movement and design they both share. Williams’ argument depended on his willingness to investigate as he put it ‘literary text and theatrical representation, not as separate entities, but as the unity which they are intended to become’ (1991: 10). This deceptively simple assertion of the unity of written text and performance belies a long critical debate that can be traced as far back as Aristotle, who famously asserted that ‘the Spectacle […] is the least artistic of all the parts’ (Aristotle and Cooper 1913: 27–28).

It is perhaps this inclination in favour of a text centred, anti-visual tradition in western culture, downplaying the significance of performance, that has contributed to a reluctance to discuss how it might function in relation to adaptation and leads to both novel and play as being understood as ‘literature’. As Margaret Kidnie summarizes:

If the identity of drama is not constructed as bridging two distinct media and what is essential to the work is limited to its text(s), then distinctions between drama and forms of literature such as the novel disappear.

(2009: 21)

Therefore including aspects of the play as performance (from actors and acting to design, lighting to props and costume) in the scope of adaptation studies expands the framework of analysis. This then acknowledges that

The performance has its own aesthetic identity, separate from the play. Plays can be the focus of a theater event, with every conscious choice corresponding exactly to, and informed by, a well thought-out interpretation of the play, but they can also be used merely to facilitate theatre events.

(Osipovich 2006: 462–63)

The relationship between text and performance in the theatre is also paralleled by film’s relationship with the screenplay, although the latter is rarely treated as ‘literature’ in the same way as a play. Indeed, Boozer (2008) and Sherry (2016) have both called for a re-consideration of the screenplay as a ‘source’ in its own right and a key determining factor in the adaptation process. The privileging of the artefact in adaptation studies can be detected in Brian McFarlane’s explanation for not looking at theatrical adaptation in his 1996 Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation: ‘That novel and film both exist as texts, as documents, in the way that a stage performance does not, means that both are amenable to close sustained study’ (1996: 202). McFarlane’s formulation here is revealing, because of what he assumes analysis of adaptations necessarily involves, i.e. a tangible ‘thing’ in which textual authority is invested and that allows an empirical comparison. As Dicecco persuasively argues, this

draws attention to the pitfalls of treating the logic of the archive as the interpretative default. The notion of one idealised text […] reveals a bias in favour of the written document [and thus] drama presents a distinct challenge to formal/ ontological models of adaptation because the test of authenticity appears to operate according to different rules from those best suited to the novel/ film paradigm.

(2017: 617)

Rather than shy away from performance then because it doesn’t easily fit into established adaptation frameworks, this study understands this as an opportunity to question those paradigms. For instance, a concern with ‘sources’ and their relationship to the adapted work have characterized the field since its inception as a scholarly practice. Approaches to the adaptation that centralize consideration of fidelity have long been challenged, with Leitch, in particular, calling for an upheaval to this type of criticism not least because ‘adaptations will always reveal their sources’ superiority because whatever their faults, the source texts will always be better at being themselves’ (2003: 161). However, theatrical performance complicates Leitch’s argument here because the ‘selves’ of performance are determined by ever-shifting parameters. Indeed performance has in itself been described as an adaptation by Hutcheon (2006), MacArthur et al. (2009) and Babbage (2017) to name a few, because of the way that it transfers the drama from one medium (written expression) to another (theatrical expression). Kidnie refutes this approach as she argues it removes all meaning from the term ‘adaptation’. She argues for a definition of adaptation that doesn’t distinguish between text as source and second-order performance but uses the term ‘work’ to understand the relationship of text and performance (2009: 28).

This is a useful conceptual approach in terms of my study, in that it understands the work in terms of both a textual and performance identity and it is these material aspects of the latter (that can be detected in the play text but can be variably inflected in the performance) that I propose have been overlooked by only thinking of, for instance, how a text might be adapted for the screen. This is particularly true when it comes to accounting for the work of actors and how they make meaning on stage and on film. The differences between acting on stage and acting on screen have been discussed by Braudy (2005) and Baron and Carnicke (2008), but they haven’t been triangulated into an examination of how the actor mediates performance in the adapted work, something that would simply not be possible to identify by just reading the play or the screenplay.⁶

Discussions of actors’ contributions highlight how consideration of performance offers not just an (re)-examination of contemporary practices but can reframe historicized analyses of adaptations between stage and screen, within a specific national culture. Christine Geraghty has called for a re-evaluation of British cinema and literary adaptation, arguing that

accepting adaptation as normal, particularly in a screen culture marked by convergence and intertextuality, helps us to stop using the fact of adaptation as a means of evaluation whereby a film (and a national cinema) are automatically dismissed as derivative or welcomed as classic.

(2019: 155)

Whilst calling for adaptation in British cinema to be seen more in terms of ‘exchanges between media’ (2019: 152), Geraghty still includes plays under the category of literary adaptation. The advantage of my approach is that by uncoupling stage sources from literary sources, issues around performance can be brought into view and discussion can be reframed in terms of a dynamic exchange of practice across stage and screen within what might be termed British performance cultures. Furthermore, if we see the exchange as being orientated towards practice, we can also think how it operates not just from stage to screen but also from screen to stage. Geraghty is right to call out the prejudice which is often embedded in value-driven judgements about the ‘dependence’ of British cinema on adaptation and she also challenges the assumptions about the verbal vs. visual communicative properties of film that these dismissals often rely on (2019: 151). But it must not be forgotten that words and dialogue in film are often inextricably bound up in performance: how words are spoken by the actor, how they combine not just with mise en scène but with the bodies and gestures of performers. So as we shall see in Chapter 4, a reliance on dialogue often means a reliance on how actors deliver that dialogue; the nuances that are conveyed in performance.

Discussions of actors’ agency here points to the clearly challenging methodological issues in approaching stage–screen adaptations through the prism of performance. Merely inverting the object of study into performance instead of text runs the risk of a theoretical cul-de-sac which either ‘shatter[s] that object into an infinite number of performances, or make[s]‌ it self-identical with an individual performance’ (Kidnie 2009: 104). Investigating questions that involve live performance will always involve difficult issues of access and epistemology for the researcher. In terms of the former, more often than not, the material as performance will simply not be available for the researcher to view when needed. In terms of the latter, every performance as Peggy Phelan argued is unique: different audiences will respond to different things and actors will react in kind (1993: 146).⁷ There may be different kinds of mediated and non-mediated records of a production more generally – the script, reviews, director’s notes – but this all relates differentially to the actual performance. Of course, a performance can also be filmed but when the object of study is thinking about transitions between stage and screen, to understand one of the elements as being presented through the medium it is hypothetically contrasted with somewhat defeats the object of study. On the other hand, advances in technology have in some cases actually collapsed the boundaries between performance and documentation so that in the case of NT Live, for instance, as Claire Read has argued, the performance is the documentation and vice versa (2014).

In terms of my approach then, as far as possible, I limited myself to working with case studies where I had actually seen a production and could think through how it related to the written text. However as, particularly in the second half, I wanted a historical reach to the stage–screen adaptations examined, I extended that condition to where I could access material that gave me an idea of what the play was like in performance. This led to prioritizing practitioners’ accounts of their work and embedding their own ideas about adapting between stage and screen into the interpretative framework wherever possible. Practitioner accounts can be valuable, in that they often transcend disciplinary boundaries, which can be restrictive when approaching performance elements across stage and screen.

My overall aim with this book then is to critically examine adaptation between stage and screen as a cultural practice in a way that in the end validates Sontag’s argument that the two media have always and will always share a dynamic and aesthetically beneficial relationship rather than being mutually exclusive. This critical examination takes on board a contemporary media landscape but also takes a longer view by reflecting on stage–screen adaptation as a practice informed by particular cultural and historical circumstances. It restates the importance of performance elements, the ‘labor of theatrical agents of production’ (Kidnie 2005: 5) in the move between stage to screen, screen to stage and theatre to cinema, and hopefully will inspire new generations of scholars and critics to re-examine this fascinating field of study.

NOTES

1.This book was in production as the COVID-19 crisis emerged, altering arts events in unprecedented ways. It is currently uncertain whether these productions will go ahead as planned.

2.The journal Adaptation (August 2014, 7:2) had a special issue entitled ‘From Theatre to Screen – and Back Again!’ (eds D. Cartmell and E. Parsons). The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance (July 2014, 7:2) had a dossier, ‘Film Adaptation in the Post Cinematic Era’ (eds. Russell J. A. Kilbourn and P. Faubert), although this didn’t look specifically at stage–screen adaptations. Scholarship in the developing area of transmedia studies is also relevant, particularly in thinking through definitions of media and the effects of specific media on narratives (Ryan 2014) with Zipfel discussing fictionality in film and theatre specifically (2014).

3.The uncoupling of film and cinema in the age of digital production and exhibition has led to debates amongst scholars, with Bruce Issacs in The Orientation of Future Cinema: Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle going so far as to ask, ‘[i]‌s the image created out of digital code cinematic?’ (2014: 24).

4.Modern British Drama on Screen (2013), edited by Palmer and Bray, is the exception here.

5.I am using the term ‘British cinema’, although this is clearly a problematic term when describing both contemporary and historical films. See Higson (2010: 5–11) for discussion of this.

6.Theatre studies and latterly film studies have demonstrated a sustained engagement with how the actor makes meaning in performance. Works across both fields such as Klevan’s Film Performance (2005), Zarrilli’s Acting (Re)Considered (2002) and Naremore’s Acting in the Cinema (1988) are notable here, with Richard Dyer’s influential work on stardom offering a cine-centred analysis of the actor as star (1997). However, because of the downplaying of performance in the adaptation matrix, I would argue that this work hasn’t been drawn upon in any sustained way in adaptation studies.

7.Although this has since been rebutted by scholars such as Rebecca Schneider, who in her influential essay ‘Performance remains’ (2001) challenges Phelan’s assertions of the ontology of performance and considers its place within archival culture.