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Stage-to-Screen Adaptation and Performance: Space, Design, Acting, Sound

Most novels are irreversibly damaged by being dramatized as they were written without any kind of performance in mind at all, whereas for plays visible performance is a constitutive part of their identity and translation from stage to screen changes their identity without actually destroying it.

(Jonathan Miller cited in Hutcheon 2006: 36)

This chapter offers a different approach to adaptations between stage and screen, one that accounts for the performance elements of the ‘work’ in its adaptation to the screen, such as the results of creative agency in acting and design. This is because an exclusive emphasis on in what way a written text is transferred to the screen would elide the question of, for instance, how a particular actor’s star persona might affect the character as performed. Discussing performance brings into play what exactly is being discussed in the comparative frame as ‘performance’ can be defined as both

a one-off experience (an experience for which one, usually, pays money), and ‘performance’ as a term able to frame any number of such unique experiences as generically related in terms of the physical activity and audience-actor dynamic to which they give rise.

(Kidnie 2005: 105)

As we have seen Kidnie’s work is applicable here because it seeks to uncover the anti-theatrical bias in adaptation studies or what she terms ‘the ideology of print’ that seeks to cordon off plays from their performances, or at least attribute to the latter a second-order status. This then leads to ‘acculturated reading strategies founded on the text as literary object’, which can obscure aspects of performance that the stage and screen have in common (Kidnie 2009: 104). This is not to say that the text only exists in performance, as Levin has identified because then ‘there would be no independent “reality” apart from the performance that could be understood’ (1986: 548). What does exist of the performance, and can to a certain extent be referred to in terms of a material object, is a ‘production’. As Osipovich argues, ‘a production is a series of acting, blocking and design choices that are rehearsed until the run of the show is set’ (2006: 464). Whilst each performance will have a unique quality that will be difficult to quantify, detailing these features ‘will still be vital for putting into context the unique character of every performance’ (2006: 464). The three features that Osipovich identifies will be the focus of this chapter although I will extend the analysis to include sound and music as both theatre and film often use aural elements to complement their visual means of communication. I do not deny the presence of the written text as this is one aspect of the ‘work’ as Kidnie would describe it, but neither do I allow the slipperiness of identifying the performance to preclude analysis of those qualities that are bound up with the written text but exist outside of it as well.

The first section of this chapter will examine the opening of stage and screen versions of Bola Agbaje’s British comedy Gone Too Far (2008/2013), firstly according to comparisons of space, time and structure, which is traditionally how stage-to-screen adaptations have been analysed (Bazin 1967; Manvell 1979; Davies 1990), but then extending the analysis to consider one crucial aspect of performance and how it is configured in the adaptation. Turning to August Wilson’s Fences (1987), I will examine how the stage design in various productions has been referenced in the film and look at how its function in the play is taken up by the mise en scène of a key sequence. This will be contrasted by looking at adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s Play (1966), which, because of the abstract nature of the space as conceived for the stage, raises certain challenges in its transfer to the screen. The next section will consider issues of acting and performance and the implications of the contribution of star discourses for fundamentally altering adaptations in their transition to the screen. Bill Naughton’s stage play Alfie (1963) will be examined for how the central character has been played across stage and screen. Finally, I will argue that sound has traditionally been overlooked in adaptation studies but that it often marks a key element of the negotiation of affect in the transition from stage to screen production. This will be discussed in reference to films where scores/sound effects are added in the film adaptation to convey character or theme. I will examine theatre and film versions of Amadeus (1979) and look at the integration of visual and aural elements in stage and screen versions of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).

Cardullo contends that analysis of stage-to-screen adaptations needs to consider how the film translates the theatre play’s structure and its utilization of time and space (2012). As Bazin argued, ‘there can be no theatre without architecture’ indicating that space for performance is organized in terms of the area/s for the actors, for the audience and optionally a setting for the dramatic action. He maintained that the consequences of this organization of theatrical space render the stage a ‘privileged spot removed from everyday experience which renders significant any object or action that appears on it’ (1967: 44). Davies argues that these elements of engagement with the space fundamentally change with the film and its audience calling it ‘a collusion with the cinematic medium – not with the director, designers and actors who present the dramatic work’ (1990: 6). With film the action is not bounded within a demarcated space but rather parts of it are captured; the audience must believe that reality goes on beyond what can be seen because, ‘the screen is not a frame like a picture but a mask which allows only part of the action to be seen’ (Bazin 1971: 105). The spectator of film can be put into a different relationship with the action depending on how that action is framed by the camera, and the variety of viewing positions available to the audience of the play in the theatre is denied by the fixed perspective of the camera.

Closely related to different organizations of space are theatre and film’s treatment of time. Just as film can offer different perspectives on the action from close up to long shot and is not bound to one continuous use of space, it is also not restricted to the continuous and sequential time marked by the duration of a play. As Cardullo identifies, the realization that whilst ‘on the stage, an actor crossing a room has to cross it step by step; on the screen, he can come in at the door and immediately be at the other side of the room’ was a key moment in the development of cinematic technique (2012: 25). Editing, both visually and sonically, can link two different times together, such as the move across two decades in Citizen Kane (1941) between Thatcher’s words ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘a Happy New Year’, which enables Kane to move sequentially in the drama from a child to a young man. Structurally, the play and film are also different with the shot being the key component of cinematic structure, against the scene, or more precisely as Cardullo contends, the ‘theatrical “beat” within the scene that introduces or resolves conflict’ (2012: 27).

Anthony Davies argues therefore that for adapters working on translating material from stage to screen, there are two strategies available to them. They can either

decide to treat dramatic action with the object of preserving its theatrical essence as far as possible by simply photographing the staged performance on the stage space [or] effect an entire visual transformation by moving the action from the confines of the theatrical enclosure and [create] new relationships between the actor and décor, between space and time and between the dramatic presentation and the audience.

(1990: 9)

Although Davies is rather binary in his arguments here (plays adapted for the screen might contain both a proscenium arch framing and a more mobile use of camera and that does not make them any less ‘cinematic’) his formulation offers a framework for thinking through how time, space and structure are adapted between theatre and film.

This can be demonstrated by an analysis of the opening of Bola Agbaje’s Gone Too Far, originally performed at the Royal Court Upstairs in 2007 and then adapted for the screen in 2013 by Agbaje and directed by Destiny Ekaragha. The play is about the conflict between two brothers, one British born and one who has just returned from living in Nigeria. It entertainingly dismantles the idea of a homogenous black ‘community’ showing characters whose sense of identity is contingent on how they relate to ideas of indigeneity and the diaspora. The Court’s production of the play had a simple set consisting of black drapes and props to help delineate particular places, such as the newsagents where the characters go to try and buy some milk. The Court production also interspersed the scenes with dance sequences where performers moved around the stage to a grime soundtrack to give a more abstract sense of youthful energy beyond the action of the play. The film on the other hand takes great pains to set the action on the streets and estates where the play was ostensibly set. The writer of both the play and screenplay emphasized how the South London setting was a key factor in the transfer of the play to the screen:

When I transferred it into a film all I needed to do was transfer it back into the setting that it originally came from […]. It was important to put that world on the screen – to make that world interesting because we wanted to put Peckham on the screen but in a really good light.

(Into Film Clubs 2015: n.pag.)

This ‘opening out’ is a common strategy of many stage-to-screen adaptations, as they connect with a world that is implied or referred to by the play but can be realized more effectively by using a photographic medium. In other words, as Palmer and Bray note, ‘the film medium possesses the ability to deepen the sense in which dramatic presentation depends on the interaction of characters with a world we can recognize fully as our own’ (2013: 10). The play’s first scene is set in Yemi’s bedroom, where the two brothers are unhappily sharing an obviously limited space. They are there to do squats administered as punishment by their mum, who is heard offstage admonishing them when their arguing gets too loud. Through the dialogue the differences between the two brothers, one born in Brixton and one born in Nigeria, one speaking English and the other Yoruba, starts to emerge.

The film on the other hand starts with a pan round a typical south London street scene and then follows a young man on a bike as he weaves his way through the connecting roads (including one showing a recognizably London red bus with the destination ‘Peckham’ on it). The film’s credits are written across the images in a jaunty, coloured font and there is an upbeat extra-diegetic soundtrack. The music then becomes diegetic and the audience move through exterior doors into a local radio station booth with a DJ speaking over the music, before cutting to Yemi’s bedroom as he listens to the broadcast whilst practising his chat-up lines directly to camera. There follows a short scene where Yemi’s mum buys okra from a street market and tells the trader how excited she is that she is going to see her son from Nigeria. The scene then moves to the football field, where Yemi plays with his friends and chats to Armani, the object of his affections, before being interrupted by his mum who hauls him away to meet his brother just off the plane. Therefore the whole sequence cuts together a number of different locales to give a spatially coherent sense of the inner city in which the characters exist. Yemi is shown interacting with the places that make up his daily life, which makes him more clearly the protagonist in the narrative, whereas in the play both brothers have equal weight in terms of their story as the play begins with them sharing the same space. In contrast to the clearly delineated time frame of the opening of the play, the film is much less specific and flexible, juxtaposing different events (the mum shopping and the football game) and moving between concurrent presents (the DJ’s patter and Yemi listening to the broadcast in his bedroom). Structurally the beginning of the play is organized around the dialogue between the two brothers with interventions from the mum offstage, which begin to hint at the themes of identity, culture and belonging, whereas the beginning of the film is taken up with action establishing the main protagonist visually and sonically in his social environment before the disequilibrium represented by the arrival of Ikudayisi.

However, I would like to look now at a crucial bit of information that is communicated through costume in the play and then is adapted to the film, using mise en scène, editing and sound. In the Royal Court production of the first scene there is a bare stage with a few suitcases strewn about the floor, containing a mixture of African and Western clothes visible to the audience, alongside the PlayStation that marks the typical British teenager’s bedroom (and to which Yemi keeps returning in defiance of his mum’s punishment). Ikudayisi in the scene is dressed in clothes that are a bit dated in contrast to Yemi who is dressed in more up-to-date fashionable sportswear. This gives the audience a subtle visual signifier of the culture clash that is significant thematically for the rest of the play. This metaphorical use of costume is emphasized in the final scene when we return to Yemi’s bedroom. Ikudayisi has discarded the pseudo western clothes made fun of by Yemi and is dressed in traditional African clothing whilst Yemi is trying to put on an agbada (West African shirt), visually signalling that through the events of the narrative both brothers are coming to terms with what bonds them together; namely family and their shared Nigerian heritage.

However, in the film, where costume does not always carry such metaphoric significance, the introduction of Ikudayisi is constructed audio-visually in such a way as to draw attention to his clothes. Yemi and his mum are walking down the street when they realize that Ikudayisi has arrived. We see a pavement-level shot of a car door opening in slow motion and then cut to Yemi’s expectant face, before cutting to a close up of a foot encased in an unfashionable sock and sandal emerging from behind the car door. We then see Yemi looking worried at what’s coming next before cutting back to the whole figure of Ikudayisi emerging in slow motion from the car. He is dressed in jeans and a cheap looking fake leather brown jacket, with a gold ring on his finger and a chunky looking watch on his wrist, made noticeable to the audience through the deployment of a cut away from the main action. We cut back to Yemi looking even more alarmed and the Afrobeat music accompanying Ikudayisi’s exit from the car is abruptly brought to a halt as if a needle had been swiftly taken off a vinyl record and the action is brought back to normal speed. In a similar way to the play, the signifying power of clothes is used to mark the brothers’ fundamental cultural difference but in the film the sequence is constructed in such a way to highlight Ikudayisi’s clothing as significant and make the sequence more amusing, aligning the spectator with Yemi’s appalled viewpoint at his brother’s unfashionable clothing and marking Ikudayisi more clearly as the ‘outsider’.

A comparable use of mise en scène to find a way to communicate a key aspect of production design is evidenced by the film adaptation of August Wilson’s play Fences (2016). In a similar strategy to Gone Too Far, the action begins outside of the place where the action in the play starts. The protagonist Troy (Denzel Washington) and his friend Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson) are shown riding on the back of a garbage truck that trundles its way through the streets of the suburbs of an American town in the 1950s. This brings some movement into the frame (like the bicycle in the previous example) and allows the characters to plausibly move through their social environment, to set their conversations in context. The film then moves to the front-yard of Troy’s house, as per the stage play, as the after-work chat and drinking begins. The film switches between inside and outside the house, as well as the street in front of the house, but most of the significant scenes take place, as in the play, in the yard. This was noted by the critics who generally berated the film for failing to disguise its theatrical origins, with The Guardian noting ‘the aesthetic is still inescapably stagy. Vestiges of greasepaint are everywhere, from the carefully assembled period props to the entrances and exits’ (Shoard 2016: n.pag.). As the reviewer implies, too much careful ‘selection’ in the look of a film can appear to undermine its claims to be set in a ‘real’ environment. In the theatre, ‘effective theatre design is essentially the architectural manifestation of the psychological dynamics which operate in the total experience of theatre’ (Davies 1990: 7) whereas in most realist films, design shouldn’t be too ‘noticeable’ (Ede 2010: 23).

The necessity of the set design to communicate the ‘psychological dynamics’ of the play is fundamental to Wilson’s play Fences. The play was first produced in 1985 at the Yale Repertory Theater, directed by Lloyd Richards and then opened on Broadway at the 46th Street Theater on 26 March 1987. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1988 and has been frequently revived since then, most notably in the United Kingdom in 2012, in a production with Lenny Henry in the central role of Troy Maxson. Set at the end of the 1950s, the play explores how Troy’s life experience is shaped implicitly and explicitly by his conflicted Afro American identity in a pre-Civil Rights movement America. The play is set in the suburbs of Pittsburgh in 1957, in the ramshackle house Troy shares with his wife Rose and son Corey. Events happen off stage that affect the fate of the characters in the drama but are all played out in the same location, the porch and yard of the house. Key in the design, as the title suggests, is the fence that gets slowly built around the house as the action progresses. As the character of Bono says in the play, ‘Some people build fences to keep people out and other people build fences to keep people in’, and the poignancy of the last scene, after Troy has died, is that the fence that Troy never quite gets round to building throughout the play has been finished. Whilst all designs have to include the fence, most have shown a typical American porch and garden in various states of dilapidation, alluding to the Maxson family’s impoverished status. A designer for a production at the Pacific Conservatory Theatre in 2017 mentions trying to incorporate both ‘the gritty truth and poetic blues-scape of the Maxson family household which consists of an ancient two-story brick house in a dirt yard in the hill district of Pittsburgh in 1957’ (PCPA n.d.: n.pag.). The design for the original Washington/Davies stage production in New York in 2010 added a tree at the centre of the backyard because it ‘signified and concretized crucial themes of forgiveness, redemption and renewal that Wilson investigates throughout Fences’ (Wooden 2011: 124). These design ideas emphasize both the pragmatic and the poetic functions of the setting in the theatre: to enable audiences to understand the specifics of place in which the play is set but also the more universal questions about human experience that the play investigates.

The film adaptation was initiated in 1989 with Wilson appointed to write the screenplay for Paramount but the playwright refused to let his screenplay go into production without a black director, writing in 1990 that in cinema, ‘whites have set themselves up as custodians of our experience’ (Shoard 2016: n.pag.). It was stalled for some time until after Wilson’s death when Denzel Washington took on the project as director and lead actor, having previously played the part on Broadway in 2010. Many of the same cast, including Viola Davis as Troy’s wife Rose, made the transition from this production to the film. The design for the film follows the play faithfully in recreating the yard, although it’s a back yard rather than a front porch and yard, and has a tree in the centre that Troy uses to hang his baseball bat on. However, the wooden fence exists with a number of other wire fences, which surround the property and are seen in the background as the main characters talk. This means, as one critic identified, that the building of the fence loses its central symbolic significance. ‘There’s a literal fence at the center of Fences, but it doesn’t resonate onscreen the way it does onstage. It’s not a living metaphor’ (Edelstein 2016: n.pag.). If design then cannot function in the same way as metaphor, how else does Washington invoke the metaphysical significance of Troy’s situation? One scene towards the end of the film is notable in this respect because unlike most of the rest of the film that almost replaces the proscenium arch with the frame of the screen, it breaks this ‘fourth wall’. After settling a fight with his son Corey, Troy grabs the baseball bat and looks wildly around him, shouting, ‘come and get me’, directly to the camera. This has the effect of boxing Troy in, whilst his gaze is directed out beyond the frame, which operates as

not only a gesture towards what is outside the film fiction (we, the viewer, the material act of filming and so on) but also as a potentially rich metaphor for the problems of vision (insight, foresight, other kinds of perceptiveness) that are often the internal currency of movie narratives.

(Brown 2012: xii)

The particular construction of this shot operates as a filmic equivalence to the metaphorical aspects of design and directs our attention towards the broader significance of Troy’s situation. He is physically constricted by the frame and looks beyond it into the unknown which he addresses as the Devil. As his wife Rose says earlier in both the play and the film, ‘Anything you don’t understand, you call the Devil’. The lack of ‘seeing’ implicit in breaking the fourth wall thus communicates the ‘problems of vision’ that characterizes Troy’s actions in the narrative and ultimately leads to his demise. The camera’s perspective is emphasized as it then sweeps up into a god’s eye view, as Troy follows the camera by looking upwards, making him ever more smaller and insignificant compared to his surroundings. It is also of course a perspective that could never be achieved in the theatre by placing the spectator above the action, and giving them an omnipotent perspective on the scene. Again, this change in the relationship between spectator and space effects a more contemplative attitude to what is being viewed, seeing Troy as not just an individual, but representative of a broader social environment, where a person’s fate is clearly shaped by subtle but all pervasive prejudice and racism.

Whilst the models described above reflect the fact that both stage and screen versions aim to point to recognizable places albeit through different representational means, what happens when the space referred to is more abstract and this abstractness is integral to the dramaturgical workings of performance? Two film adaptations of Beckett’s 1963 Play can be compared to identify how the performance space, resistant to representation, has been adapted to the essentially representative world of the screen.

Beckett’s theatre is thus not about something, not a simulation of a known world; the image or images of the artistic creation are not images of something outside the work; they are ‘that something itself’, as he famously quipped in 1929 in reference to James Joyce’s then titled ‘Work in Progress’.

(Gontarski 2015: 130)

Play was written in English in late 1962 and first performed in German as Spiel in June 1963. Its first British performance was by the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic Theatre, London, on 7 April 1964, produced by George Devine. The play has three figures, one man, two women, trapped in urns, speaking rapidly about a love triangle they are all involved in. A significant aspect of the play in performance is the spotlight that shines on each of them as they talk and switches rapidly between the figures as they speak. Beckett’s own notes on staging indicate the importance of this spotlight and specific instructions for how it should function, noting that there should only be one spotlight and it needs to occupy the same stage space as its ‘victims’, preferably placing it in the centre of the footlights so the faces are lit from below. In the rare moments that all three faces need to be illuminated it should ‘be as a single spot branching into three’. Otherwise Beckett directs that, ‘a single mobile spot should be used, swivelling at maximum speed from one face to another as required’ (Beckett 2009).

The light then is used to bring the voices into being and frame the rather banal story being played out. It works as a meta-theatrical device by seeming to compel the bodies on stage to speak when their figure is illuminated by it. The actors behave mechanically as the spotlight falls on them; they regurgitate their monologues in an endlessly repetitive cycle. The use of the spotlight directs attention onto the medium itself rather than the plot, parodying the conventions of theatrical performance.

Whatever sympathy the audience feels for the characters comes not from the story they tell, which is undercut with humour, but from their existential predicament, which is the condition of the actor forced to repeat a lame story over and over for an audience whose benevolence is questionable at best.

(Gatten 2009: 97)

The function of this spotlight is central to the dramaturgical workings of Play and so obviously offers both semiotic and technical challenges when adapting this piece to film. As director Anthony Minghella pointed out, when engaged in this task for the Beckett on Film series in 2001, the challenge is to find a ‘cinematic correlative’ for the light ‘otherwise the only alternative is to lock off the camera and record a live performance. You can’t have a light moving and a camera moving – one has to be still’ (quoted in Herren 2009: 19). Minghella’s answer was to let the camera do the work of the light and communicate the materiality of the medium through making the camera an active, visible and audible participant in the drama. The opening image shows the play’s title in white against a grey background whilst scratchy, static noises can be heard on the soundtrack. This then cuts to a section of film leader, with the numbers counting down, usually hidden when a film is projected as it’s a guide for the speed the projector should run the film. We then hear the mumble of voices, before fading up on what looks like the surface of the moon, clearly meant to be a sort of no man’s land. This then shears into an empty frame with ‘hairs’ in the gate, again denoting the materiality of the medium on which the drama is recorded, and the cinematic equivalent of an empty space, before jump cutting back again onto the three figures in the urns in the moonscape setting. This makes the audience aware, in a similar way to its use in Godard’s Breathless (1959), of the presence of the editing in the construction of the piece. The film strip then speeds up and cuts between three quick close ups of one of the figures in the urn (Kristin Scott Thomas) in the middle of her speech. The light is uniform throughout and it is therefore the camera, rather than the light, that acts as a predatory figure here, swivelling between the figures and focusing and refocusing on the faces, before jump cutting to another figure as they begin to speak. However dizzying the moving camera work though, the essential conceit of the play is lost because cinematic convention determines that the camera frame will cut to a figure speaking. The idea that the camera movement, and by extension the medium of film, prompts the figure to speak does not come across with the same clarity as the operation of the spotlight on stage.

There is also an earlier adaptation of Play in 1966 made by director Marin Karmitz in collaboration with Beckett himself. Karmitz and Beckett had a different solution to the issue of adapting light by showing all the faces lit up against a background of black screen. This maintains the abstraction of the play but stabilizes the light so the camera can move, showing the faces in long shot, close up and occasionally two shots. Herren argues that this still weakens the ‘ontological principle that light=activation, that light essentially constitutes being on stage and must always be answered with a response from character’ because each character can choose to remain silent under the camera’s eye (2009: 21). This therefore fundamentally undermines ‘the obligation to express that the utilisation of the spotlight on stage communicates to the audience’ (Beckett 2009). Does this then make this Beckett play ultimately unfilmable? Returning to Bazin here is instructive because of how he refused the split between written text and its setting and performance, arguing that ‘a play […] is unassailably protected by the text’ and that the ‘mode and style of production […] are already embodied in the text’ (Bazin 1967: 84). It would seem as if it would be impossible to adapt this stage play to film because the mechanics of live performance are integral to the work.

However, one aspect of the play’s performance that can be inflected across stage and screen versions of the work is the actor’s playing of character. The labour of the actor in embodying characters has arguably been neglected by adaptation studies. One of the few scholars to have paid it attention is Christine Geraghty, who has argued that one of the key pleasures of classic literary adaptation is the re-materialization of literary language into specific embodiments by particular actors (2002: 42). Yet in the transition from stage to screen, there are already bodily and vocal incarnations of these characters by actors. Sometimes the same actor will play the part on screen that they played on stage, such as Marlon Brando’s iconic performance of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1948 and 1952). Sometimes, different actors will be brought on to projects because they have a particular star appeal or they can draw on a star persona garnered from their other film appearances, to inflect the character with particular meaning. In Streetcar for instance, Vivien Leigh replaced Jessica Tandy as Blanche, partly because the film needed a known star in the role, but also to draw on associations with her most famous film role, that of southern belle, Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939). Often adaptations of stage plays will only get made because of stars agreeing to appear in them, to enable a wider audience than those who might have seen the play in the theatre. The agreement is mutually beneficial as stars can make their name in films and then use their appearance in film adaptations of plays to increase their cultural capital, such as Dustin Hoffman in the film version of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1985).

Yet the actor or star does not figure in much thinking about adaptation either in terms of how an actor’s performance might mediate a ‘known’ character through nuances of gesture or voice or indeed how a star persona might engage productively or antagonistically with that character. Both Linda Hutcheon and Christine Geraghty have called for adaptation scholars to think more expansively about actors as agents in the adaptive process, with Geraghty claiming that adaptations ‘not only present different actors in the same role but also present acting in a different way’ as they call attention to a gap between the character as originally constructed and its embodiment on screen (2007: 11). Hutcheon raises the question of ‘embodied performance’: unlike characters in books, characters in stage and screen plays are presented to audiences through the bodies and voices of actors who play them and this demands analysis about the relationships between role, actor and star image (2006: 38). This section will consider these issues by looking at stage and screen versions of Bill Naughton’s Alfie (excluding Alan Price in the sequel Alfie Darling in 1975, as it tells a different story). I will argue that by taking into account the character of Alfie in the first radio and stage versions and comparing it with the star personas of each actor in the film roles (Michael Caine, Jude Law), the character of Alfie is significantly changed. The original Alfie was described in 1962 as ‘that dreadful little lorry driver’ (Crossman 1962: 22). Caine’s screen interpretation of the role in 1966 drew upon the public construction of the actor’s star image in the mid-1960s as aligned with the values of the ascendant, young urban working classes and the film then helped to shape Caine’s subsequent brand of ‘blokeish’ charisma. However, Law’s screen articulation in 2004 drew upon his more ambiguously positioned, metrosexual star persona to enable the film to articulate its concerns with post-millennial masculinity in crisis.

Alfie was initially a radio play, first broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme in a production by Douglas Cleverdon on 7 January 1962 between 9.10 p.m. and 10.25 p.m. and subsequently repeated twice on 3 February at 6.30 p.m. and 11 September at 8 p.m., because it was so popular with listeners (Aldgate 1995: 106). It was written by Bill Naughton, a working-class writer from Salford. The radio play, entitled Alfie Elkins and His Little Life, had just two characters, a northern narrator and the Cockney sounding Alfie speaking directly to the audience. The play spanned two decades from the end of the Second World War to the late 1950s.The main character goes from one ‘bird to the other’ with a grim sense of determined hedonism, rejecting anything or anyone that might touch him too deeply. The part was played by Bill Owen (later known as Compo in Last of the Summer Wine) who was older (48) at the time of the broadcast than the character as written would suggest, but obviously being radio there was less dependence on visual appearance (Archive.org n.d.: n.pag.).

Naughton then turned his work into a stage play, first performed at the Mermaid Theatre on 19 June 1963 (it subsequently transferred to the Duchess Theatre) with John Neville in the title role. Neville was a theatre actor who had found matinee-idol success early in his career in the roles of Hamlet and Richard II in the 1950s. His performance, changing the lorry driver to a London wide-boy, was described by the critic Harold Hobson as ‘the highlight of his career’ (cited in Coveney 2011):

John Neville imbues this cynical egotist with the easy meretricious charm that is Alfie’s stock in trade. He handles with great skill that ticklish scene when it dawns on his mind that fatherhood is an experience at once desirable and out of his world.

(Darlington 1963: 16)

The stage version expanded the radio play to actually show the women in Alfie’s life but retained the direct address to the audience. Breaking the fourth wall was a distinctive feature of each adaptation and had different implications with the change in medium. The radio medium emphasized the intimacy that direct address engenders, the feeling that one person is confiding in you their individual thoughts and feelings. In the theatre, a more public space, this technique is a device by which the play is able to comment on its leading character. By taking the audience into his confidence, the gap between Alfie’s self-presentation and the audience’s knowledge of him through witnessing his actions on stage becomes ever wider.

The play transferred to Broadway the following year, with Terence Stamp (fresh from his breakthrough film role of Billy Budd) playing the lead. Whilst the play in London was a success, its Broadway incarnation was not. In his autobiography Stamp describes how delighted he was to play the role and as an East End native, with a glamorous model girlfriend in Jean Shrimpton, he would have seemed to have been ideal casting for the role. The play opened in New York’s Morocco Theater on 17 December 1964, after playing to good audiences in provincial theatres, but the production played for only 21 performances. Stamp blamed a devout Catholic critic for a damning review that would have doomed any play that depicted abortion to failure (1989: 147). Shrimpton however claimed that the audience was just bemused:

[T]‌hey didn’t understand cockney rhyming slang – in fact they did not understand the play at all. Terry was dynamic enough but this near monologue from him in an East End accent was baffling the audience. It seemed to me it was not going to work and it didn’t. The applause at the end was polite and the critics delivered their coup de grace the next morning.

(Shrimpton and Hall 1990: 127)

Bill Naughton also wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation in 1966, following the play relatively faithfully. It was a comparatively big budget production, financed by Paramount and designed to showcase Swinging London for American audiences, where it was, according to Alexander Walker, aggressively marketed (2005: 95). In an echo of the failure of Stamp’s authentic East End accent to appeal to American audiences, Geoffrey Macnab claimed that Caine had to re-loop his dialogue to make his speaking clearer for the American market (Macnab 2000: 205). Caine was brought in to play the part after it had been originally offered to Stamp, who was his former flatmate. Stamp declined it after his failure in the role on Broadway and Caine recalls in his autobiography that he spent many hours remonstrating with Stamp to do the film role, to no avail (1993: 180). Caine himself at this point had actually failed an audition to replace John Neville in the stage version and was under contract to Harry Saltzman at the time after a minor but significant role in Zulu in 1964 and his starring role as the anti-Bond Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File in 1965. With the resources from the Bond films at his disposal, Saltzman was intent on making Caine a star and Alfie was the vehicle by which this was to be achieved, supported by an increase in the circulation of stories about Caine’s wild off-screen life and iconic photos of Caine in sharp suits and trademark glasses. Christine Gledhill has suggested that ‘stardom proper arises when the off-stage or off-screen life of the actor becomes as important as the performed role in the production of a semi-autonomous persona or image, a development which depends on mass circulation journalism or photography’ (1991: 192). This is evidenced by the extratextual information circulating around Caine at the time. The film’s original poster demonstrates an elision of character and star with the strapline, ‘Caine IS Alfie’. In his biography, Caine claims that at this time he was fully aware of building his public image and giving newspaper editors something to write about, so he made sure that all the interviews ‘were about birds’ leading to a swathe of articles in the popular press with titles such as ‘The bird man of Grosvenor Square’ (Caine 1993: 187). Therefore the original character of Alfie, whose character deficiencies are gradually revealed to the audience, becomes invested with the qualities of Caine’s star persona. This has implications for the overall drama as Alfie’s intensive womanizing is reworked to seem admirable for audiences rather than misogynistic or self-destructive. For American audiences, in particular, Caine was also being sold as the living embodiment of the social changes brought about by the mid-1960s consumer and post-war baby boom and became emblematic of the apparent breakdown in class divisions exemplified by Swinging London. An article in American Esquire that was intended to launch Caine as a star in the United States claimed that his working-class London roots made him a new kind of British star:

No one exemplifies this transformation better than Caine […] he established his reputation not only as an actor but as an emblem of the new Britain and currently he is the most fashionable example of the crumbling of old class prejudice.

(Lawrenson 1966: 32)

Alfie was a transatlantic box office success, being the second highest grossing film at the UK box office after Thunderball and making $10 million in the United States. However, the film didn’t meet universal critical acclaim, with several reviewers noticing the difference between the original play and the screen adaptation.

Bill Naughton’s funny, touching and sad little character study has suffered the ultimate metamorphosis. Drenched in garish Technicolour, stretched into Techniscope and fitted with a pop theme tune, it has made Alfie a modish anti-hero inside whose thick skin the original play can occasionally be heard struggling to get out.

(Anon. 1966: n.pag.)

This review points to a tension between a character whose actions the narrative demands we should question and the star who we are asked to admire for his free-wheeling brazen sexual confidence. There is therefore a certain distance between the star who remains visually and sexually powerful and the character who is subjected to the effects of the narrative that demand he should pay some sort of penalty for his sexual and social transgressions. This tension is compounded by the retention of the play’s direct address to the audience, so that Caine as Alfie is the on-screen narrator of his own story, inviting the audience’s collusion with his view of events, whilst the other characters remain oblivious to Alfie’s on-camera discourse. This direct audience address and Caine’s throwaway ironic delivery of it render Alfie, as Jeffery Richards concluded, more of a ‘role model than an object of condemnation’ (1997: 163).

Yet whilst an examination of Caine’s star persona would support this view, there are moments in the film when Caine’s performance does show Alfie to be more sensitive than his brash exterior would suggest. Although events are shown without the audience gaining any access to the women’s point of view, as the film progresses, it deliberately opens up a space between what Alfie says about his actions to the audience and what the film shows us of their effect. Caine’s performance underpins this, particularly in the scene, when he returns to the flat, where Lily (Vivien Merchant) has had to go through a painful abortion after Alfie has got her pregnant. After entering the room he ignores Lily’s tired plea not to enter into the side room, where the aborted foetus has been discarded. From his entrance into the room, Alfie’s face is framed in close up and Caine shows him looking nervously around and then slowly approach the foetus. The camera stays on Alfie’s face, without cutting away. Caine looks down and then up, with his face contorted by an expression of extreme anguish and tears come to his eyes as he realizes the implications of his actions. The fact that this is all shot in close up accentuates identification with the character at this moment and seems to give the audience privileged access to Alfie’s inner anguish, albeit arguably more for himself than for his partner.¹ In the following scene, Alfie confides in his friend (Murray Melvin) about his attitude to the event rather than the audience, indicating that the direct address to camera presenting a confident lothario is more of a performance and Alfie’s masculinity is therefore more fragile than it appears. Therefore as Carson concludes:

For all their representations of a male centred style centred exaltation of the classless consumerist self these films do not present the spectator with a uniform celebration of a male centred perspective.

(Carson 1998: 58)

The equivalent scene in the play puts Alfie in a much more unsympathetic light. It is constructed differently as we see Alfie with Lily after the abortion before Alfie leaves her to get some air and then narrates directly to the audience how he went back to the flat and accidentally sees the aborted foetus. The fact that he tells the audience that he cried, and not for anyone else but ‘’is bleedin self’, encourages the audience to take a more critical view of him and his actions (Naughton 1963: 60). Furthermore, in both the scenes with Lily he appears incapable of realizing the full implications of what has happened. He slaps her to stop her from screaming in case the landlady hears and the illegal act is found out. At the end of the scene he thoughtlessly tosses her a toy teddy bear for her youngest son, although goes silent when he sees her holding it like a baby. The ending of the play, when he looks back over his ‘little life’, shows him in a more pensive mood, but this is undercut by him inadvertently bumping into Siddie, who he had unceremoniously dumped at the beginning of the play. He persuades her to go off with him and seems to have recovered his former swagger. This contrasts with the ending of the Caine film, which ends more ambiguously with Caine famously asking the audience, ‘What’s it all about?’

Changing the focus in adaptation to performance brings into view what the star brings to the character in terms of their persona, what the actor brings to character in terms of performance of the role and the interplay between the three elements. By looking at the actor as an agent in the adaptive process we can understand how texts can change quite fundamentally between stage and screen and in screen remakes. In the case of Alfie, the strong star persona constructed for Michael Caine at the beginning of his career comes into conflict with the morality of the original material. However, Caine’s performance and the way it is presented by the mise en scène could be said to point to this moral imperative by showing us a character hiding behind a public persona that is revealed by the end to be a construction.

Other actors then can affect the character as performed and it’s useful in this respect to compare Caine’s Alfie with the remake in 2004 and Jude Law in the title role as an ersatz post-feminist Alfie. Law’s star persona at this point was marked by a more fluid metrosexual masculinity than Caine’s and publicly Law identified himself with the film’s attitude to the main character rather than the character itself, which again subtly altered the ideological import of the drama. The remake was positioned as an updated adaptation of the film rather than the play, with Law claiming that

The only thing I didn’t want to do was a Michael Caine. It’s a rethink of Alfie […] you can’t remake it because it’s too much of a classic but we’ve taken the essence of Alfie Elkins and set him in a modern age with modern women which puts a completely different slant on how he behaves and what he can get away with.

(Hiscock 2004b: n.pag.)

The action was transposed from Swinging London to contemporary New York (although the film was actually shot in Manchester), with Alfie still working as a chauffeur but now zipping about the streets self-consciously on his blue vintage Vespa. The issues of class embedded in the play and still traceable in the Caine version are erased in multicultural, classless New York, as Law, the cheeky outsider, moves with ease between Marisa Tomei’s humble flat to Susan Sarandon’s penthouse suite. There is no abortion scene and male friendships in the film are given more prominence. Alfie’s affair with his friend’s girlfriend is therefore framed more in terms of the betrayal of homosocial bonds it represents. Although the film seems to draw on Sex and the City discourses of female empowerment, the film is still ambiguous in its portrayal of sexual relations. Arguably the introduction of Alfie’s impotence as a key narrative device early on in the film positions him as more sympathetic to audiences, so that his inability to commit is ultimately more damaging to himself than to the feisty women around him. This shift of emphasis in Law’s Alfie is evidenced by the reworking of the poster away from ‘Caine IS Alfie’ to the more plaintive (and referencing Cilla Black’s original theme tune), ‘What’s it all about?’, with Law gazing out soulfully to the audience, trapped within the I of Alfie, rather than in the 1966 poster, where Caine’s disembodied head sits cheekily on top of it.

Although his role in Alfie was supposed to launch Law as a transatlantic star in a very similar way to Michael Caine, there are significant differences in their star personas that mediate the effect of Alfie as a character. Whilst Caine appeared to embrace stardom and was happy to collude with the construction of his persona as Cockney man about town, Law seemed notably more reluctant to commit himself to the construction of a consistent star persona. Up until Alfie, Law was known for his stage as well as screen acting and, despite his leading man good looks, tended to take on character parts. Anthony Minghella, who directed Law in The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), described Law’s reluctance to take on roles beyond the dazzling character turn and embrace the fact that he could be seen as both an actor and a star.

It’s true of all wonderful actors that they somehow are in a complex relationship with stardom, particularly British actors; they think they mistrust it, and they want the regard of their peers. They want to be perceived as actors.

(Wolf 2003: n.pag.)

Alfie, however, marked a turning point in Law’s choice of roles, trading unashamedly on his boyish good looks and capitalizing on press interest deriving from the break-up of his marriage, so that his public image went from stable family man to freewheeling Lothario overnight. This offered the possibility (similar to Caine) of a conflation between a womanizing man about town persona and his character in Alfie but Law, unlike Caine, distanced himself in interviews from the character he played.

Alfie is a guy who relies on the veneer. He thinks that it’s enough to buy a great cheap suit, say the right things and bed this woman and that woman and that will bring him happiness but he’s so wrong.

(Hiscock 2004b: n.pag)

In terms of Law’s performance, the direct address to the audience was retained and elaborated on in the 2004 Alfie, but operates differently to the Caine film. Whilst the former was delivered squarely to camera, in the latter Law’s Alfie seeks a more ironic, self-deprecating complicity. Whilst Caine switches from talking to the audience to going back into the scene, with Law there is more ongoing communication with the audience within the scene. He winks, shrugs, scowls and smiles at the camera, whilst simultaneously engaging with the female characters. Therefore whilst Caine’s performance suggested that Alfie’s admissions to camera are self-deluding performances, Law’s performance implies that his Alfie is much more knowing about his behaviour to women, asking the audience to understand and forgive his transgressions. Caine’s verdict on Law’s interpretation demonstrates this:

My Alfie didn’t know what he was doing in that film – but thought that he did. Jude’s Alfie clearly knew what he was up to all along […] I played Alfie as a sort of primitive. The last line I say in that movie is, ‘What’s it all about?’ The minute Jude walks on you know that here is a guy who knows exactly what everything is about.

(Pearce 2007: 21)

Therefore Law’s metrosexual masculinity, despite being in Dyer’s terms a ‘perfect fit’ for a reconfigured post-feminist Alfie, ironically emphasizes the potential misogyny of the material as his knowingness regarding his actions towards women is signalled through his way of playing the direct address to the audience and seeking their complicity.

Both screen versions of Alfie added songs that emphasized their status as pop-cultural events, and in this next section, I will look at music as performance in stage–screen adaptations. The significance of music and sound for live performance has recently been explored by Roesner (2016) and Kendrick and Roesner (2012), counteracting a scholarly tendency to privilege the visual or the spectacle in analyses of theatrical productions. Roesner in particular has argued that attention paid to musicalization in the theatre ‘re-introduces a full range of textual potential: as rhythmical, gesticulatory, melodic, spatial and sounding phenomenon as well as a carrier of meaning’ (2016: 3). This section will focus in particular on how music operates on stage in relation to the spoken and aural elements of the performance text, predominantly using the example of the original production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, a work that was notable for its conscious deployment of musical elements to support the development of character and themes. I will then look at the film adaptation to track how the relationships between music and visual elements were carried over or reconfigured.

Raymond Spottiswoode described film music as having the following functions: imitation – where score imitates speech or natural sounds; commentary – where the score takes the role of commentator to the images on screen; evocation – where music reveals something about character (this includes the ‘leitmotif’ where a tune becomes associated with a character through repetition); contrast – where music contrasts with the image to create effect; and finally dynamism – where music works together with the composition to emphasize editing or cutting (1965: 49–50). Narrative conventions such as Classical Hollywood Narrative style developed after synchronous sound was introduced meant that the relationship of image and sound was determined by certain ideological practices, which used the soundtrack to support the image and render itself invisible in the process. Music for plays rarely functions as underscore in this way, although it does sometimes echo the same practices of providing musical leitmotifs for certain characters, or using well-known songs to heighten the emotional affect. For instance, Lyn Gardner recalls the use of Otis Redding’s ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ at the end of a production of Jim Cartwright’s 1980s classic about the effect of Thatcher’s policies on a community, Road. The use of the song implicitly demands audience empathy for the plight of the protagonists:

Redding’s anthem suddenly soars over the deafening daily roar of despair and hopelessness of a group of young people living in a dead-end Northern town that has had the community ripped out of it by unemployment. In both cases, without the cunning use of the song, the emotional impact of each scene would be diminished.

(Gardner 2008: n.pag.)

Music has become part of the toolkit with which productions can impact their audiences today, although in the past it was more typical for music to be absent from a stage production and then introduced to underpin classical narrative conventions in the screen adaptation. For instance, in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane (1966) no music is indicated in the written text of the original stage production. The film adaptation, made in 1970, in a strategy typical of the period, has a pop theme tune with the same title, written and sung by Georgie Fame, placed over the opening credits and revisited throughout the film. However, the film also uses music to signal that the action is to be understood as a farce, a generic signifier that the play scrupulously avoids. Campbell has examined the use of music and sound in the marriage scene between Sloane (Peter McEnery), Kath (Beryl Reid) and Ed (Harry Andrews). As the characters promise, ‘I will’, the music suddenly stops and there is ‘a plucked bass portamento, which produces a decidedly comic effect’ (Campbell 2013: 152). Both Ed and Kath then kiss Sloane, and the soundtrack returns to Fame’s theme tune and then to a church organ finish as ‘Amen’ is written across the final image of the threesome together. Campbell argues that the sound explicitly positions the gay marriage as farcical, a parody of Christian marriage and thus encourages the audience to not take it too seriously, unlike the play where the final ménage à trois between Kath, Ed and Sloane is presented without commentary (Orton 2014: 129). The music therefore dates the film in a way that the play remains timeless and because of the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United Kingdom in 2014, ‘the use of audio effects to distance the audience from considering gay marriage as a potential reality now seems quaint’ (Campbell 2013: 167).

There are also examples where music is used in the original production of the play but takes on a different significance in the film. Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus was first performed at the National Theatre in 1979 and subsequently adapted into a film in 1984 by Shaffer himself and directed by Milos Forman. Both play and film depict the rivalry between court composer Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with the former tortured by the realization of his own mediocrity in the presence of Mozart’s feckless genius. The original play was in two acts and divided into twelve and seven scenes, with the music in the play presented as if it was heard from the perspective of Salieri’s paranoid mind. For instance, rather than use sections of Mozart’s actual music, the composer for the stage play, Harrison Birtwistle aurally distorted patches of Mozart’s music so they were almost unrecognizable (Tibbetts 2004: 168).

The film on the other hand both exploited the prestige factor of recognizably ‘classical’ music in the soundtrack and arranged it in line with the conventions of the Hollywood biopic genre. Sequences of Mozart’s actual music were used, recorded by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and conducted by Sir Neville Marriner specifically for the film. Commentators have noted how the release of the film led to a renaissance in Mozart’s popularity, with the CD of the film’s soundtrack becoming one of the year’s bestsellers. However, specific pieces of Mozart’s music were also selected to highlight the narrative’s thematic concerns. Most notable in these terms was the sequence depicting Mozart’s death, where Salieri notates his rival’s Requiem, as the former lies on his deathbed, communicating each part as it is heard in his head until it builds into the whole of the musical score. The scene was not in the play (and couldn’t have happened in real life) but was written by Shaffer specifically for the film. It is designed to take advantage of the properties of the cinematic medium, in that the audience get privileged access to what is inside Mozart’s head and thus witness his genius in putting together the musical parts to make the whole. Shaffer has spoken about how a concern to present the nature of musical inspiration was paramount in his adaptive strategy.

We were able to construct a scene that is highly effective in cinematic terms, yet wholly concerned with the least visual of all possible subjects; music itself. I do not believe that a stage version of this scene would have been half as effective.

(Shaffer 1984: 57, original emphasis)

It is noteworthy then that a revival of Amadeus at the National Theatre in 2016, after Shaffer’s death, took a very different attitude to the music and one that arguably was inspired by the integrated use of music in the film. Whereas Hall’s original production used music sparingly, Michael Longhurst’s production put the music centre stage by employing twenty musicians from the Southbank Sinfonia to play Mozart’s music whilst being assimilated into the action. Dressed in modern black clothes they become a chorus commenting on the action, responding to Salieri with both music and movement. As the Independent review highlighted, this enabled Mozart’s music to have a visceral impact, by being brought alive in correspondence with the action on stage, similar to that described by Shaffer above.

There’s an extraordinary sequence in which Salieri is glancing through a folder of his rival’s sheet music. As he drops the pages one by one, unable to bear the beauty of what he reads, the Sinfonia’s glorious performances of them get abruptly aborted but the mobile platform of steps on which they are standing continues to bear down like an implacable juggernaut on the writhing and retching Salieri.

(Taylor 2016: n.pag.)

Finally I would like to look at an example where the relationship of music to the drama was both integral to the production and then examine how this was then adapted to the screen. The play in question is Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, which was adapted to the screen in 1951. Both versions were directed by Elia Kazan, with Marlon Brando in the role of Stanley and Jessica Tandy/Vivien Leigh in the role of Blanche in stage/screen versions respectively. The debut production of Streetcar opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York on 3 December 1947 and was a huge commercial and critical success, playing for 855 performances. As Davison has argued, the ‘music created for theatrical productions is notoriously ephemeral. It is not uncommon to find that the only information about a production’s music to survive is a credit for the composer and/or performers in the play’s program or playbill and, occasionally, a few lines about the music in reviews of the play’ (2011: 402). Because of the existence of archive material relating to both stage and screen versions of the drama, the score of Streetcar has been subject to an unusual level of critical investigation (e.g. Davison 2009; Butler 2002). For instance, Davison describes how because of disputes about the categorization of the play between producer Irene M. Selznick and the American Federation of Musicians, the extent and purpose of the music, and how it developed from text to production, is exceptionally well documented (2011).

From the start, Williams had included references to music in the play, including a blues piano, which ‘expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here’ (Williams and Miller 2009: 1), a muted trumpet and a ‘polka tune’ that functions as Blanche’s memory music and comes in towards the end of the play to highlight Blanche’s mental disintegration. In pre-production, Kazan developed this into two dissimilar types of music that played at different times in the production and Blanche’s ‘leitmotif’ was brought in earlier in the play. As Davison suggests, ‘placing these cues throughout the play suggested that Blanche’s mental state was fragile prior to her arrival in New Orleans’ (Davison 2009: 83). The theme was performed on the world’s first polyphonic synthesizer, the Hammond Novachord and was played just slightly off-stage. The Novachord could warp acoustic sounds into defamiliarized and uncanny variations in order to leave it ambiguous whether it was there as mood music from outside the action or represented the sounds that were inside Blanche’s head, as she recalled her life in Belle Reve.

The blues piano and trumpet in Williams’ playscript evolved into improvised jazz music performed by a live band upstairs in a dressing room and amplified to the auditorium to give the impression of a band playing in the fictional ‘Four Deuces’ café over the road. Davison also relates how the jazz score was used at key moments to counterpoint the action, such as a ‘slow, whimsical, sexy version of Sugar Blues’ being deployed to undermine Blanche’s protestations that she has ‘old fashioned ideals’ (Davison 2009: 84). Kazan also decided that the jazz blues was to be used to underpin the latent physical sexuality that is expressed between characters, ‘whether characters are conscious of its power, expressing it in their words and actions (Stanley and Stella), or whether the music expresses its power over them, in their denial or suppression of it (Blanche)’ (Davison 2011: 440). In production then, Williams’ original suggestions for music cues were often changed or removed. A particular example of this is the ending, where Kazan chose to bring the action to the close with the sound of the haunting polka music rather than the upbeat jazz indicated by Williams, which encouraged sympathy with Blanche as she is led away by the doctor and matron and implicitly linked her demise to the suicide of her husband, the loss of Belle Reve and the fragmentation of her identity that followed.

This sense of the music being used to comment on characters was fairly innovative for music accompanying a play in the theatre and this active engagement with the characters and narrative was retained in the score for the film. Alex North’s score has been described as ‘the first functional, dramatic jazz score for a film. Up until then, jazz had been generally used only as source music’ (Lochner 2006: 3). Davison argues that the score of the film challenged the notion that music for a film should guide the audience towards a particular interpretation (sometimes called Mickey Mousing), maintaining that it retained the play’s ambiguity towards its characters (2009: 84). Butler on the other hand argues that the film score operates within dominant Classical Hollywood norms, by using jazz music to aurally point to what is deemed seedy and immoral (2002: 98). He references handwritten notations on North’s original score, where the words ‘sexy, virile’ appear alongside the instrumentation for muted trumpet whereas Blanche’s dreams of her previous, seemingly unsullied life are underscored by a more classical soundtrack involving violins, and cello, with the note that it should sound ‘magic-like, shimmering’ (Butler 2002: 98). What is certainly clear is that the music blurs the boundaries between the diegetic and the non-diegetic in terms of whether it is internal to the plot or used to underscore the dramatic action from outside of it. For instance, in the opening scenes, the rolling blues piano that accompanies the images becomes the music heard by the characters in the bowling lanes, where Blanche meets up with Stella.

North also expanded the music for Blanche by developing two themes that worked as leitmotifs. The first is the polka theme that is associated with Blanche’s memory of dancing with her husband before he shot himself. Whenever he is referred to in the film, however obliquely, the tune comes in and snaps off at the sound of a shot. The only exception to this is at the end when Mitch comes round to break up with Blanche. The music does not stop after the shot but goes on, perhaps indicating that Blanche’s relationship with Mitch is as doomed as that with her former husband. However there is another theme, which North called ‘Belle Reve Reflections’, that is used not only to indicate that traumatic loss of the estate for Blanche, but also at other points in the film. For instance, it plays when Stanley breaks the news of Stella’s pregnancy to Blanche. This might not seem on the surface to impact Blanche but by linking this to Blanche’s music of ‘loss’, the music comments on the action, suggesting that this will be another nail in the coffin for Blanche, by being cut out of the new family unit, as indeed happens at the end.

There was also more than one score for the film as North’s original music suffered from cuts made in the film by the producers to satisfy the Catholic Legion of Decency, precisely because of the perceived ‘carnality’ of some parts of the score (Davison 2009: 68–72). This was the score that played during what has been termed the ‘staircase scene’, which comes about halfway through the film. Blanche and Stella are upstairs having been driven out of the apartment by Stanley’s violence towards his wife after the card game. After a ducking in the bath by the other men to sober him up, Stanley comes outside and wails up to Stella to come down. To Blanche’s surprise, Stella walks as if spellbound out of the upper flat and down the staircase into a passionate embrace with her husband. As Davison has painstakingly analysed, even though the original film passed the Production Code with a few minor changes, the Legion of Decency objected to the music scoring the scene precisely because it indicated Stanley and Stella’s relationship was primarily based on lust. Therefore a replacement cue was written for the scene that avoided this connotation and was attached to the print of the film until in 1993, when in a less febrile moral climate, Warner Brothers released the Original Director’s version that restored North’s original music. This points to a key social and historical factor shaping adaptations between stage and screen, namely the far stricter codes of censorship for the cinema that affected what could be shown and heard on screen. North’s score then expanded on the music for the stage production to explore more intently ‘the characters, the setting, main motifs, crucial events and states of minds. The film soundtrack could thus be denoted as integral to and harmonised with the dramatic action’ (Onič 2016: 59).

This chapter has argued that understanding of stage-to-screen adaptions can be expanded by looking at material aspects of performance, such as costume, acting, design and sound, and thinking about how they operate on stage and how they are configured in the screen adaptation. This distinguishes them from the adaptation of novels as both plays and films dramatize situations and involve actors performing written dialogue, interacting with settings and sound to make meaning. However, medium-specific conventions mean that these elements are reconfigured between adaptations. In the next chapter, I will reverse the focus on stage-to-screen adaptation to look at how the stage has adapted films and created performance events for audiences. Whilst some aspects such as questions around acting, design and sound are the same for screen-to-stage as they are for stage-to-screen adaptations, I shall also discuss what their staging strategies reveal about their relationship to the source film.

NOTE

1.Due to the limitations of length, I have omitted to discuss more broadly the very different identification processes that operate in film and theatre in relation to the actor and how this is facilitated by different perspectives on the action. Baron is particularly good on looking at how mise en scène helps to construct performance on film (Baron and Carnicke 2011: 11–31).