Theatre and Adaptation 9781472533166_txt_print.indd 1 19/03/2014 13:47 9781472533166_txt_print.indd 2 19/03/2014 13:47 Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat Edited by Margherita Laera 9781472533166_txt_print.indd 3 19/03/2014 13:47 Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Margherita Laera, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Margherita Laera has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-3316-6 PB: 978-1-4081-8472-1 ePDF: 978-1-4725-2241-2 ePub: 978-1-4725-2221-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed and bound in India 9781472533166_txt_print.indd 4 19/03/2014 13:47 For David Kohn With all my love, always 9781472533166_txt_print.indd 5 19/03/2014 13:47 9781472533166_txt_print.indd 6 19/03/2014 13:47 Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: The Theatricality of Adaptation Margherita Laera 1 Part 1 Return, Rewrite, Repeat 19 1 ‘It’s Very Tied to the Content of the Play’: Basil Jones, Adrian Kohler, Jane Taylor and Mervyn Millar of Handspring Puppet Company in Conversation with Nadia Davids 21 2 Social and Theatrical Adaptation: Grzegorz Jarzyna in Conversation with Paul Allain 35 3 Creating X-Rays of the Text to Dissect the Present: Ivo van Hove of Toneelgroep Amsterdam in Conversation with Peter M. Boenisch 49 4 ‘Something New Is Sure To Happen’: Daniel Veronese in Conversation with Jean Graham-Jones 63 5 Conservative Adaptation in Japanese Noh Theatre: Udaka Michishige in Conversation with Diego Pellecchia 77 Part 2 Defusing Tradition 91 6 On Literality and Limits: Romeo Castellucci of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio in Conversation with Nicholas Ridout 93 7 The Subtle Aggressors: Julia Bardsley and Simon Vincenzi in Conversation with Dominic Johnson 107 8 Between Radical Adaptation and Strategic Adaptability: Ki Catur ‘Benyek’ Kuncoro in Conversation with Miguel Escobar 121 9 Beg, Borrow or Steal: Lois Weaver in Conversation with Jen Harvie 135 9781472533166_txt_print.indd 7 19/03/2014 13:47 viii Contents Part 3 Intercultural Encounters 149 10 Shakespeare/Two Gents Productions: Denton Chikura, Tonderai Munyevu and Arne Pohlmeier of Two Gents Productions in Conversation with Penelope Woods 151 11 Being Affected: Ong Keng Sen of TheatreWorks Singapore in Conversation with William Peterson 165 12 Hello Darkness My Old Friend: Alvis Hermanis in Conversation with Alan Read 181 Part 4 Crafting Adaptations 197 13 The Novel as ‘Obstacle’: John Collins of Elevator Repair Service in Conversation with Aoife Monks 199 14 Doing the Impossible: Katie Mitchell in Conversation with Dan Rebellato 213 15 ‘There Are No Formulas’: Emma Rice of Kneehigh in Conversation with Martin Welton 227 16 ‘Expert’ Dramaturgies: Helgard Haug of Rimini Protokoll in Conversation with Margherita Laera 241 17 Theatre as an Intellectual Concertina: Simon Stephens in Conversation with Duška Radosavljević 255 Notes on Contributors 269 Index 273 9781472533166_txt_print.indd 8 19/03/2014 13:47 Acknowledgements This book brings together an extraordinary group of theatre-makers and academics whose work I deeply admire, and with whom it has been a pleasure to collaborate. I am very grateful for the time each has contributed, and for the resulting rigour this has brought to the project. The idea for this collection emerged from a series of 12 public inter- views I organized in 2012, entitled the Leverhulme Olympic Talks on Theatre and Adaptation. They took place at Queen Mary, University of London, at the ICA and at the Barbican Centre. The project, generously sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust, also received support from Queen Mary’s Drama Department and Olympics Committee. I want to thank the Head of Drama, Michael McKinnie, and the Olympics Committee Chair, Evelyn Welch, for their endorsement. I am also indebted to Jules Deering and the technical team for providing exceptional assis- tance to the series of talks, and to Harriet Curtis and Nicola Lee for helping it run smoothly. The European Theatre Research Network at the University of Kent kindly teamed up with Queen Mary and the Barbican to support the last talk of the series, with the director Grzegorz Jarzyna. I am also very grateful to Matthew Cohen for his advice on the subject of Indonesian puppetry performance, and to my patient colleagues who transcribed the interviews: Harriet Curtis, Diane Gittings and Susan Higgins. Many thanks to the editorial team at Methuen Drama, especially Mark Dudgeon and Emily Hockley, for making this book happen. Lastly, I want to express my gratitude to my family for their love and encouragement while I worked on this project. 9781472533166_txt_print.indd 9 19/03/2014 13:47 9781472533166_txt_print.indd 10 19/03/2014 13:47 Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: The Theatricality of Adaptation Margherita Laera Theatre returns, it always does. It returns to places where it has already been before and to times in which it has already appeared. And while it does so, it sends us too, the spectators, to those places and times, performance after performance. Theatre also rewrites. It constantly does. It rewrites history, relationships, stories and rules. It refashions beliefs, recycles old and used objects and reassembles them into new embodied experiences. Above all, theatre repeats, and incessantly so. It repeats itself and the act of returning and rewriting, as though it were struck by an obsessive compulsion to reiterate and re-enact, again and again, the vestiges of its past. In so doing, it adapts itself to present contingencies and situations, like an animal species struggling to survive through evolution. Theatre, however, does not reshape its coordinates simply to remain alive or to remain itself through time, but also to change the world around it. Theatre, one could say, never stops adapting its features to the world and the world to its features. In this book, theatre makers and academics discuss the many modalities in which theatre returns to, rewrites and repeats its objects and desires. Through 17 commissioned interviews, the contributors to this volume explore the notion of ‘adaptation’ and its multiple relevance to theatre and performance in the twenty-first century. While the mechanisms of the cultural practice we now call ‘adaptation’ have been associated with theatricality for longer than written historical evidence can account for, they are certainly not limited to the theatre. In After Babel, George Steiner proposed that 9781472533166_txt_print.indd 1 19/03/2014 13:47 2 Theatre and Adaptation ‘invariance within transformation’ is at the basis of what we call ‘c u l t u r e’. 1 For Steiner, ‘a culture is a sequence of translations and trans- formations of constants’ relying upon mechanisms such as ‘paraphrase, pastiche, imitation, thematic variation, parody, citation in a supporting or undermining context, false attribution (accidental or deliberate), plagiarism, collage and many more’.2 The production of community, therefore, is rooted in the repetition of cultural units of meaning through the rituals of sociality and belonging, otherwise known as ‘tradition’. But what role does theatre play in the perpetuation of traditional practices? How does theatre contribute to the formation, deformation, and hybridization of ‘cultures’? What relationship is there between adaptation, performance, and change? In the interviews that follow, the term ‘adaptation’ is applied to a wide variety of theatrical operations, uses, and contexts, in which a trans- formation of sorts takes place. It not only refers to the dramaturgical practice of turning, for instance, a novel into a play script, a domain traditionally covered by playwrights. It also covers the work of directors and their mise en scène, that of actors in performance and rehearsals, that of translators in transferring a text from one language to another, and that of audiences in co-authoring and responding to a piece. A focus on the processes of adaptation, that is, on the modalities in which theatre makers adapt existing cultural material of varying form into performance, can be traced throughout the volume. Here, artists reflect on how they practise adaptation as well as why they serially do. While theatre venues continue to bank on the attractive familiarity of adaptations, and more and more university drama departments offer practical and theoretical modules on how to devise and analyse them, scholarship has so far concentrated on literary and cinematic practice or on specific subfields of Shakespeare Studies and Classical Receptions.3 Through conversations between theatre and performance academics and internationally renowned ‘serial adapters’ working in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa, this book wishes to explore a variety of approaches and contexts in which stage practitioners make theatre by constantly returning to, rewriting and repeating their methodologies, histories and inherited narratives. 9781472533166_txt_print.indd 2 19/03/2014 13:47 Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: The Theatricality of Adaptation 3 This volume explores the idea that the mechanisms of adaptation and those of theatricality have something fundamental in common, not least in their relationship with temporality.