Theatre Journal

It is not easy to find a definition of adaptationthat is acknowledged and agreed to by scholars in adaptation studies. For some, its focus is primarily on literature to film adaptations, ¹for others on adaptation as process and as product, ²and for still others as a subdivision [End Page 581]of intertextuality; ³problematic though such definitions might be, they all describe to some extent the dramaturgical processes inherent in all text-based theatre. Whether we take Linda Hutcheon’s rather open definition of adaptation as "repetition with variation" ⁴or look towards Julie Sanders’s more comprehensive list of what adaptation can be—a transpositional practice, an act of re-vision, an editorial practice, an amplification procedure, a re-interpretation and re-location ⁵—both might as well be descriptions of theatre’s relationship with text. Fundamentally, then, a dramaturgical practice, adaptation as process may very well occur in most rehearsal rooms leading to text-based theatre. This review essay takes everything to be an adaptation that calls itself thus. Echoing Gideon Toury’s definition of translation, ⁶I take, in this instance, an adaptation to be any performance that is presented or regarded as such within the receiving culture.

What follows is a discussion of a number of productions seen throughout 2013–14 in an attempt to either dismiss adaptation as a useful categorization of theatre practice or, hopefully, be able to offer an analysis of specific trends within adaptation in contemporary theatre. These productions are designed for children, which inflects the interpretation slightly but nevertheless provides a useful basis for analyzing theatrical adaption at large.

As the short list of productions under discussion indicates, in the majority of cases, adaptors are mentioned as occupying roles and spaces separate from that of the writer or director, although Not Now Bernardcredits the whole company as adaptor, while The Gruffalocredits nobody with the adaptation. Adaptors, and translators for that matter, thus occupy a liminal space: either rendered invisible or deemed not-quite-writer, not-quite-director, they nonetheless remain intrinsically linked to the dramaturgical process. Adaptors are "unavoidably and inherently dramaturgical in the acts they commit on the words of another." ⁷Such an act committed "on the words of another" implies what Jørgen Bruhn and colleagues posit as a question: namely, whether "we should not admit that the adaptive process is dialectical, and that the source text is changed in the process of adaptation as well?" ⁸Thus, the hierarchical relationship between source and adaptation, which has long been criticized and discredited, has to be replaced by thinking about an adaptation and its source being in a lateral rather than vertical relation, but also a dialectical and, indeed, dramaturgical one. ⁹In other words, the reception of an adaptation in performance depends very much on how an audience accesses this dialectical relationship: an audience with knowledge of the source will enter the dialectical relationship at a different point than an audience who has no knowledge of the source. Linda Hutcheon argues that "if we are not familiar with the particular work that it [the adaptation] adapts, we simply experience the adaptation as we would any other work. To experience it as an adaptation, however, . . . we need to recognize it as such and know its adapted text, thus allowing the latter to oscillate in our memories with what we are experiencing." ¹⁰ [End Page 582]

However, rather than experiencing an adapted text "as we would any other work," lacking knowledge of the source simply shifts the entry point into the dialectical process whereby the source becomes the secondary text rather than the adaptation itself. There are, of course, numerous entrance points into the dialectic relationship between adaptation and source; for example, our knowledge...