Introduction to Special Issue

Year 2025, Volume: 35 Issue: Special Issue, 0 - 0, 05.08.2025

Aleks Sierz

Abstract

At the start of 1955, the British critic Kenneth Tynan began an article, which was published in the Observer newspaper under the title “Convalescence”, about his country’s new drama, by saying: “Night-nurses at the bedside of good drama, we critics keep a holy vigil.” About 70 years later, this metaphor is still going strong, and critics, commentators and academics can still find themselves in the position of tending theatrical drama as if it was a patient whose recovery they have to supervise. We gather around the sick person’s bed, and try to console their relatives. We whisper to each other our views on how bad their condition is. We mutter about the reasons for their decline: lack of funding, poor audiences and competition from younger and healthier media. Behind us the life-saving machines bleep and blink; nurses appear and then leave. At the same time, we wish ardently for the patient’s recuperation, seeing hopeful signs from each movement, however small, of the theatre’s body.

Amid this rather gloomy picture of contemporary British theatre, some rays of sun do shine in through the patient’s window. As the online conference, Adaptation, Appropriation, Translation (held on 8-10 December 2023), made clear, this aspect of the subject exhibits a rude health. At what was a very memorable and intellectually stimulating event, the keynote speakers were Professor Benjamin Poore, Dr Catherine Rees, Professor Julie Sanders and Dr Aleks Sierz. Using examples drawn from the early work of Caryl Churchill, as well as more recent plays including James Graham’s Best of Enemies (2021), Poore analyzed the subject of appropriation, intermedi ality, and the problem of history, by examining the question of identifying the difference between the intermedial practices of adaptation and those of the contemporary history play. History — the name that we give to our attempts to order and make sense of the overwhelming chaos of the past — is, he argued, on one level quite different from a novel or a film as a source text for stage adaptation. On another level, the same questions of fidelity and storytelling apply. On the other hand, Rees explored ways in which we can use textual adaptation as a metaphor to understand and approach other acts of appropriation and adaptation in the wider society, in this case the so-called Culture Wars. Looking at Patrick Marber’s Don Juan in Soho (2006), itself an adaptation of the famous masculinist myth, as means to explore how cultural heritage becomes part of our national cityscape, and how we as a society understand, process and celebrate so-called heroic achievement. In addition, Sanders looked at the ways in which Shakespeare is currently being adapted in debates about contemporary questions of social justice in a range of transnational contexts. Using the giant puppet Little Amal (2021), which engaged with impromptu audiences to tell a story of migration and displacement, this example looked specifically at her arrival on London’s Bankside — itself a Shakespearean geography — greeted by a Pericles-associated community theatre production. Lastly, Sierz examined two recent adaptations by playwright Martin Crimp, namely When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other (2019) and Cyrano de Bergerac (2019). with the aim of showing that although the idea of being faithful to the original work remains a very strong aspect of public taste, it is productions which depart most radically from their source that are the most aesthetically interesting, and the most successful in generating new meanings from the adapted material. Moreover, the freedom of creativity that this approach produces results in the most memorable theatrical experiences.

Keywords

Introduction , special , issue

References

• Hutcheon, L. (2013). A theory of adaptation. Routledge. google scholar
• Sanders, J. (2016). Adaptation and appropriation. Routledge. google scholar