Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen

Provides a new foundation for discussions about theater, film, and translations between the two mediums.

Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen provides an introduction to adaptations between theater and film, establishing a framework for considering these as distinct from literary adaptation. The book places emphasis on performance and event, opening new avenues of exploration to include non-literary issues such as the treatment of space and place, mis en scène, acting styles, and star personas. The recent growth of digital theater is examined to foreground the “events” of theater and cinema—largely ignored in adaptation studies—with phenomena such as National Theatre Live analyzed for the different ways that “liveness” is adapted.

Drawing from case studies that explore distinct periods in British film and theater history, the volume looks at issues surrounding theatrical naturalism and cinematic realism and illustrates the principle that adaptations can't be divorced from the historical and cultural moment in which they are produced. Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen explores how cultural values can be articulated in the act of translating between media, providing a new framework for the discussion of theater and film as dramatic works.

'Building productively on previous scholarship while also taking adaptation studies in fruitful new directions, Adapting Performance between Stage and Screen offers an accessible and incisive consideration of its topic. Lowe confidently navigates the many permutations of the relationship between cinema and theatre and meticulously explores how this has played out in the particularly intertwined British variation on the theme. Very worthwhile reading for anyone interested in British film, British theatre and their deep interconnectivity, this is a performance that definitely deserves its own round of applause.'

-- Melanie Williams, Journal of British Cinema and Television

'As an introduction to this new approach, Lowe leaves us with a number of potential avenues for future exploration and academic research. Although there are a few suggestions listed in the book, such as a re-examination of the films of Basil Dean, further analysis of the theatre-to-cinema live broadcast and the investigation of stage productions of British film, this method will provide the inspiration for further academic analysis in both theatre and film studies. Lowe’s accessible writing style makes this not only an informative but also a pleasurable read for everyone with an interest in performances on either stage or screen.'

-- Georgia Brown, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

The author offers very good readings and analysis of a wide range of texts from well-known classics to more obscure works, spanning the popular, the populist and the avant-garde. It is thrilling to read a book that can discuss Steven Spielberg or Alfred Hitchcock in one place and Robert Lepage or Ivo van Hove in another ... It is an exciting volume that plugs an important gap in current cross-media scholarship.

-- Richard Hand, Professor of Media Practice at the University of East Anglia and Editor of the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance

This book offers an original analysis which emphasizes performance and event (rather than literary texts) as the basis for analyzing different examples of adaptation. In terms of case studies, it offers interesting and worthwhile insights into some quite familiar material but also takes on relatively new examples of the exchange between theatre and film in its discussion of live-casting and the recent dominance of staged films in British theatre … an excellent account of an important topic.

-- Christine Geraghty, Professor of Film and Television, University of Glasgow,

Victoria Lowe is a lecturer in drama and screen studies at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. Her research interests include stage/screen adaptation, theatricality in the cinema, intermediality, screen acting and stardom and the voice in cinema.

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