Cronin, Bernadette, Rachel MagShamhráin, and Nikolai Preuschoff, editors. Adaptation Considered as a Collaborative Art: Process and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Can we understand all works of art and media adapted from pre-existing sources as being collaborative in nature? Or, better question, should we? Is it possible for filmmakers and theatre artists to collaborate with their deceased predecessors? If yes, is a Ouija Board needed? Adaptation Considered as a Collaborative Art: Process and Practice – a recent offering from Palgrave Macmillan’s series on Adaptation in Theatre and Performance – edited by Bernadette Cronin, Rachel MagShamhráin, and Nikolai Preuschoff, seeks to answer these questions and more. The essays compiled in this collection offer a varied array of nuanced approaches to the intersections between adaptation and collaboration; no séances necessary.
This volume is the long-awaited culmination of a 2014 conference held at University College Cork. As its title suggests, its principal goal is to put “adaptation” and “collaboration” in dialogue with one another. With the former being an ever-growing subdiscipline of interdisciplinary humanities research, and the latter a methodological and conceptual framework for creative practices, it stands to reason that the two would often go hand-in-hand. This connection is engendered in a variety of different ways, all of which are united by placing their emphases on matters of authorship and process. In so doing, attention is paid to the more commonly neglected half of Linda Hutcheon’s oft-quoted definition of adaptation as being “both product and process.”
The contributions oscillate between two distinct understandings of “collaboration” as it concerns the creation of adapted works. On one hand, collaboration is taken to mean the literal cooperative engagement between creative agents toward a common goal. On the other hand, it is treated as a way of conceptualizing all adaptations as being collaborations between the source’s original author/creator/artist and the later author/creator/artist who adapts their work. In opposition to (long outdated, though nonetheless pernicious) views of adapters’ parasitic or plagiaristic plundering of a source’s virtues in the supposed absence of their own originality, this change of perspective casts the practice of adaptation in a cooperative and mutually participatory light. This view of collaboration is not always considered in strictly metaphorical terms, as several chapters invoke instances wherein living authors have actively participated in latter-day adaptations of their original work. However, in most instances, there is a notably asymmetrical lack of reciprocity governing this supposedly collaborative dynamic, calling to mind something along the lines of what psychologists (and social media influencers) would call a “parasocial” relationship. This makes for a rather broad potential scope, since it allows virtually any adaptation to theoretically fall within the book’s purview, and not all of its essays accentuate the collaborative element of their case studies much beyond the minimal degree required to passably justify their inclusion. However, I would argue that many of the book’s strongest contributions engage both interpretations simultaneously, exploring situations of literal collaborative artistic labour while also re-evaluating questions of plural authorship in relation to the transition from source to adaptation.
The editors’ introductory chapter effectively sets the terms of the overlapping concepts uniting its ensuing chapters. In addition to laying out the core premises that I have already outlined above, it presents some fascinating insights into how the socioeconomic underpinnings of contemporary creative labour practices tend to breed particularly collaborative sensibilities. Factors such as the gig economy, job precarity, technology, globalization, and arts funding structures are all shown to play a hand in destabilizing the autonomy of the singular author. The introduction also raises an intriguing point about collaboration not always being an unquestionably positive condition, as is so often thought to be the case in utopian discourses of radical egalitarianism and the dismantling of artistic hierarchies. Much attention is here paid to the darker side of collaboration, not merely in terms of the occasional clashing egos of incompatible participants, but notably invoking more nefarious connotations of wartime collaboration with the enemy or occupying powers. The keyword is thus treated as neither inherently good or bad, but instead as a neutral descriptor of practical measures and conditions whose value is contextually dependent. Lastly, the editors specify how they have aimed to place theatrical performance at the centre of all of its discussions, due to theatre being the medium that is most acutely aware of collaboration’s necessity in seeing a project through to completion. I suspect this assertion may raise the eyebrow of a filmmaker, whose own preferred medium typically requires significantly more involved parties than your average theatrical production (a film’s end credits sequence eclipsing your average playbill severalfold). However, the claim is rooted less on the production side as it is in theatre’s “collaborative” copresence between performer and audience as a defining characteristic of the form. In any case, only a select few of the ensuing chapters make good on this promise of theatre’s centrality, ultimately rendering the point somewhat moot.
The remainder of the contributions contain insights that are largely specific to their chosen case studies. Your mileage will vary as to how interesting or useful you may find each of them, which may be directly proportionate to your own particular interest in the individual texts in question. It seems inevitable that few readers will consume the volume in its entirety, and if we are being honest, that might just be okay.
To begin with the most broadly applicable, the collection is bookended by the original conference’s two keynote presentations. These essays by prominent adaptation theorists, Thomas Leitch and Judith Buchanan, implicitly confer the whole endeavour with their seal of approval from the field at large. Leitch’s chapter is by far the most theoretical (and, by extension, the most generalist) treatment of the subject; it is thus no surprise that several of the subsequent contributors reference his keynote address directly when laying out the terms of their own discussions. He takes as his starting point the question of whether or not it is possible to collaborate with the dead, grounding his analysis in Kenneth Burke’s theories of agency and motive. He concludes with a series of questions to prompt further investigation, probing the core conceit of how the volume’s editors have invited us to think about collaboration. Buchanan then closes the book by picking up Leitch’s baton with a direct continuation of this theme. She explores three recent postmodern adaptations of Shakespeare plays – Wooster Group’s 2006 production of Hamlet, Silents Now’s 2013 production of Richard III, and Kit Monkman’s 2018 film version of Macbeth – all of which playfully take earlier (pre-1965) film versions of their respective plays as their principal sources. By weaving archival footage into the fabric of their performances, these pieces interrogate the relationship between Shakespeare and cinema, and the complex cultural legacies thereof.
For readers who expect to only engage with a limited sampling of chapters, I would highly recommend at least reading the three contributions made by the volume’s editors. These expectedly seem to be the most in line with the prescribed objectives of the project, offering three distinct angles on the titular theme. Cronin’s essay documents the creation process of a devised theatrical adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Maids, self-reflexively titled playing ‘the maids.’ The author, herself, was part of the team that brought the production into fruition, now using her firsthand experience of the project to outline a quasi-journalistic breakdown of the play’s who, what, where, when, why, and how. Preuschoff’s piece analyses the 2014 Wes Anderson film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, through the lens of Anderson’s widely publicized influence drawn from the fin-de-siècle Austrian author, Stefan Zweig. Due to the film having not been based on a specific Zweig text, but more so his general ethos as an authorial persona, Preuschoff challenges the boundaries of what constitutes adaptation proper, playing upon the film’s concierge and lobby boy figures as being emblematic of Anderson’s own custodial relationship toward his sources. MagShamhráin’s chapter examines how texts that focus on the lives of famous authors function as mechanisms for the reproduction of literary afterlife. Using works by and about Heinrich von Kleist as her case studies, her inquiry into the interplay of adaptation and posterity eloquently explores the collaborative impulse behind such prosthetic fillings of biographical lacunae through creative practice.
It is worth noting that the bulk of the volume is divided into thematically organized subsections, each containing two or three chapters apiece. Most of these sectional divisions are partitioned along the lines of the disparate media of the adaptations under investigation. The first is on “Drama and Theatre.” Somewhat contrary to the introductory proclamation of theatre’s recurrence throughout the entire volume, this appears to be the only section wherein the medium is prominently featured in any sustained manner. In addition to the aforementioned essay by Cronin, this section contains an exploration by Mary Noonan on the dramatic permutations of George Moore’s The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, followed by Siobhán O’Gorman’s similar analysis of the stage adaptation of Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. In both instances, the chosen focus items are presented as theatrical counter-discourses to the more widely known film adaptations of the works in question, highlighting the significance of theatre-specific elements, such as collective creation and dreamlike imagery.
The next section is on “Literature and Screen,” housing Preuschoff’s chapter alongside one by Graham Allen providing a philosophically-inflected reading of Stanley Kubrick’s first mature film, The Killing (1956), and one by Donna Maria Alexander examining the pop cultural influences on the contemporary poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Danez Smith, and Claudia Rankine. The subsequent section continues this cinematic emphasis under the title of “Screen and Politics,” though it might just as easily have been named “Adaptation in German Cinema,” as that appears to be the more notable point of connection between its two essays – rather than to misleadingly single these two out as the only contributors concerned with the political dimensions of adaptation. Christiane Schönfeld discusses a case of propagandistic film adaptation during the Nazi regime via a close reading of the 1933 film version of Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter. Jumping to something more contemporary, Jean E. Conacher’s chapter uses Andreas Dresen’s 2005 film of Christoph Hein’s novel, Willenbrock, as a means of discussing the lingering influence of theatrical “ensemble” process on artists who cut their teeth in the former GDR.
The next section, “Screen, Fine Art and Theory,” seems most transparently to be a “miscellany” sorting grounds for odds and ends that did not quite fit within any of the other categories. Guillaume Lecomte’s contribution concerns intercultural film remakes – particularly “auto-remakes,” when the original filmmaker returns to helm the later permutation, revising their own work for a new context – by looking at how Georgian-French filmmaker, Géla Babluani, remade his film 13 Tzameti (2005) as simply 13 (2010) for an American audience. Caitríona Leahy presents the collection’s only foray into the visual arts with a discussion of Anselm Kiefer’s painting as meditations on the artist’s godlike relationship to their practice, as mediated through the authorial gesture of the signature. Finally, a section devoted entirely to “Television” offers two glimpses into how these dynamics play out in the uniquely collaborative worlds of writing and producing for the small screen. Mark Wallace uses theories of audience reception and fandom to evaluate the popular BBC series Sherlock, with its interplay between the nineteenth-century source material and contemporary setting and stylistic flair. Thomas Van Parys analyses the Nordic noir series The Killing (not to be confused with the Kubrick film of the same name, discussed above) via the measures taken in the series’ official novelization to grant it “prestige” literary status beyond the typically denigrating expectations of such works as being pulpy and derivative.
Overall, the diversity of content and methodologies explored across this mosaic of contributions may be interpreted as its own kind of collaborative engagement on the subject of collaborative engagements. Though nearly every chapter was written individually, the conference format and reciprocal connections arising between and across chapters represents a meeting of minds toward a common scholastic goal. For anyone interested in either of its primary keywords, there is surely something worthwhile that can be taken away from reading this collection, whether fully or selectively. Once you have integrated its insights into your own thought on collaboration, it surely will not be long before you find yourself thinking about your own ideas as being adapted from theirs, at which point, you may even begin thinking of these authors as your own collaborators.
Ryan Borochovitz is a PhD Candidate in the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. His primary research concerns theatrical representations of history, life writing, and adaptation studies. He also works as a dramaturg, theatre critic, and co-producer of the podcast, Cup of Hemlock Theatre.
col- 