Abstract
This chapter investigates how through dramatizing choice in “real” time, both adaptation and performance can release alternative stories or endings in a tragic play. Audiences and directors certainly debate how far may one go in “correcting” or making changes in a tragic plot, since tragedy seems to be all about fatal consequences and especially an ending from which there is no return. Radical remakings of tragic plots through either adaptation or performance are admittedly rare, precisely because audiences, actors, and critics alike often crave the repetition of those familiar stories, no matter how horrific they might be. However, this chapter offers two case studies of performative disruption that help us see the alternative possibilities latent in tragic theater. The first example is Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an adaptation of both Hamlet and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stages the dynamics of choice in an unfixed present time and space to exploit the opening for invention, gaming, and rewriting that Hamlet itself invites. In the end Stoppard does not let Rosencrantz and Guildenstern escape from Hamlet; that is, he does not release the kind of potential that was exploded in this chapter’s second example, Richard Schechner’s legendary adaptation and performance of Euripides’s Bacchae in Dionysus in 69. In that case, game-like performance generated a sense of present possibilities that could empower the audience and actors to intervene in the tragic plot and break it open—or to just walk away.
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- 1.
See Fuchs’s introduction to The Death of Character on the emphasis on “presence” in the theater of the 1970s and its breakdown in most postmodern theater and performance (Fuchs 1996). On the time of the “present” in theater, see Wagner, Chap. 1 (Wagner 2014); Richardson (Richardson 1987); and Maisano on how in the theater “‘now’ is nothing but a repetition, representation, mediation, and interpretation of time” (385) (Maisano 2013).
- 2.
See Harris on how “the stagecraft of the King’s Men—their acting styles, special effects, and stage properties” was “untimely” (20): that is, each object, movement, sound, body had its own history, interwoven into the actions of the present (Harris 2011).
- 3.
On “Original Practices” see Steigerwalt (Steigerwalt 2013).
- 4.
See also Sack 27 (Sack 2015).
- 5.
See Kidnie on how “precisely what constitutes authentic Shakespeare is a question that can never finally be resolved since there is not an a priori category that texts or staging are a production of […] The issue is therefore not how performance departs from or otherwise adapts text, but the shifting criteria by which both texts and performances are recognized—or not—as instances of a certain work” (9–10) (Kidnie 2008). See also Lavender on the instability of the text and early modern performance practice and its consequences for “Shakespeare reworked” (Lavender 2001).
- 6.
In considering the relationship between performance and adaptation, Kidnie has challenged the notion of performance as having a “second order status” where “performance is measured in relation to the text in degrees of infidelity and inauthenticity” (104) (Kidnie 2005).
- 7.
See Hutcheon: “Adaptations are obviously not new to our time, however; Shakespeare transferred his culture’s stories from page to stage and made them available to a whole new audience. Aeschylus and Racine and Goethe and da Ponte also retold familiar stories in new forms. Adaptations are so much a part of Western culture that they appear to affirm Walter Benjamin’s insight that ‘storytelling is always the art of repeating stories’” (2) (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013). Also see Sanders on Shakespeare as an “active adapter and imitator” (46) (Sanders 2006).
- 8.
Gilbert and Tompkins argue further that “even in the face of fixed dialogue and/or plot closure, manipulation of a play’s performative codes and contexts can productively shift the power structures that seem predetermined in the originary script” (19) (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996).
- 9.
See Sanders: “Adaptation and appropriation […] supplementing, complementing, coming after Derrida and Darwin […] are all about multiple interactions and a matrix of possibilities” (60) (Sanders 2006).
- 10.
See Berlin on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as an act of criticism itself (Berlin 1973).
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
See States, Shape of Paradox: when speculating on the day of the week, Estragon “is squandering time, putting the play outside of all temporal reality while seeming to be immersed in its categories” (35) (States 1978).
- 14.
As States observes, “the failure of memory in Beckett […] is […] a built-in convenience by which the play is able to escape all moorings in time and space that might lock the characters into a causal history” (35) (States 1978).
- 15.
- 16.
In general, see Costikyan, who emphasizes the importance of uncertainty in games. He argues that “part of the reason games appeal is because they allow us to explore uncertainty”—even if the end is fixed (13) (Costikyan 2013). That openness is reinforced through the agonistic game that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern later play bandying questions, a give-and-take that parodies Vladimir’s and Estragon’s verbal gameplaying, whether in their game of escalating insults or efforts at conversation (“Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a way,” says Vladimir [6]).
- 17.
See also Keyssar-Franke on the question of Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s relative freedom to act: she sees them given a chance to play but ultimately entrapped within the plot of Hamlet and idea of destiny (Keyssar-Franke 1975). Whitaker also sees that “as lively reflectors on their destiny, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are bound neither by Shakespeare’s plot nor by our usual dullness of speech and imagination. To the very end they are able to rise into a spectatorial freedom and a quasi-authorial creativity” (59) (Whitaker 1983). See also Schlueter on “the illusion of choice” in the play (74) (Schlueter 1995).
- 18.
But see Gruber on the ending of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “in rehearsals and in all published editions of the play after the first, Stoppard excised a bit of action which brought his drama full circle, so that it ended with someone banging on a shutter shouting two names” (91) (Gruber 1981–1982).
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
On the performance of Dionysus in 69 as “a landmark in the history of the reception of Greek theatre in the twentieth century,” see Zeitlin, “Dionysus in 69” (51) (Zeitlin 2004).
- 22.
On other adaptations of the Bacchae, see Hall et al. (2004).
- 23.
There are no page numbers in this text.
- 24.
Finley as Dionysus also said to Shephard as Pentheus: “Bill, you don’t understand. You’re a man. I’m a god. This is a tragedy. The odds are against you.”
- 25.
Victor Turner recounts Schechner’s rehearsal of Ibsen’s A Doll House where “we came up with four Noras, one of whom actually made a choice contrary to Ibsen’s script. It happened that in her personal life she herself was being confronted with a dilemma similar to Nora’s. […] Eventually, instead of detonating the famous door slam that some critics say ushered in modern theater, she rushed back to the group, signifying that she was not ready—at least not yet—to give up her children, thus throwing unexpected light on the ethical toughness of Ibsen’s Nora” (88) (Turner 1982).
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Bushnell, R. (2016). Tragic Adaptation and Performance: Undoing the Play. In: Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames . Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58526-4_2
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