Category: Film & Theater

A monster and his maker

In the last days, I have savoured the theatrical treat (via YouTube livestream) of Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating as Victor Frankenstein and his monster creation (a tour de force by both as both in my opinion!) in Danny Boyle’s 2011 National Theatre (UK) adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (Here is Michael Billington’s original Guardian review.) Without this pest that is upon us, would such a privilege be granted? Perhaps not. You see, I do look for things positive [sic] to take from this crisis.

Firstly, as I have previously stated, I am interested in the process of adaptation from one medium to another, and in this instance it works very well indeed; perhaps, because the reduced plot form (for instance, the omission of the framed narrative) and character tableau does not mitigate the precepts of rationalist thought and the limitations of science being explored in the original work, nor the questions posed of the conflict between the enlightened individual and a humane social order. As with the novel, this stage version can be best appreciated as a composite – as a philosophical treatise masquerading as an entertainment in a gothic tradition.

Illustration by Theodor von Holst frontispiece 1831 edition

On reflection, I must also say that Shelley’s classic tale first published anonymously in 1818 as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (the Prometheus additive being particularly telling), captivates still, and when considering a range of Lektüre for these daunting days, it is one, with its relativisation of our place in the greater natural order of things, that is well worth returning to. Not to mention, it being just a wonderfully well told story!

From page to stage (II)

Continuing with a topic I have recently been thinking about, I have come upon an interesting essay; inspired by a stage version of Mrs. Dalloway, it is a couple of years old but makes pertinent observations just the same, and not necessarily specific to Virginia Woolf. It reminds me of just how often I wonder at the fortitude or foolhardiness of some theatrical or cinematic adaptations from the literary moderne of a century ago, and whether some forms are just better left as they were intended. The conservative in me speaks.

Considering the 2018 experimental production at the Arcola Theater in London, Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours” and its film adaptation, Jo Glanville ponders, with reference to renowned Woolf biographer Hermione Lee, how adequate any adaptation of Woolf’s work can ever be, and especially here Mrs. Dalloway, composed as it is of a fragmentary flow of imagination and memory – unordered, even chaotic.

… Woolf evokes the very experience of being alive through a ceaseless poetic chain of thoughts, responses and memories as the narrative shifts between the world within and the world outside. In an essay on the novel, Hermione Lee quotes from Woolf’s correspondence with the painter Jacques Raverat while she was writing Mrs Dalloway. Raverat wrote that it was not possible to represent the way our minds respond to an idea or experience in a linear narrative. Woolf responded that it’s the job of a writer to go beyond ‘the formal railway line of sentence’ and to show how people ‘feel or think or dream […] all over the place’.  How can an adaptation recreate that effect?…

Boundless, Unbound.com

Glanville doesn’t exactly answer the question she poses, and appears as sceptical as I tend to be, but nevertheless clearly admires the bravura in having a go, for better or worse, at transforming all the fleeting moments, shadings of emotions, muddled thoughts that make Mrs. Dalloway such a splendid work of literature, into a “real time” experience of sorts. When it’s all said and done, any attempt to capture the haunted past and let it mingle amongst the crowded present is very much in the spirit of Virginia Woolf. Perhaps an adequate enough reason after all. Bring them on – the reworkings, the inspired appropriations! The radical now raises her voice.

From page to stage

Virginia Woolf’s “orlando”

Should anyone be in doubt of the quiet subversive lurking in Virginia Woolf’s work, or of her relevancy almost eighty years after her death, should read, or return to, her 1928 novella Orlando. Something I intend doing, so that I can think and write about it from this particular place in time (and ‘place in time’ is at the essence of this work). One really just has to contemplate the language and concerns in our every day – gendered and fluid, and in accord with biology some would say – to recognise in the radical Woolf a version of ourselves.

Scene from Olga Neuwirth‘s ORLANDO Auftragswerk der Wiener StaatsoperOpera © Wiener Staatsoper

Certainly I am not alone in pondering again this extraordinary work; Tilda Swindon does it a lot and again recently, and just this year there has been a Katie Mitchell stage adaptation in Berlin and Paris (and in London next year). And now, at the Wiener Staatsoper, a production from the Austrian composer, Olga Neuwirth greeted with superlatives – here, a Guardian review.

A play upon Pamela

I have read in the last days of Cate Blanchett’s performance in a controversial new play for the National Theater in London, When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, whereby the content is such that forwarning is given to the faint of heart and/or presumably the easily (or perhaps usually not so easily) offended. That it should have inspiration in the 18th century and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), and the very beginnings of the novel as a form!

‘Mr B Finds Pamela Writing’ – oil on canvas, 1743-4, the first of a series of 12 paintings by Joseph Highmore illustrating scenes from Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela. Photograph: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy

This piece at The Guardian by John Mullan gives an interesting perspective; relating the power dynamics at play and the predatory behaviour of one protagonist and the dilemmas of the other, with concerns and incidents we only know of too well in the here and now.

Written as a series of letters, and mostly by Pamela, Richardson seems to have come by a literary form adequate in conjuring the immediacy of a complicated and evolving relationship.  Martin Crimp and Katie Mitchell and their players have come up with their own modern version (or vision!), to the satisfaction and dis- in equal measure it seems!

Love the Blanchett, would have loved to have seen this! London (I do believe the aforesaid has forsaken her antipodean home – again!) and the theatre – that’s a thing not many places can top!