Between Page and Stage. Scholars and Theatre-makers

(1)

(2)

series

between.pomiedzy10

(3)

(4)

edited by

Tomasz Wiśniewski Martin Blaszk

(5)

Reviewer

dr hab. Ewa Kujawska-Lis, prof. UWM

Cover and title pages design Filip Sendal

Photograph Magdalena Małyjasiak

Typesetting and page layout Michał Janczewski

Financial support for BETWEEN.POMIĘDZY comes from the statutory resources of the University of Gdańsk Faculty of Languages,

Institute of English and American Studies and Department of Linguistics

ISBN 978-83-7865-646-3

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego ul. Armii Krajowej 119/121, 81-824 Sopot

tel./fax 58 523 11 37, tel. 725 991 206 e-mail: wydawnictwo@ug.edu.pl

www.wyd.ug.edu.pl Internet bookstore: www.kiw.ug.edu.pl

(6)

between.pomiędzy is a series of publications produced under the aegis of the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Gdańsk, and the Foundation BETWEEN.POMIĘDZY. Th e series contains both themed collections of essays and monographs. Books may be in Polish or in English. Its aim is to make accessible scholarship that addresses important issues in modern and contemporary literature and theatre, and also scholarship that deals with substantial theoretical issues that are of interest to specialists in other fi elds of literary study. Publications in the “between.

pomiędzy” series are particularly focused on form and aesthetics, but the series remains open to scholarship that approaches literature in diff erent but complementary ways. Th e overall name of the series “between.pomiędzy”

indicates its commitment to work that looks at texts on the borders between genres and kinds, between historical periods and movements, and between national and linguistic cultures.

Th e series includes the following studies: 1. Samuel Be ckett. Tradycja – awangarda, ed. Tomasz Wiśniewski (2012); 2. Back to the Be ckett Text, ed. To- masz Wiśniewski (2012); 3. Poeci współcześni. Poeci przeszłości, ed. Monika Szuba and Tomasz Wiśniewski (2013); 4. Poets of the Past. Poets of the Pres- ent, ed. Monika Szuba and Tomasz Wiśniewski (2013); 5. Między słowem a rzeczy-wistości ą. Poezja Eliota wobec cielesności i Wcielenia, ed. Jean Ward and Maria Fengler (2015); 6. Boundless Scotland: Space in Contemporary Scot- tish Fiction, ed. Monika Szuba (2015); 7. Time, Narrative, and Imagination:

Essays on Paul Auster, ed. Arkadiusz Misztal (2015); 8. J.M. Coetzee: Dead Ends and Beyond, ed. Ludmiła Gruszewska-Blaim and Tomasz Wiśniewski (2015); 9. Striking the Chords of Spirit and Flesh in Polish Poetry. A Serendip- ity, ed. Jean Ward, Maria Fengler and Małgorzata Grzegorzewska (2016).

Series editors: Professor David Malcolm, Dr hab. Tomasz Wiśniewski, Dr Mo- nika Szuba and Dr Katarzyna Kręglewska.

Editorial board: Professor Vincent Broqua (Université Paris-8, France), Professor S.E. Gontarski (Florida State University, USA), Dr Wolfgang Görtschacher (University of Salzburg, Austria), Professor Ralf Hertel (Uni- versity of Trier, Germany), Professor Kenneth Pickering (University of Kent, UK), Professor Alan Riach (University of Glasgow, UK), Professor Carla Sassi (University of Verona, Italy), and Professor Jean Ward (University of Gdańsk, Poland).

(7)

between.pomiędzyto seria wydawnicza powiązana z odbywają- cym się od 2010 roku w Sopocie Festiwalem Literatury i Teatru BETWEEN.

POMIĘDZY, objęta opieką merytoryczną Instytutu Anglistyki i Amery- kanistyki Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego oraz Fundacji Between.Pomiędzy. Na serię wydawniczą składają się monografi e zbiorowe publikowane w języku polskim lub angielskim. Seria upowszechnia badania naukowe dotyczące ważnych zagadnień z dziedziny literatury i teatru, jak również istotnych kwestii teoretycznych, obejmujących większy obszar badawczy. Publikacje

“between.pomiędzy” skupione są na zagadnieniach związanych z szeroko pojętą formą i estetyką, jednakże pozostajemy otwarci na badania, które proponują komplementarne podejścia do literatury. Nazwa serii – “between.

pomiędzy” – świadczy o zainteresowaniu tekstami zawieszonymi pomiędzy rodzajami i gatunkami literackimi, kierunkami i epokami historycznymi oraz kulturami narodowymi i językami.

Dotychczas ukazały się tomy: 1. Samuel Be ckett. Tradycja – awangarda, red. To- masz Wiśniewski (2012); 2. Back to the Be ckett Text, red. Tomasz Wiśniewski (2012); 3. Poeci współcześni. Poeci przeszłości, red. Monika Szuba i Tomasz Wiśniewski (2013); 4. Poets of the Past. Poets of the Present, red. Monika Szu- ba i Tomasz Wiśniewski (2013); 5. Między słowem a rzeczy-wistością. Poezja Eliota wobec cielesności i Wcielenia, red. Jean Ward i Maria Fengler (2015);

6. Boundless Scotland: Space in Contemporary Scottish Fiction, red. Monika Szuba (2015); 7. Time, Narrative, and Imagination: Essays on Paul Auster, red. Arkadiusz Misztal (2015); 8. J.M. Coetzee: Dead Ends and Beyond (2015), red. Ludmiła Grzuszewska-Blaim i Tomasz Wiśniewski (2015); 9. Striking the Chords of Spirit and Flesh in Polish Poetry. A Serendipity, red. Jean Ward, Maria Fengler i Małgorzata Grzegorzewska (2016).

Redakcja naukowa: prof. David Malcolm, dr hab. Tomasz Wiśniewski, dr Mo- nika Szuba, dr Katarzyna Kręglewska.

Rada naukowa: prof. Vincent Broqua (Uniwersytet Paris-8, Francja), prof.

S.E. Gontarski (Uniwersytet Stanu Floryda, USA), dr Wolfgang Görtscha- cher (Uniwersytet w Salzburgu, Austria), prof. Ralf Hertel (Uniwersytet w Trewirze, Niemcy), prof. Kenneth Pickering (Uniwersytet Kent, Wielka Brytania), prof. Alan Riach (Uniwersytet w Glasgow, Wielka Brytania), prof.

Carla Sassi (Uniwersytet w Weronie, Włochy) oraz prof. Jean Ward (Uni- wersytet Gdański, Polska).

(8)

Table of Contest

Tomasz Wiśniewski and Martin Blaszk (University of Gdańsk)

Introduction . . . 9 Frances Babbage (University of Sheffi eld, UK)

How Books Matter:

Th eatre, Adaptation and the Life of Texts . . . 11 Naz Yeni (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)

Multiplicity in Complicité’s Th e Master and Margarita . . . 27 Katarzyna Ojrzyńska (University of Łódź, Poland)

Satiating Irish Hunger: Tom MacIntyre’s

Stage Adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh’s Poem . . . 51 Tomasz Wiśniewski (University of Gdańsk, Poland)

Th e Textual Tissue in Contemporary Th eatre:

A Spectrum of Possibilities . . . 67 Paul Allain (Kent University, UK)

Ways of Hearing: Listening Again to Polish Th eatre . . . 79 Joanna Lisiewicz (University of Gdańsk, Poland)

By Darkness Illuminated: On Th e Trap

by Tadeusz Różewicz and Jerzy Jarocki . . . 95 Anna R. Burzyńska (Jagiellonian University, Poland)

Th e Montage of Image: Robert Wilson’s Staging of

George Büchner’s Plays . . . 107 Jadwiga Uchman (University of Łódź, Poland)

Original Play-script – Translation – Production:

Th e Case of Andrzej Wajda’s Hamlet IV . . . 119

(9)

Table of Contents 8

Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak (University of Wrocław, Poland) Th e Politics of Looking Back:

Negotiating the Th atcher Legacy . . . 149 S.E. Gontarski (Florida State University, USA)

A Period of Adjustment:

Zelda Fitzgerald among Tennessee’s Women . . . 171 Katherine Lyall-Watson (University of Queensland, Australia)

Biographical Th eatre: Why Playwrights

Have More Licence to Invent Th an Prose Writers . . . 183 Pedro Alves (teatromosca, Portugal)

Th e Birth of the Reader-Spectator . . . 203 Martin Blaszk (University of Gdańsk, Poland)

A Happening in Reaction to Beckett’s What Where:

What Where Re-Actions – Sopot Pier, 13^th May, 2013 . . . 213 Name Index . . . 233

(10)

Tomasz Wiśniewski and Martin Blaszk

University of Gdańsk

Introduction

Th e theatre of the past sixty years, or more, has been a fi eld of intriguing evolution. Th ere is no doubt that the work of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990), Jacques Lecoq (1921–

1999), Peter Brook (b. 1925), Julian Beck (1925–1985), Judith Mali- na (1926–2015), Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999), Ariane Mnouchkine (b. 1939), Tadashi Suzuki (b. 1939), Pina Bausch (1940–2009) and others, has shift ed general understanding of theatre and increased its artistic, cultural and social autonomy. Th eatre as we know now depends neither on a logocentric model of communication derived from literature nor on the univocal artistic vision of the playwright.

Th eatre-makers have developed a variety of methods for this col- lective and multigeneous kind of creative work. Indeed, their ob- jectives have established a whole paradigm of conventions that are operative in contemporary theatre. Th ey range from those that prioritise the vision of the director (Kantor), through those that focus on establishing a clear stage language (Brook, Lecoq), to those that aim at more urgent interventions beyond the sphere of theatre (Mnouchkine). Th ese are just a few examples that can be extended by notions such as: liveness, multi- inter- trans-media theatre, the alienation eff ect, physicality, post-dramatic theatre and many others.

It is true, therefore, that contemporary theatre has developed an au- tonomous artistic paradigm that should be taken into consideration whenever we discuss theatre in a professional way.

Th e legacy of Samuel Beckett’s drama, or – more generally – the model of theatre that seems to be dominant in British and Irish drama, proves that the situation is more pluralistic than exists in

(11)

Tomasz Wiśniewski and Martin Blaszk 10

Poland, where the playwright’s position is at present minimalised.

Th us, it seems, there is much value in a dichotomy of theatre modes that may be provisionally described as the logocentric on the one hand, and on the other, the ephemeral and the physical.

Th e juxtaposition of these two tendencies is the main focus of this volume. Th irteen articles written by scholars who deal with drama and theatre either in a strictly academic manner (Babbage, Yeni, Ojrzyńska, Wiśniewski, Burzyńska, Lisiewicz, Uchman, Kębłowska- Ławniczak) or in a more practical way (Gontarski, Allain, Blaszk) are accompanied by those submitted by theatre practitioners (Alves, Lyall-Watson). Ours is an attempt to suggest a spectrum of perspec- tives in a heterogeneous fi eld where the textual tissue (the page) is paired with a performative tissue (the stage). In a world in which a single relation between the former and the latter is no longer operative, this book – we believe – contributes to the ongoing discus- sion on modes in theatre communication.

Finally, the thirteen authors invited to contribute to this volume chose the subjects they wrote about and how they should write about them. Th is has led to a diverse coverage in terms of content but also the form of the articles. As editors, at the initial stages of developing this book, we decided that all the authors could (should) write using a format in which they felt comfortable. Th is has led to diff erences in layout between the articles, but we feel this will cause little discomfort to readers, while the benefi ts of such a “freedom of choice” can be experienced in the way that each of the authors develops their ideas.

Gdańsk, 13 November 2017

(12)

Frances Babbage

University of Sheffi eld, UK

How Books Matter:

Theatre, Adaptation and the Life of Texts

1.

Th is article begins with a book about the disappearance of books.

Ray Bradbury’s science fi ction novel Fahrenheit 451 (fi rst published in 1953) depicts a dystopian society in which books are outlawed: they are considered highly dangerous, the root of all so- cietal problems. Most have already been removed, but any remain- ing books discovered through government searches are seized and handed over to specialist “fi remen” who immediately destroy them. 451 °F, Bradbury had learned, is the temperature at which book paper begins to burn. In the novel, an underground commu- nity exists dedicated to learning entire books by heart to preserve them for future generations. Bradbury’s protagonist, the confl icted fi reman Montag, asks the representative of these exiled book lov- ers: “How many of you are there?” He is told:

Th ousands on the roads, the abandoned railtracks […], bums on the outside, libraries inside. It wasn’t planned, at fi rst. Each man had a book he wanted to remember, and did. […] Th e most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves was that we were not important […]; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world.

We’re nothing more than dust-jackets for books, of no signifi cance otherwise. […] Why, there’s one town in Maryland, only twenty- seven people […], is the complete essays of a man named Bertrand Russell. Pick up that town, almost, and fl ip the pages, so many pages

(13)

Frances Babbage 12

to a person. And when the war’s over, some day, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we’ll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again. ( Brad- bury 1973, 147)

Fahrenheit 451 explores how books matter to us and how the ef- fects of their absence may be registered. Given this preoccupation, it might seem somewhat perverse that the novel has inspired sev- eral dramatic adaptations, of which perhaps the best known is the 1966 fi lm of the same name by François Truff aut. Bradbury’s story has interested theatre makers as much as movie directors, with one particularly intriguing adaptation presented at Fierce Festival in Bir- mingham in 2012. Time Has Fallen Asleep in the Aft ernoon Sunshine is described as “an intimate scenario for an audience of one” and was created by Mette Evardsen, a Norwegian dancer and live artist based in Brussels. At Evardsen’s invitation, a number of Birmingham locals had volunteered to memorize a book of his or her choice. Time Has Fallen Asleep… took place in Birmingham Central Library; spectators could make a half-hour appointment with a work chosen from a list – a library of “living books” – for a one-to-one recital of a single chapter. Th e title of Evardsen’s piece is taken from Bradbury’s novel and is itself quoted from another text: Dreamthorp: essays written in the country, by the 19^th century poet Alexander Smith. Smith’s line alludes to a state of pleasurable stasis, a suspended moment in which the hands on the church clock, he writes, “seem always pointing to one hour” ( Smith, 1905). Th ose intimate performances in the library seemed to call for a related kind of attention: a willingness to let each recital take the time it needed and a degree of tolerance (on both sides) of overlong pauses, momentary stumblings, even actual errors.

Reviewer Lyn Gardner of the Guardian describes her own spectato- rial experience, having elected to hear Natsume Soseke’s I am a Cat (1905–06), as “curious,” a well-chosen word that doubly denotes the peculiar and the intriguing. For Gardner, the encounter was

not the same as being read to, but similarly pleasurable, [and] as much about the act of memory itself as […] about the story – about eff ort. Th e human books do not perform in any way, but neither are

(14)

How Books Matter… 13

they completely neutral, because they cannot help but imprint themselves on the book, almost as surely as the writer: in every cough and hesitation, and in the second-by-second struggle to remember, the ever-present possibility of forgetting. ( Gardner 2012)

Th ose volunteer readers were not performers in a conventional sense, but were inevitably more than the “dust jackets” Bradbury’s defi ant memorizers claim to be. Gardner also emphasizes what her experience felt like in that context, in the space of the library: how inert by comparison seemed the unopened books on the shelves, and yet how this recital suggested by implication that all books were potentially “living things” that might, at a given moment, leap from the wall and tip out their contents. What a cacophony that would produce! Th ere is a moment in Fahrenheit 451 when Montag’s boss, Beatty, reminds one woman why the destruction law has had to be put in place: “Where’s your common sense?” he asks: “None of these books agree with each other” ( Bradbury, 43). Refusing to see reason, she throws herself into the fl ames to be consumed together with her library.

Bradbury’s motif of legalized book-burning seemed, at the time he was writing, to hint at themes of state censorship, but the author insisted his overriding concern was with the way in which the increasing popularity of television threatened to kill an interest in reading. Engrossed in inane TV programmes, the mass of people in Fahrenheit 451 have stopped asking questions about their world;

they are simply too dazzled by colour and deafened by noise. By contrast, members of the resistance movement seek to preserve not so much specifi c books, but the principle of the book. Th e rebels equally value, as does Bradbury, the unique demands that the literary form makes of a reader. Engaging with books requires a kind of persistent engagement: it is this quality that Evardsen’s performance piece re- works and reimagines as an encounter between voice, text and lis- tener, a coming together that is both leisurely and at the same time willingly eff ortful.

Th e antagonistic pairing of television and book reading looks decidedly dated today and it is also, of course, potentially suspect.

Th e opposition Bradbury sets up illustrates a now over-rehearsed argument generally felt to derive from a conservative standpoint: in

(15)

Frances Babbage 14

other words, that those used to consuming manageable “bites” of

“text,” helped down with plenty of “pictures,” will become unwilling to make the more substantial investment of time and thought a work of literature is believed to require. It is not diffi cult to take issue with such a position, although one might be equally struck by the assumptions that the terms of the argument fail to conceal. Television viewers, it is implied, consume greedily: they are easily satisfi ed, but quickly want more. In contrast, book readers make a more mature investment: this demands time, patience and attention but ultimately pays richer dividends. Beyond the loaded language used to set up the supposed binary, what of the logic of its conclusions? Must the rise of a new form mean the decline of another? If one kind of enter- tainment demands a diff erent variety of engagement, does it follow that other faculties are steadily weakened or destroyed? Th e argument might surely be turned around: instead of proceeding from an assumption of literature’s superiority, critics could presuppose that the multidimensionality of television would in time stimulate and extend the receivers’ ability to perceive and comprehend complex narratives and layered representations.

Th e rise of TV has not meant the end of books, even though television and digital media more generally have undoubtedly al- tered our relationship with reading. Today, a more pressing question might be: a book or e book? Given the preoccupations of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury’s response when invited to comment on the Amazon Kindle will not surprise:

Th ose aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. Th ere are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. […] You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever.

( Weller 2010)

In Bradbury’s novel, books as material objects are fast disappearing;

yet, as each one is absorbed into the brain and body of a human being it acquires the quality of a muscle memory and correspondingly attains the profound signifi cance Bradbury describes here. You walk with it; it stays with you forever.

(16)

Th is issue of passionate attachment to a book – to individual books, the principle of the book, and the material substance of books – has intriguing implications for adaptation in the theatre. In a twenty-fi rst century context, it is more meaningful as well as more productive to take from Fahrenheit 451 not Bradbury’s privileging of verbal above visual, or narration above enactment, but rather his representation of a distinctive type of fascination. At the heart of this is the recognition that books (are) matter: in other words, that all books “mean” is bound up – literally – within their physical volume but simultaneously escapes and exceeds that space, since the matter of books becomes animate only through acts of reading (and re- membering, and sharing). In the context of adaptation practice, it is usually supposed that while directors and (re)writers begin with an attachment to a book, they must then necessarily detach themselves from this to a signifi cant degree in order to let the adaptation fi nd a life of its own in the new form. However, it is equally possible to follow the alternative route: to explore, instead, the consequences – aesthetic, experiential – of allowing this attachment to persist. Th us, rather than proceeding from assumptions about which elements of a literary work can or cannot be translated into theatre, the writer or director might alternatively be fi red by curiosity about what theatrical shape an adaptation might ultimately assume if seemingly un- translatable literary qualities are retained, as far as possible, “intact.”

In an 1845 essay on the perceived decline in American drama, Ed- gar Allan Poe argued that the surest route to artistic reinvigoration would be for theatre-makers to “burn or bury the ‘old models’, and to forget, as quickly as possible, that ever a play has been penned […], to consider de novo what are the capabilities of the drama – not merely what hitherto have been its conventional purposes” ( Poe 1986, 451). Adaptation from one medium to another highlights pre- cisely this opportunity: embracing those aspects of a book that on the surface do not “fi t” or will not “work” can open up possibilities for theatrical innovation. Time Has Fallen Asleep in the Aft ernoon Sunshine illustrates this in practice, since this performance is both respectful – the project began by “taking literally” an element in Bradbury’s novel – and liberated, with Evardsen admitting no ob- ligation to produce an adaptation in the conventional sense. Th is

“curious” piece, to recall Gardner, represents one way to circumvent

(17)

Frances Babbage 16

the critical standoff between (problematic) arguments for “fi delity”

on the one hand and recommendations that adaptations throw off the shackles of a source text and embrace “creative integrity” on the other. Time Has Fallen Asleep… asks us rather to hold both sides of the fi delity/creativity equation in tension. Sharpened by its intimate, almost miniaturized focus, this adaptation provokes a series of questions. Amongst these, what can the dimension of performance, of liveness, bring to a book? What can a book – and more broadly, bookness – bring to performance? In the rest of this paper, I examine distinctive ways in which books can “matter” in adaptation practice, and further, how elements of textual materiality can inform performance itself. Th rough this, I argue that attention to the form of books as well as to their content can invigorate not just theatrical practice but also adaptation in theory, since a more layered analysis of books and “bookness” in adaptation will in turn extend understanding of the ways in which diff erent orders of text speak to, and with, one another.

2.

A memory: twenty years ago, I saw Complicité’s Th e Street of Croco- diles, a production inspired by Bruno Schulz’s fantastical collection of linked stories fi rst published in 1934. Th is extraordinary performance strengthened the company’s already fast-growing reputation, introducing their work to the British theatrical mainstream even while the aesthetic exuded, at the same time, “a kind of otherness”

( Gardner 1997). Since then, I have found myself repeatedly coming back to a single sequence within this production. In the open- ing moments, Cesar Sarachu, in the role of Joseph (a character in many ways resembling Schulz himself), carefully picked up a book.

He pressed it tightly to his chest; he caressed it; then, raising it to his face, he inhaled its unique scent. And when the actor (as Joseph, as Schulz) breathed in this book and leafed through its pages, other actors playing characters from Schulz’s stories began to materialize in dreamlike fashion before the audience: one forced her way out of a packing case, in the process dislodging further heaps of books; another walked impossibly down a vertical wall, reading all the while;

(18)

others rolled, or fl oated, heads buried in books, in words, as if they were only half-present on the stage, their bodies shading off into the text they had crawled out of. Director Simon McBurney wrote in the programme that with the adaptation they had “attempted to cre- ate a peculiar theatre language, a fabric that might hold some of the scents falling from the jacket of Schulz’s prose” ( McBurney 1992).

Th is metaphor was translated physically to the production: Joseph remembers when he smells the book he is reading. Th e moment Sarachu lift s the text up to his face is already multilayered: “Joseph”

breathes in the essence of paper and ink and by this means allows the reanimation of his memories; at the same time, Complicité, as artists, try to catch the sensuous qualities of Schulz’s writing, willing that this fragrance should touch and scent the theatrical work they have made in response.

Sarachu’s action implicitly poses a question: how far can the materiality of a literary text continue to have gravity, and exert a productive vitality, in stage adaptation? Th ere is a certain perversity attached to this inquiry, since as I have indicated scholars in the fi eld of adaptation studies have justifi ably come to regard “over- attachment” to a source with profound suspicion. When what had been the dominant discourse of “fi delity” in adaptation theory was at last permanently unsettled, critical emphasis shift ed in large part to the supposed creative integrity of the new artwork, now absolved from the imperative to refer back, endlessly and deferentially, to the source that inspired it ( Cardwell 2002, 19; Hutcheon 2006, 6–9;

McFarlane 1996, 194). It is hard to take issue with this general critical redirection, for aft er all, who would want to see subservient stag- ings? Consider the too-easy recourse to voiceovers so beloved of fi lm and television adaptation, or stage productions for which the source book’s author has been embodied as a character (oft en made to sit at a desk a little off to one side, presumably in the hope that this will not obstruct the “main” dramatized action): such devices regularly suggest less a profound commitment to the source than a failure of imagination indicative of the fact that no satisfactory so- lution to the challenges of medium translation could be found. But since “lack of imagination” is scarcely a charge that could be levelled at Complicité, what signifi cance can be found in the desire, enacted by Sarachu, to hold on so insistently to the matter of the book?

(19)

Frances Babbage 18

In parts three and four of this article I explore two adaptations in detail: Complicité’s Street of Crocodiles; and Gatz, by the American theatre group Elevator Repair Service, the latter a seven-hour production in which F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Th e Great Gatsby is read aloud on stage in its entirety. Th ese two productions diversely testify to the potency not simply of narratives but of books themselves as talismanic objects, in certain ways recalling the terms adopted by Bradbury. Th e conscious expression of bookness on stage in these adaptations serves to underline the distinctive qualities of each medium in play – literary text on the one hand and theatrical performance on the other – and, as I argue, imaginatively to exploit the friction between them.

3.

To understand the incipient power in the relationship of “actor + book” – although with the example of Gatz, we might more accu- rately say “book + actor” – it is helpful to refl ect fi rst on the mean- ings and sensation of watching somebody read. Drawing necessarily on subjective experience, I propose that seeing somebody absorbed in a book stirs a desire in the onlooker fi rst of all to know what he or she is reading – not to have this summarized, but as it were to peer over the shoulder and see the same page, to follow the text as it is read, line by line. Generally, circumstances ensure that this is im- possible; but even if it were not, the experience gained would not be

“the same” because the second reader would not enter the identical imaginative space that the fi rst reader has already reached. Th us, the sight of a reader lost in a text prompts an acute sense of one’s double remove: fi rst, because one cannot physically see what the reader is looking at; second, because the page is in any case no more than a map of the place where he or she is “really.”

Th e implications of this account of reading-in-the-world will be clearer if the activity is relocated in an aesthetic context. In art his- torian Garrett Stewart’s 2006 study of representations of readers and reading in painting, Th e Look of Reading, the author demonstrates that only very rarely are viewers of such art works allowed to glimpse the content of what a painted fi gure is looking at (be this novel, let-

(20)

ter, or other). Instead, Stewart argues, the image of reading piques curiosity by deliberately withholding that knowledge from us, and in the process provoking a kind of bodily frisson by rousing what we, the viewers of the work, understand that reading experience to provide. Yet as Stewart remarks, the recurrence of representations of reading in art initially seems puzzling, since if “reading is where you go to be elsewhere” (as I attempted to illustrate above), why should artists “labor so intensely to evoke the unpicturable space”? Stewart observes, rightly, that “[s]tasis, blankness, introversion […] are not normally the stuff of scenic drama” ( Stewart 2006, 2–3).

Central to Stewart’s theoretical explanation for this phenomenon is the intriguing and, I suggest, persuasive claim that representation of the look of reading recruits a form of “narrative energy”: studying the image of a reader engaged with a text, the viewer is led to feel the tension between the static visuals of the canvas, and the (implied) momentum of a verbal text, albeit here only the painted sign of one.

Reading is, crucially, durational: both the pleasures of reading, and the import of what one reads, are characteristically qualities released not instantaneously, but in the course of the activity. While viewers of visual art may need a little time to examine the diff erent elements within a painting, in the end the simultaneity of the whole is avail- able against which to measure their conclusions. Th e point of this comparison of the two media is not to set visual “surface” (to its disadvantage) up against supposed narrative “depth”; it is rather to propose that representation of one kind of art form within another – and especially where these function in manifestly diff erent ways – draws attention to the frustrations and failures of representation as well as the capabilities implicit within each.

Th e critical term for the depiction of one type of art by another is ekphrasis (the word derived from the Greek “ek” = out, “phrasis”

= to speak). Th e most frequent exemplifying context for ekphrasis is literature, an instance being where a poetry or prose text describes in detail the characteristics of a work of visual art. Here, one aesthetic language is being used to describe the qualities of another – or conversely we might imagine that one language is itself striving to

“speak out” from within another – all the time in the knowledge that this endeavour will fall short of achieving truly satisfying expression. Stewart’s work traces a reverse ekphrasis, then, whereby a visual

(21)

Frances Babbage 20

medium seeks to articulate the distinctive structure of experience off ered by the narrative arts.

How usefully can the notion of ekphrasis be applied, fi rst, in the context of theatre, and second, to illuminate the performance of reading and staging of “bookness”? Drama is both visual and verbal, and (more explicitly than with fi ne art) the experience of its audience is durational. Yet although staged reading is not the transpar- ent equivalent of painted reading, many of the same representational tensions are upheld when the two art forms are brought together.

And when books are prominent and scenes of reading occur within stage adaptation those diff erences are intensifi ed further, since adaptation as a practice always implicitly extends the invitation to discov- er something new both about the source and the medium that has taken this over. When Complicité’s spectators watch Joseph inhale the distinctive odour of his book – a volume that both is and is not Schulz’s story collection, Th e Street of Crocodiles – that gesture rous- es the desire to share the character’s nostalgic journey whilst empha- sizing the uniquely personal dimension of his relationship with the text/object: the audience is drawn in, yet also gently shut out.

Clutching onto the book in this way, the character Joseph – simultaneously the actor, and by extension McBurney and the company – invests it with extraordinary power. Th e conviction that printed words might become animate if one wants it enough is, not coinci- dentally, a spirit that permeates Schulz’s writing. Th e narrator’s vi- sionary (although admittedly mentally unstable) father in Th e Street of Crocodiles insists repeatedly that there “is no dead matter,” that ap- parent “lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life”; in truth, he asserts, the “whole of matter pulsates with infi nite possibilities,” “entices us with a thousand sweet, soft , round shapes which it blindly dreams up within itself ” ( Schulz 2008, 31).

Obsessed by birds, the father pores over his ornithological textbooks, the intensity of his gaze causing “feathery phantasms [to seem] to rise from the pages and fi ll the room with colours” ( Schulz, 21). In Com- plicité’s hands, the leaves of books ripple and fl utter, take shape as if about to escape the performers’ grasp altogether: here, it is not the case that actors straightforwardly manipulate objects, in a one-way process; rather, the physical properties of the object help infl uence the movements of the actors’ bodies in a form of reciprocal exchange.

(22)