Complexifying adaptations

Last week, on a brief visit to England, I saw a production of AMADEUS. I have to admit it was three hours of hell for me, as it contained all the elements I would not expect from a National Theatre production.  The two central performances were execrable: Mozart was a one- note-performance of unrelenting screaming, the kind of person I’d like to slap hard and often, while the actor playing Salieri clearly enjoyed Beverly opportunity to dominate the stage in a sub-Olivier performance of embarrassing quality.

I would have left the performance alone, but then I thought; as an adaptation critic it behaves me to think more deeply about my responses.  What was I really disliking, the performances or my immediate impressions of the current production compared to fond memories of past productions? Do I need to rethink my response in terms of today’s performance, even though I personally hated it?  I sat down and thought a little. The director was obviously interested in rethinking AMADEUS as a public melodrama in which Mozart automatically assumed prominence despite anything Salieri did.  He was a genius and revelled in the licence that gave him to misbehave. The fact he was emotionally dead did not matter. Salieri tried to maintain his sang frond but his desire to revenge himself on Mozart (and through him, God). Got the better of him. The play became a succession of sequences where the two tried to outdo one another in terms of bad behaviour, even if this had a destructive effect on the actors’ characterisations.

The production had an old-fashioned feel to it, with stage devices inspired by Brecht that would not have looked out of place in the 1980s. But here’s my age coming to affect my judgement; even if the audience were mostly white and retired, we would not expect them to cast their collective minds back to another theatrical era. Better to approach the conscious anachronisms as a means of distancing an audience and thereby prevent them from empathising with the main characters. The device would also take us out of the eighteenth century and make us understand its transhisoricity better.

The same also applies to the on stage presence of the band, providing background music as well as the accompaniment to the songs in the original script. They resembled the group who played in the National’s highly successful GALILEO thirty-eight years ago. I am not knocking the National - far from it. I am pleased that they draw on their own history to show the value of alienation.

What does this analysis signify for adaptation? First, we should be prepared to sacrifice our judgement in favour of looking at a production in more detail. Second, we should realise that looking at adaptations means looking at the contexts of production, to tell us more about why a product;on appeared as it does.  This doesn’t always mean the staging, or the director, or the theatre company, but taking into account audience reaction, as well as making more sense of our own reactions.  That won’t make our task any easier, but it might aid the process of negotiation between different interests which I believe adaptation studies needs to promote to develop further.