THE BROWNING VERSION (BBC PLAY OF THE MONTH 1985)

Available now on BBC Video, this version was first broadcast in a series that brought the world’s best theatrical material to the screen each month, in studio-bound productions with the focus on characterisation and theme.  Rattigan was a popular choice for production, chiefly because his plays were quite recent (in the pantheon oi great drama, that is), and because his style of writing worked extremely well for their intimidate television camera and the use of videotape, which was the standard form of BBC shooting for the mid-80s.

Starring Judi Dench and Ian Holm, as the Crocker-Harris’s, the episode focused on the contrasts in behaviour of the two in a society dedicated to politeness and respectability.  Truth came at a terrible premium, and was often consciously avoided by staff members wanting to protect their pensions.  This is a theme that extends beyond the play’s limited social milieu of a minor boys’ public school in the late 40s, a time when much of Britain still looked back to pre-war attitudes, despite the radical social changes taking place in the Forties.  This is what the production stresses in its decor, a melange of dusty books, previous year’s exam papers, and reports.  The cramped staff conditions allow perhaps twenty per cent of its members to sit, while the rest have to stand.  Crocker-Harris’s (Holm’s) study is a dusty room where the windows are either blocked or so caked with dust that no new light enters inside.  The room is dominated by an ancient desk piled high with papers and an armchair where Crocker-Harris occasionally uses for moments of reflection. The whole scene looks tired, listless and in the need of a good lick of paint.

Yet it will never receive anything so radical, not while the current Headmaster (John Woodvine) is in post.  A superficial man whose main aim seems to be to cultivate an atmosphere of enforced efficiency, especially on public occasions such as Speech Day, he loathes Crocker-Harris for his listlessness and wants him out as soon as possible, even if it means denying him a pension.  Of course, the Head never says anything directly for fear of destroying the atmosphere of false bonhomie, especially on speech days.  Rather he has a way of dressing up bad news as not his responsibility, as if he is conveying it on others’ behalf while he remains impartial.

Crocker-Harris has peopled this environment for the past two decades.  As portrayed by Holm, he cultivates an outlook of extreme reserve, not revealing anything of himself to anyone.  This is the result of a career spent in an environment where survival depends on such traits, even if Crocker-Harris has been emotionally destroyed as a result.  The production makes much of his abilities when he came to the schnozzola - a brilliant classical scholar with a glittering future academically.  But the environment destroys him: he loses that hunger that drives good academics onwards and soon realises he is not cut out for teaching.  Crocker-Harris talks bitterly about his feelings in a conversation with Frank Hunter (Michael Kitchen), a younger colleagues who strenuously tries to befriend Crocker-Harris yet finds advances perpetually rebuffed.

The basic scenario suggests how in s school environment adaptation can soon become impossible, especially for someone whose personal convictions evaporated years ago.  It’s not that Holm’z Crocker-Harris is a bad teacher, or a bad person; but his mind has become so fouled up with inertia that he can neither relate to other people not modify his teaching style.  His is the fate of anyone not believing how self-development occurs because individuals want it to, and with the help of others around them.  Rather he remains suspicious of everyone (whom he believes either ignores him completely or laughs at him behind a facade of respectability).  The only protection is for Crocker-Harris to look and say nothing, even if that strategy alienates Holm further from his colleagues and learners.

Yet Crocker-Harris’s problems are exacerbated by a marriage to Dench’s Millie. She is a complex character, at once pitiable yet thoroughly deserving of what happens to her.  Superficially she maintains a respectable public image as a dutiful schoolmaster’s wife, attending all the right parties and agreeing with everything the Head says.  Yet behind that lies a deeply disappointed women, who has had extramarital love-affairs yet cannot experience any satisfaction from them.  Once Hunter learns how horrible she has been to her husband, he refuses to have anything to do with her.

The climactic moment between husband and wife occurs when Millie discovers that the boy Taplow has bought a going-away present for Crocker-Harris.  Beneath a look of pure hatred, she informs her husband that this has nothing to.do with the learner being fond of his teacher, but a strategy designed to cull favour from the teacher and ensure that the student gets his graces.  According to the logic of this production, this is the moment we understand how a lack of adaptation turns individuals into cruel beasts, offering explanations far from the truth but designed to humiliate their loved ones.  No one can really stoop lower.

Yet Rattigan has not finished yet.  Holm’s Crocker-Harris half-believes what his wife says, but for the first time in years he hits back.  Vowing never to put his wife through emotional hell any more, he spurns her company in the forthcoming vacation and resolves never to visit her parents in Bradford any more.  He does not know what he will do instead: maybe he will visit Frank Hunter instead —- alone.  Holm’s expression does not change, but we understand how he has adapted himself to find an alternative mode of existence.

The production ends on a note of cautious optimism.  He rings the Head and insists on his inalienable right to end the sequence of speeches, not to accept the Head’s demand that Crocker-Harris goes next-to-last.  This may sound unimportant, but Holm’s Crocket-Harris has for the first time willingly defied orders and asserted his own view instead.  As he moves away from the phone, he sighs a little then picks up the book Taplow bought him - a symbol of independence,  as well as a reminder that, contrary to what he had assumed, some learners did appreciate his way of teaching.

The production is very much a period-piece, the product of an era when Britain was dominated by pre-war attitudes.  But that context is only used to reinforce Rattigan’s concern that people should learn to adapt through life so as to remain happy, and listen to others.  No one is as badly disposed as Millie Crocker-Harris, even though in a world dedicated to surfaces they might be reluctant to share their emotions.

Rattigan and Human Adaptation: The Browning Version

Terence Rattigan”s career reached it peak in the Forties and Fifties, when he had an apparently endless string of hits including THE WINSLOW BOY, THE BROWNING VERSION and WHO IS SYLVIA?  Then, so theatrical mythology informs us, he dropped out  of the theatrical firmament in favour of the so-0called “Angry Young Men” spearheaded by Jimmy Porter and Arthur Seaton (of SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING inflame).

The only snag with that story is that it is hogwash. Rattigan was very much in vogue throughout the Fifties and has remained so ever since. His subjects might seem a little archaic to us, but his characterisations remain as fresh and exciting as they were seventy years ago. Rattigan has the gift of insight into a particular type of character who still dominates the professions, as well as understanding the effect he exerts on people of all classes and ages. In this piece, I want to explore this character in detail, drawing on some personal experiences as well as examples from Rattigan’s work.

I was educated at an English public school.  Apart from a good basic education, the element I remember most is the proliferation of single men, or unhappily married men that dominated the staff.  They were not precisely unhappy, but they certainly were not happy in themselves.  One was much more adept with an astronomical telescope than he was at teaching geography, while another had a longing to do drama rather than teach plays for exams.  Even as a teenager, I got the sense that these men had been forced by circumstances to teach, even though they did not like the vocation that much.  Don’t get me wrong; they were fond of the boys but could not abide the subjects they were teaching.  There were some who could be described as “perverted” with unnatural feelings towards young boys, but they were well known and avoided.  No: the more intriguing were the heterosexual men with no aptitude for their chosen profession, other than getting boys through the exams.

Arthur Crocker-Harris is a similar kind of personality (in THE BROWNING YERSION). A brilliant classical scholar in his youth, he began his career full of aspirations to write as well as produce exciting versions of AGAMEMNON. But the dreams came to nothing, and he has passed the time teaching the syllabus while never being able to connect with his students or his fellow-staff members.

His basic shortcoming is an inability to understand that teaching is a complex art that involves person skills: the ability to listen to as well as respond to others.  This is a problem shared by many Dulwich staff of the past , when I was there especially.  The causes are institutional as well as personal.  Schools are so obsessed with exams that they often neglect the social aspects of education: the ability to stimulate learners in whatever direction they choose.  This is partly due to ignorance, partly fear: give a learner too much freedom and they will challenge your authority.

So Crocker-Harris digs his own grave for himself.  Neither able to change his style nor practice inter relating better with the students, he stays where he is. When we encounter him, he is on his last day at the school, reflecting bitterly on a wasted life. In 1948, when the play premiered, this was a.hot topic, as many people felt that the spirit of newness prevailing since the end of World War 2 had passed them by.  There might be a Welfare State and a new National Health Service, but such legislation had little or no effect.  These men were part of an older generation for whom life had passed them by. They just struggled on doing the same thing year after year and hopefully with a minimal pension to look forward to at the end of one’s life.  Cricket-Harris doesn’t even have this consolation: forced by illness to retire early, the school governors have decided not to award him a pension, despite years seesseof devoted service.

For the bulk of the play, we are asked to sympathise with Crocker-Harris, with the knowledge that personal inadequacy dug the grave he finds himself in. He could have made more effort, we think.  When I was at school, I used to think this about frustrated teachers: why didn’t they have sufficient gumption to change their lives?

But here’s the rub.  I have always advocated human adaptation as a mode of self-improvement.  Understand that there are myriads of opportunity, personal as well as professional, just waiting to be grasped, provided you look hard enough.  But what happens to those who can’t this because of themselves, their circumstances, or the people surrounding them? This is where Rattigan cuts to the chase, and why he is so significant fir adaptation studies.  Crocker-Harris is imprisoned in a sink-hole job, with a loveless marriage and a unsympathetic headmaster who’d rather placate the governors and engage a new, younger teacher who will automatically attract popularity.  Crocker-Harris has nowhere to go except to teach English at a Cramer for eight months of the year.  The moment of truth arrives two thirds of the play, when Taplow, the boy finishing off his Greek course with some private study sessions, buys Crocket-Harris a small leaving-present of Broiwning’s translation of the AGAMEMNON.  Crocker-Harris realises that, contrary to what he assumed, the students respected him.  His classes might not have been that entertaining, but they were not as bad as Crocker-Harris had assumed. In a sequence of unendurable poignancy, he begins to cry, even in front of Taplow.  For the first time he has allowed his emotions to flow - a definite bad mark as far as the school ethos is concerned, but a positive development fir Crocker-Harris.

Rattigan here emphasises the importance of emotion, of being true to oneself as well as others, irrespective of the situation.  It’s a lesson as true today as it was in 1948 when the play was written.  If you acknowledge to yourself the presence of powerfulr emotions within you, you are on the road to successful adaptation.  It is just that people find it difficult to admit this, whatever the context.  Just think if Barry Evans, one of my schoolteachers, had felt he could talk more about his passion for astronomy, or to admit his homosexuality, or even admit his professional frustrations to his students.  I had the same dilemmas when I talk about having cancer, but have discovered that students learn more about me, and I learn more about them, if I do.

And that\s the major lesson of THE BROWNING VERSION.  It’s not about much in terms of content, but describes Crocker-Harris”s mental discovery that he has a heart and soul just like everyone.  It’s just a matter of finding it, that’s all.  The play ends with a pyrrhic victory, as Crocker-Harris calls the headmaster and insists that he will claim his right to speak last at Parents’ Day, even though the headmaster wanted a younger and more popular teacher who is leaving to fulfil that role.  Crocker-Harris has had enough of being pushed around; it’s tome to assert himself, even though no one has seen this personality before.

The play has resonance for me, because it not only describes a culture I know well, but because it deals with emotions of the heart. It forces viewers to reflect on themselves, and consider whether they should made similar processes of mental adjustment  Most significantly, it confirms how adaptation as a vitally trans historical power, influencing all our lives.

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.

Blog on SIX TURKISH FILMMAKERS

A blog-post on my new book, published 14 Nov.. 2016

https://uwpress.wisc.edu/blog/

Adapting Jules Verne for radio: AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, dramatized by Terry James (1991).  Dir. Janet Whittaker.  Perf. Leslie Phillips, Jim Broadbent, Diana Quick.  BBC Radio 4 Extra, 19-22 Jun. 2017.

After listening to this colorful dramatization of the Verne classic, I understood the novel’s debt to classic picaresque adventures such as Don Quixote.  Phineas Fogg (Leslie Phillips) and Passepartout (Yves Aubert) are the Quixote and Sancho Panza figures, while Princess Aouda (Diana Quick) is Dulcinea.  Sergeant Fix (Jim Broadbent) is the classic fly in the ointment, pursuing Fogg worldwide but failing to arrest him, despite valiant efforts to obtain a warrant to do so.

In truth the story of pure hokum, dramatizing late Victorian English attitudes to other countries with wry humor.  Verne conceived Fogg as a curious middle-aged man of the confirmed bachelor variety, apparently indifferent to everything and everyone and obsessed with the idea of arriving in different ports on time.  It does not matter whether he is in India, Hong Kong, or the United States; he believes that everything can be bought and sold for his benefit.  In the modern era he might be perceived as a classic supporter of the current government.  Leslie Phillips plays him with Rex Harrison-like suavity, but his air of nonchalance is abruptly disturbed by Aouda’s presence.  To his evident astonishment Fogg discovers that he has amorous feelings for her; and the two finish the adaptation by marrying.  So much for the ice-cool Englishman.

Passepartout is played by Aubert as a rubber-ball like figure, whose capacity to overcome adversity is apparently limitless.  Some of his adventures are explicitly comic (such as when he joins a group of Chinese acrobats to make money), but he remains faithful to his “Master” throughout, even though he finds some of Fogg’s mannerisms distinctly eccentric.  A French author looks at the English, and considers them very strange.

Janet Whittaker’s production advances through two parallel narratives, delivered directly to listeners by Passepartout and Fix.  Passepartout keeps a journal; Fix his police officer’s notebook.  When these two documents are used as material to keep the ship’s engine going on the final trip back from New York to Liverpool, Princess Aouda takes over the narration.  The technique of direct address helps us to understand the characters’ attitudes to what seems a ludicrous undertaking.  Despite Fogg’s inexhaustible energy, the idea of traveling the world in eighty days seems preposterous.  It is a tribute to the characters’ resilience that the three narratives gradually alter in tone, as Passepartout and Fix realize that the feat will be completed, whatever the cost.

The four parts are constructed as a series of picaresque episodes linked with electronic music from Wılfredo Acosta that gives an otherworldly atmosphere to the production.  The attitudes and social mores might be explicitly Victorian, but the tale is a wish-fulfillment fantasy, a testament to human ingenuity and to three indomitable spirits.

Adaptation and Nation Conference: Edinburgh, June 2017

I eagerly looked forward to this one-day conference held at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh on 22 June 2017.  I have been working on transnational audiences, and am currently researching into how the meaning of the disputed term fidelity has become contested in recent years with the move towards globalized approaches to adaptation.

Jeremy Strong (U. of West London)began the event with a lively presentation on French heritage cinema of the late twentieth century and its influence on the British media. The images of a prelapsarian world full of country lanes, with the people going home at sunset after a day on the farm were seductive – so seductive, in fact, that they formed the basis for well-known commercials such as that promoted by Stella Artois.  Strong also drew attention to the success of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, which fueled the British public’s dream of getting away from it all in France.  The television version, while not a success, is a good example of spectacle television, designed to promote tourist images of the area.  Strong argued persuasively that this form of cinema was not realistic, but formed part of a psychogeography dedicated to attracting a large fan base.  This psychogeography was childlike as well as attractive, fulfilling dreams – perhaps nostalgic, perhaps aspirational.  Cultural specificities were not significant; these dreams were transnational including familiar conventions of sunsets, wistful music, countrified people and their animals.

Michael Lawrence’s (U. of Sussex)piece on the Bollywood version of Wuthering Heights took up the transnational theme.  Released in 1966 under the title Dil Diya Dard Liya, it starred Dilip Kumar, a mainstay of Bollywood, and ran for 169 minutes.  The film incorporates familiar melodramatic conventions of love, marriage, heroism and villainy, interspersed with frequent musical interludes.  The script was built round Kumar’s star image, with emotions worn on the sleeve.  The film was successfully exported to Russia and other areas but remained unknown to the majority of Western audiences.  The links between Bollywood and the local Turkish industry Yeşilçam are palpable: the recasting of Western classics according to local conventions; the use of music to enhance the films’ emotional effect; and the building of the action round a genuinely local star.

Chi Yun Shin’s (Sheffield Hallam U.)work on The Handmaiden (2016) the Korean reboot of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002), followed a similar methodological path.  The Korean reboot is much more explicit than the source-text, and transposes the action from Victorian England to Korea under Japanese colonial rule.  I think the Korean film is more of a reboot than a remake, as director Park Chan-wook makes no attempt to rework the novel but provides his own particular riff on the material.  Local considerations take priority over global issues.  I’d like to have seen some discussion of Aisling Walsh’s television adaptation of the Waters novel (2005), especially the relationship of the neo-Victorian ambiance to Park’s use of settings, both of which differ significantly from the novel.  An article on this subject by Eda İpek Gündüz (Gaziantep U.) will appear in a forthcoming anthology on Value in Adaptation, forthcoming from McFarland.

Carol Poole’s (Edge Hill U.) paper on the various versions of War and Peace, including that of Bondarchuk (1966) and the recent BBC version by Tom Harper (1966).  Being pedantic, I’d I have liked a reference or two to the 1956 version by King Vidotr with Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn, not to mention the famous 1972 television scripted by Jack Pulman with Anthony Hopkins in the lead.  What was perhaps most evident from Poole’s piece was the elasticity of the source-test; it doesn’t really matter about fidelity issues as the screenwriters reshape the material according to culture-specific concerns.  I use the term “culture-specific” rather than “national”: as Poole persuasively averred, it’s time to approach adaptation from as post-national standpoint, taking into account the audiences’ inclinations.  We all have our favorite adaptations of the novel, shaped by our ages, background and relationships.  Michael Stewart (Queen Margaret U.) argued persuasively that Alice Munro’s short story “Silence” (2004), transformed into Almodóvar’s Julieta (2016), was in a sense unadaptable.  Following Jeremy Strong’s argument about the imaginative constructions of Provence, Stewart believed that Almodóvar enacted his own vision of Canada, a world of darkness and threat.  The source-text provides a source of inspiration for an idiosyncratic idea of nationhood that tells us more about the director’s imagination than Munro’s writing.  Historical issues – as constructed through the sets and costumes, for instance – assume a secondary role.  Stewart’s piece reminds us to approach each text on its own merits rather than applying a prearranged framework shaped by our previous knowledge of adaptation.  The same also applies to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013): Robert Munro (Queen Margaret U.) argued that the director emptied the Glasgow setting of any local significance, and thereby prompting us to reflect on humanity’s relationship to the environment – maybe even the ecosphere? Perhaps there is further opportunities for the exploration of the film from an eco-critical angle.

Another piece by Douglas McNaughton (U. of Brighton) concentrated on Scottish films.  McNaughton considered T2: Trainspotting (2017) as an updating of the first film, released in 1996.  The comparison reminded us of the effect of time on our perceptions: the later version of Trainspotting offered a sentimental view of the first film, with the once-young protagonists having to cope with the confines of middle age – a double-edged sword if there ever was one.  McNaughton’s piece also confirmed about how perceptions of adaptations change over time: I remember viewing the premiere of the first film, when some members of the audience visibly recoiled at some of the grislier sequences (especially those set in a urinal).  Now the roseate glow of nostalgia hangs over that material, as we look back to a pre-Brexit world whose inhabitants enjoyed a freedom of self-expression denied to them now.   

The conference also offered a series of reflections on the concept of value.  Picking up on Stewart’s piece, Sarah Artt (Edinburgh Napier U.)argued whether there had been any successful adaptations of Jean Rhys’ novels.  The answer is very much a matter of opinion – especially if radio adaptations and/or readings are taken into account – but Artt’s piece revealed the intrinsic role played by audiences in the adaptive act.  How they react to particular films tell us a lot about their aesthetic preoccupations, and what they expect from the idea of “nation” and “nationalism.”  They are in perpetual dialogue with the cinema and television producers and directors looking to make profits on their investments. Shelley Galpin’s (U. of York)piece on Far From the Madding Crowd (2015), which she freely admitted was her favorite adaptation of the novel.  Participants from a different generation begged to differ, preferring John Schlesinger’s 1967 version instead.  We could also bring Nicholas Renton’s 1988 television version into the discussion.  What is perhaps more instructive is that fidelity issues in this discussion are very much shaped by individual preferences, which are in turn shaped by social background, age and cinematic experience.  Adaptation is not simply focused on textual issues, but needs to take ethnographical issues into account.  The same also applied to Victoria Lowe’s (U. of Manchester) discussion of the British New Wave films of the late Fifties and Sixties.  The generic term “British New Wave” is contested; likewise our opinion of the films produced around that time and the impact they made on British film history.  As Lowe spoke, I kept thinking of the recent BBC Radio 4 season, also entitled the “British New Wave,” which overlooked the films’ theatrical origins altogether.  Yet I don’t think such differences are a matter for dispute – they simply indicate the ways in which perceptions depend on a variety of factors, personal, industrial as well as cultural.

What I found most enlightening about the whole seminar is the way in which apparently disparate cultural products are linked transhistorically as well as transnationally.  It is up to adaptation scholars to unpick those links that tell us a lot about the way people react to individual films as well as learning more about how and why such films are produced.  Strictly formal procedures, such as the relationship between source and target-texts, have been supplanted in the adaptation studies’ agenda by a concentration on conditions of production and reception and how they have changed over time and space.  There are far more opportunities for constructive dialogue between adaptation scholars with different research interests – dialogue that will tell us more about transnational flows.

This is an exciting time for adaptation studies; and it is a testament to the quality of the papers delivered at the Edinburgh event that this sense of excitement throughout the whole day. Thanks are due to the co-organizers of this event, Michael Stewart and Robert Munro, as well as the participants for a memorable event.

                                                                                                                                                Laurence Raw

28 Jun. 2017

Spontaneous Speechmaking

As a veteran attendee of conferences over the last quarter century, I have become accustomed to a series of familiar rituals.  The speakers gather round a table on the podium or speaking area, and one by one they deliver their papers, invariably accompanied these days by PowerPoint presentations of variable quality.  Sometimes the slides bear very little relationship to the arguments presented; on other occasions presenters copy their entire paper on to the slides, forcing the audience to wonder why they are speaking at all.  We could readily discover what their topic might be through reading the slides.

Nine days ago I delivered a piece in Thessaloniki, Greece, on the audience’s role in adaptation.  I planned it roughly according to a paper I had recently completed on a similar topic.  I would begin with an explanation of the popular appeal of Yeşilçam films in Sixties and Seventies Turkey, concentrating in particular on the symbiotic relationship established between performers, producers, and their audiences.  I would then survey the changes in the Turkish film industry in the Nineties, when Yeşilçam died out and the television serial, or dizi, dominated the ratings on public service as well as private broadcasting.  I would finish with a survey of attitudes in various countries towards the diziler, which have proved both financially as well as popularly successful.  I had spent several hours putting together a PowerPoint presentation which I hoped would not fall into the kind of methodological traps I have previously described (https://www.slideshare.net/laurenceraw/literacies-and-transnational-audiemces).

I was due to speak at 13.30.  I went to the morning sessions, secure in the knowledge that I had prepared my presentation and could answer questions on it.  As the session unfolded, however, it became increasingly clear that other presentations were focusing on subjects resembling mine.  A Portuguese colleague offered a fascinating insight into the early days of the local film   industry, where the combination of censorship and capitalism led to an idiosyncratic product very similar in terms of content and form to Yeşilçam.  Another presenter, this time from Greece, looked at the contemporary reception of Bill Haley’s film Rock Around the Clock (1956), and its potential for generating “moral panics” (as far as the media were concerned, that is).  Precisely the same thing had occurred in the Turkish film industry, especially when films dealt with family and marital issues.

I began to write furiously while the other presentations were delivered.  I decided to ditch much of what I had previously prepared and restructure my presentation around the relationship between industry, performers and audience.  Following Simone Murray’s arguments, I wanted to show how the form of a Yeşilçam drama did not depend so much on the screenwriter, nor on textual issues such as fidelity, but rather on what the audiences expected.  Hence the fondness for recycling familiar melodramatic plots centering on good and evil.  I followed that with the piece on audience reaction to the diziler outside Turkey, to show how audiences in different territories constructed different evaluations of the same material, both in informal conversations and online discussion groups.  I ended up by calling for more systematic studies of the role of audience, especially in a digitized world where local and global issues were often inseparable.

The only snag was that I had to present this spontaneously with the minimum of notes to work from.  The traditional props of the conference speaker – the PowerPoint presentation and the elaborately worded written lecture – were unavailable to me.  As my therapist once memorably said, I had to “fly by the seat of my pants.”

I underestimated the resilience of the human spirit in such situations.  I talked to the audience as if I was talking to friends in a teashop, keeping my tone conversational, and returning periodically to my main themes (adaptation and industry, audience studied) to aid comprehension.  Subconsciously I felt my head moving from right to left, trying to make sure I looked at every one of the audience, even though they seemed somewhat blurred (I was wearing my reading rather than my distance eyeglasses).  As I warmed to my theme, idea after idea came to my mind; I could readily quote the previous presenters’ work on Portuguese films to suggest transnationality).  Conclusions have always been my bugbear, but in this presentation the ending appeared perfectly logical: we need to expand our frame of reference in adaptation studies to include nonwestern cinemas and their histories.

I felt good at the end. For someone who experiences problems of self-esteem, especially with the deterioration in my voice, this was particularly gratifying.  Only the week before the BBC rang me to make a comment in one of their film programs, but decided not to use my owing to my croaky voice that was not suitable for the airwaves.  Even though the producer denied it fervently, I understood that he was not telling the truth.  No matter: in Thessaloniki I had dealt with my fears and spoken to the best of my ability.

There is no real moral to this story, other than to suggest that adaptation studies bears an intimate relationship to individual psychology.  Sometimes you need to adapt yourself to the exigencies of an unforeseen situation.  The experience can prove stressful, but the results highly beneficial.