What is the Art of Adaptation?
Fri, May 8th 2009, 08:20
Last week I attended a session at the Stratford upon Avon Literary Festival. Apparently there's a famous writer who came from this neck of the woods once. Anyway... I picked out The Art of Adapation as an interesting session. Andrew Davies of Pride and Prejudice et al. fame was due to be there but had to go to Hollywood instead. The panel didn't disappoint though.
Paul Allen talked to three writers, radio writer Mary Cutler (The Archers, Falco radio adapations), novelist and screenwriter David Nicholls (Starter for Ten, Tess of the D'Urbervilles adaptation for TV) and Deborah Maggoch (adapter of Pride and Prejudice for the big screen, and The Diary of Anne Frank for the BBC).
Actor Richard Derrington did some readings. He has a great voice and I recognised him from a play (rather appropriately an adaptation of the novel Unless) that my wife was Costume Supervisor for at the Stephen Joseph Theatre.
Various elements of adaptation were discussed. Here's a few nuggets that I picked up.
Paul Allen kicked off asking about voiceover. Obviously books are often told in a first person narrative which makes voiceover seem an obvious choice. But it can often be a lazy option. Sometimes the adapted dialogue needs to be more like the internal narrative of the original book and less like the dialogue as written in the original. Sometimes the deliberate use of voiceover at a crucial moment can work really well, especially if it's used sparingly elsewhere.
There was a lot of talk about what you keep, what you chuck away and what you add. Essentially you have to ignore all the fans who say, "you are going to include that bit aren't you?" and create something that seems authentic to yourself.
Adaptations of real lives can be tricky because they don't have plots! Sometimes you have to fill in the gaps. For example Deborah Maggoch commented that Anne Frank's diary isn't very specific about why she fell in and then out of love with Peter. So Deborah had to make a leap of imagination for her TV adaptation.
Dates of events are often shuffled around to suit the screen adaptation.
Adaptations into serial form have other requirements... you need to find a way of summarising at the end of a week of radio stories. And at the beginning of the new week you need to summarise and have a second big bang beginning.
Writing about absent characters works in a novel, but is trickier in radio.
When adapting something that's been successfully adapted before you have to find the themes in the story that resonate with you and find a new angle. David Nicholls revealed he's working on a new film version of Great Expectations, but it's still too early to say if it'll make it beyond script stage.
When adapting create your first draft from the original work, then don't refer back to the original work again. That is regressive. The adaptation should evolve from the draft.
Sometimes the "favourtie bit in the book" doesn't translate to screen and has to be left out completely. David Nicholls spoke about how in his novel Starter for Ten there is a comedy dance sequence which everyone who reads the book finds very memorable. When he adapted his novel for film he was encouraged to include that scene. The scene was shot for the film, but it just didn't fit in to the screen narrative. As a result the whole scene was dumped. David said it was expensive lesson for him to learn.
Depending on the project, the writers used the book alone as the basis for a story, or they did do some research around the era. Sometimes for real and recent events they decide not to talk to the people involved and to find their own story in amongst the existing material.
And there it is... and remember, all but one of Shakespeare's plays were adaptations of earlier works.
