Tragic adaptation and performance

undoing the play

pp. 23-45

in: Rebecca Bushnell, Tragic time in drama, film, and videogames, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

This chapter investigates how through dramatizing choice in "real" time, both adaptation and performance can release alternative stories or endings in a tragic play. Audiences and directors certainly debate how far may one go in "correcting" or making changes in a tragic plot, since tragedy seems to be all about fatal consequences and especially an ending from which there is no return. Radical remakings of tragic plots through either adaptation or performance are admittedly rare, precisely because audiences, actors, and critics alike often crave the repetition of those familiar stories, no matter how horrific they might be. However, this chapter offers two case studies of performative disruption that help us see the alternative possibilities latent in tragic theater. The first example is Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an adaptation of both Hamlet and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stages the dynamics of choice in an unfixed present time and space to exploit the opening for invention, gaming, and rewriting that Hamlet itself invites. In the end Stoppard does not let Rosencrantz and Guildenstern escape from Hamlet; that is, he does not release the kind of potential that was exploded in this chapter's second example, Richard Schechner's legendary adaptation and performance of Euripides's Bacchae in Dionysus in 69. In that case, game-like performance generated a sense of present possibilities that could empower the audience and actors to intervene in the tragic plot and break it open—or to just walk away.