A while ago, I was thinking (aloud) about page-to-stage adaptations of German novels, a fairly popular phenomenon, and about ownership of texts and how writers (and their descendants) react to meddling by translators and directors. And now there's a symposium in Berlin on this very subject: RealFiktionen. Last night I went along to the second of their three events, excited to see my friends, the writers Deniz Utlu and Olga Grjasnowa, talking about their experiences of having their novels adapted for the stage.
The evening began, however, with Wolfram Lotz and Hannes Becker, two young men who've been getting a whole lotta hype recently. And they were sexy and silly and made all the girls laugh, but I found they tested the patience of the older members of the audience, myself included, who seemed to have a different sense of comic timing, let's say. Still, I did actually love, love, love their 27 Demands for The Theatre, for its almost achievable utopianism and for addressing the horribleness of hierarchies. (I recently spent a day in a foreign country with some German theatre people, purely by coincidence, and was amazed that the dramaturg ("the guy who re-writes the plays," said the electrician) refused to sit at the same table as the technical staff and didn't exchange a single word with them. What an idiot.)
And then came the podium discussion with Olga and Deniz and the directors Nurkan Erpulat and Hakan Savaş Mican, who are staging their respective novels at the Maxim-Gorki-Theater (which the NY Times says is "leading an immigrant vanguard", but hey, I suppose they have to write something eye-catching in the headlines, even if it makes you feel like you're stranded in the seventies). And the discussion, while it could have been tighter, was interesting for several reasons.
First of all, the writers were both totally laid-back about having their novels adapted. Maybe because they know the directors and trust them, or maybe because they recognize that the stage versions are going to be radically different to the originals anyway and so can relax into the whole experience. Olga Grjasnowa actually said she prefers the play of her first novel to the book; there's one scene that simply works better, for her. Novels are finite, nailed down to the page and can't be changed, while plays can come out differently at every performance, have the potential for constant evolution. I don't know whether that means constant enhancement; I can imagine there are nights when the actors are more jaded than others, but what do I know. And she pointed out that publishing a novel means surrendering control over its interpretation because every reader understands it differently; writers can only hope readers will even finish their books. Plus, the editor and the publisher and even/especially the sales reps have the power to cut entire characters and plot strands (although maybe that changes as writers become more established and have greater punching power). So a director reaching in and wrenching out the "soul" of your novel, as Hakan Savaş Mican put it, is only one in a long line of interventions.
Interestingly, Deniz Utlu sees things differently when he writes directly for the stage, because there he has more of a vision for his work in the context. But everyone on the panel agreed that there are two huge differences between page and stage: time and space. In a novel, everything happens in the reader's imagination and a writer can slow down or speed up time, focus on a hummingbird's wings for two pages or have characters age within a paragraph. And theatre in particular has to find a way to compensate for that. The example given was Elyas and his Uncle Cemal in Utlu's Die Ungehaltenen, who in the novel meet up over and over and sit and drink tea in companionable silence – something the director said he doesn't want to recreate in real time (Lotz and Becker might, though), so he has to condense those encounters, which are important for the respective characters.
And the space element is the fact that there are real people up there acting things out, moving closer and further away from each other and the audience. What they didn't mention was sound; I think music is not unimportant either, but maybe that's more of a film thing. Or lighting, or stage design and costumes. What I didn't realize is how theatre people go about making novels into plays, sometimes: according to Nurkan Erpulat they all read the book (actors and designers and directors and assistants; Lotz and Becker say the technical staff do/should too, but maybe they don't, I don't know) and then they go into a rehearsal space together and think about how to make a play out of it, and only after a few weeks does anything get written down, I think by the dramaturg but I'm not sure, and even then that initial version is still very flexible.
It was fun to listen to directors talking; they seem to be a different species to writers. At one point Nurkan Erpulat pretended to be a moderator, intoning an inane but not uninteresting question into the microphone, and the best moment of all was when Hakan Savaş Mican proclaimed it impossible to adapt a novel for the stage. I'm very much looking forward to his production of Deniz Utlu's novel now, what with my translator's realistic love for performing impossible feats.
Showing posts with label theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theatre. Show all posts
Thursday, 14 May 2015
Monday, 23 February 2015
The Show's the Thing
So there I was, thinking about writers and the theatre in Germany, and a big old scandal comes up and slaps me in the face. Brecht's heirs against director Frank Castorf. Castorf put on a very personal interpretation of Baal, with lots of stuff more Castorf than Brecht, and Barbara Brecht-Schall objected and the publisher Suhrkamp, whose lawyer is obviously kept busy, went to court on her behalf. Deutsche Welle has a good explanation of the situation in English, including clearing up what on earth Regietheater means - a very German word if ever there was one. If you're even vaguely interested, do read this article, which also goes into differences between theatre in Germany and the rest of the world. The court ruled that Munich's Residenztheater can only stage the play two more times (plus at the Berliner Theatertreffen, where tickets are presumably very sold out).
And then another director, Leander Haußmann, got all uppity about these damned writers meddling with things they don't understand. Over the weekend, the Deutscher Bühnenverein ("a politico-cultural organisation that represents the interests of its members, namely theatres and orchestras") issued a statement calling for a reform of copyright law to give directors more freedom:
I have two approaches for looking at this, one as a lapsed Marxist atheist and one as a translator. I'll tell you the first one first.
So, the lapsed Marxist atheist in me is saying, What's the big deal, the guy's dead. He's been dead for sixty years and if his kids can't manage to support themselves financially yet they probably have bigger problems than whether Daddy would have liked this particular version of his play or not. Daddy certainly isn't looking down from heaven between mouthfuls of divine Kaiserschmarren and tearing his non-existent hair out. Isn't it enough respect for the dead that someone still wants to put on his play and still sees it as relevant ninety-two years after it premiered?
While the translator in me, as she often does, is drawing parallels to translation. The director is interpreting the words on the page and adding extra ones for context, the way translators sometimes have to do when we think our readers won't get the point for cultural or historical reasons. OK, we rarely add whole swathes of extra words like Castorf does, and our presence in the final text is expected to be minimal. But someone like Michael Hofmann seems to feel comfortable adding here and there, and there's certainly been a tradition of omission in translation, although we're getting more careful about that. In this case, of course, the context is Frank Castorf's present view of the world, or his comparison of Baal's bad behaviour to America in Vietnam, or whatever. I'm almost envious of theatre directors for having that freedom to interpret more wildly than translators.
Yesterday I cyber-eavesdropped on a long and interesting Facebook discussion in response to Haußmann's really rather clumsy opinion piece. Most of the people commenting were writers, and were concerned about the possibility of their work being misappropriated, the extreme example being a play performed within some kind of dictatorship. I can understand that, but at the same time – as someone who tinkers and tampers with writers' work for a living – I think writers have to let go of their products to some extent, let others interpret their books or their scripts publicly rather than in private. Like painters who have to sell their actual pictures to make a living, rather than keeping them on the wall in their kitchen. I won't say, like Haußmann does, that writers should keep away from the theatre and directors should keep away from writing. But I think he has a point when he says that the written word remains on the page, whereas the spoken word is ephemeral. Which, I suppose, is one reason why we translators are expected to be truer to our originals than directors are. At least most of us have smaller egos than Frank Castorf though, dear writers.
P.S. Does this totally contradict what I wrote about stage adaptations of novels? Not entirely, I feel. But who says I have to be consistent?
And then another director, Leander Haußmann, got all uppity about these damned writers meddling with things they don't understand. Over the weekend, the Deutscher Bühnenverein ("a politico-cultural organisation that represents the interests of its members, namely theatres and orchestras") issued a statement calling for a reform of copyright law to give directors more freedom:
It is unrealistic to demand that a director does not use additional text in a staging of a play, so as to protect a copyright-holder like Brecht who has been dead for almost sixty years. The aim of the performance of a work that has been in existence for decades must be to confront it with a director's present view of the world. If additional text is needed to do so, the heirs should not be able to demand the play be cancelled for copyright reasons.Woah. It's like a giant battle of the egos, only one of the egos is dead. Original genius director versus original genius writer, represented by offspring of original genius writer. How odd that the dead one would win. I suppose that's what you get for being canonized (in the literary sense) – extra weight in courtroom wrestling matches.
I have two approaches for looking at this, one as a lapsed Marxist atheist and one as a translator. I'll tell you the first one first.
So, the lapsed Marxist atheist in me is saying, What's the big deal, the guy's dead. He's been dead for sixty years and if his kids can't manage to support themselves financially yet they probably have bigger problems than whether Daddy would have liked this particular version of his play or not. Daddy certainly isn't looking down from heaven between mouthfuls of divine Kaiserschmarren and tearing his non-existent hair out. Isn't it enough respect for the dead that someone still wants to put on his play and still sees it as relevant ninety-two years after it premiered?
While the translator in me, as she often does, is drawing parallels to translation. The director is interpreting the words on the page and adding extra ones for context, the way translators sometimes have to do when we think our readers won't get the point for cultural or historical reasons. OK, we rarely add whole swathes of extra words like Castorf does, and our presence in the final text is expected to be minimal. But someone like Michael Hofmann seems to feel comfortable adding here and there, and there's certainly been a tradition of omission in translation, although we're getting more careful about that. In this case, of course, the context is Frank Castorf's present view of the world, or his comparison of Baal's bad behaviour to America in Vietnam, or whatever. I'm almost envious of theatre directors for having that freedom to interpret more wildly than translators.
Yesterday I cyber-eavesdropped on a long and interesting Facebook discussion in response to Haußmann's really rather clumsy opinion piece. Most of the people commenting were writers, and were concerned about the possibility of their work being misappropriated, the extreme example being a play performed within some kind of dictatorship. I can understand that, but at the same time – as someone who tinkers and tampers with writers' work for a living – I think writers have to let go of their products to some extent, let others interpret their books or their scripts publicly rather than in private. Like painters who have to sell their actual pictures to make a living, rather than keeping them on the wall in their kitchen. I won't say, like Haußmann does, that writers should keep away from the theatre and directors should keep away from writing. But I think he has a point when he says that the written word remains on the page, whereas the spoken word is ephemeral. Which, I suppose, is one reason why we translators are expected to be truer to our originals than directors are. At least most of us have smaller egos than Frank Castorf though, dear writers.
P.S. Does this totally contradict what I wrote about stage adaptations of novels? Not entirely, I feel. But who says I have to be consistent?
Saturday, 7 February 2015
German Writers on Stage and Screen
This post is going to be one long caveat – I know next to nothing about German theatre. But I recently read this piece by Holger Syme about the Theatertreffen, a festival that invites productions in German to Berlin in the hope of showcasing what's going on in the theatre right now. Syme is troubled that there are four brand new plays in the festival, three book or film adaptations and only three older plays. It took me a while to grasp his point – which is that there has traditionally been a strand of German theatre that uses the classics "to speak to the present" and that this strand is missing from the festival. Because my immediate reaction was, great, new plays getting recognition! Perhaps this is because I'm still annoyed by the British habit of putting Nazi uniforms into productions of German classics – Woyzeck, for goodness' sake! Think harder! I wanted to shout. But I didn't, and it was a very long time ago. At any rate, I'm not sure I share Syme's concerns (after all, this is just one year of one festival) but I'm glad someone's writing about German theatre in English.
I was particularly glad that there are four new plays on the programme and only one novel adaptation. I'm not the only person to feel uncomfortable about these, which are common on German stages. When I've seen them I've come away feeling disgruntled – my readings of novels are so personal that a director's version feels to me rather like a violation, and the brutal abbreviation that's necessary to squeeze a slow-moving novel into a couple of hours' entertainment doesn't help. People who know more about this than me seem to agree that a good book-to-stage adaptation has to go a long way away from the original – embracing that act of appropriation, perhaps, as something creative rather than violent. I think that makes sense. I can only imagine that the book adaptation on the Theatertreffen programme falls into this category, because Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands is not a traditional narrative work.
There are reasons for these novel adaptations, though, and they're partly economic – audiences will be familiar with the books' names, at least, and publishers are getting better and better at selling rights for film and stage adaptations. What makes me sad is that a lot of German-language novelists also write for the stage, and have traditionally done so. Off the top of my head: Elfriede Jelinek, Lukas Bärfuss, Kristof Magnusson, Daniela Dröscher, Julya Rabinowich, Max Frisch, Thomas Bernhard, Nino Haratischwili, Feridun Zaimoglu, Kathrin Röggla. And they write plays that don't need adapting, they're made-to-measure pieces for the stage written by astoundingly talented people, and yet the novel adaptations often seem to be a bigger deal. Sheesh, I wish I knew enough about theatre to say that they're actually better quality. I wish I knew enough about theatre to define quality.
Films, I can do a bit better. But there's little point writing the five millionth piece about how page-to-screen adaptations fall short, right? So here, two fabulous things to do with the writer Clemens Meyer, one of my translatees. He's just been awarded a big sparkly prize for best (unfilmed) screenplay, along with co-writer Thomas Stuber, for an adaptation of his short story "In den Gängen". You can read the original story in English in All the Lights. And director Andreas Dresen's adaptation of his debut novel Als wir träumten is competing in the Berlinale as we speak, then on general release in Germany from 26 February.
I was particularly glad that there are four new plays on the programme and only one novel adaptation. I'm not the only person to feel uncomfortable about these, which are common on German stages. When I've seen them I've come away feeling disgruntled – my readings of novels are so personal that a director's version feels to me rather like a violation, and the brutal abbreviation that's necessary to squeeze a slow-moving novel into a couple of hours' entertainment doesn't help. People who know more about this than me seem to agree that a good book-to-stage adaptation has to go a long way away from the original – embracing that act of appropriation, perhaps, as something creative rather than violent. I think that makes sense. I can only imagine that the book adaptation on the Theatertreffen programme falls into this category, because Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands is not a traditional narrative work.
There are reasons for these novel adaptations, though, and they're partly economic – audiences will be familiar with the books' names, at least, and publishers are getting better and better at selling rights for film and stage adaptations. What makes me sad is that a lot of German-language novelists also write for the stage, and have traditionally done so. Off the top of my head: Elfriede Jelinek, Lukas Bärfuss, Kristof Magnusson, Daniela Dröscher, Julya Rabinowich, Max Frisch, Thomas Bernhard, Nino Haratischwili, Feridun Zaimoglu, Kathrin Röggla. And they write plays that don't need adapting, they're made-to-measure pieces for the stage written by astoundingly talented people, and yet the novel adaptations often seem to be a bigger deal. Sheesh, I wish I knew enough about theatre to say that they're actually better quality. I wish I knew enough about theatre to define quality.
Films, I can do a bit better. But there's little point writing the five millionth piece about how page-to-screen adaptations fall short, right? So here, two fabulous things to do with the writer Clemens Meyer, one of my translatees. He's just been awarded a big sparkly prize for best (unfilmed) screenplay, along with co-writer Thomas Stuber, for an adaptation of his short story "In den Gängen". You can read the original story in English in All the Lights. And director Andreas Dresen's adaptation of his debut novel Als wir träumten is competing in the Berlinale as we speak, then on general release in Germany from 26 February.
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