Adaptation as a Love Affair

This chapter explores the ways in which stage adaptation, as a form by definition open, volatile, and thus susceptible to both the marvels and the injuries of interpretation, is forever attached to the unresolved debate pertaining to directors’ so-called ‘respect’ and ‘loyalty’ towards the original text. Whether adaptation is seen as an invitation to deepen and expand the source material or (at the opposite extreme) as a gratuitous statement of ultimately uninspired defiance, one needs to address and perhaps attempt to settle the issue of directorial freedom and/or mediation in a process that is inevitably indebted to an inceptive core. Focusing on auteur directors’ adaptations of Greek tragedy, this chapter interrogates such controversial notions as authority and deference to the received primary agent of creativity, namely, the writer of the original text – a text which qua material for adaptation bears the brunt of change, be that appropriation, growth, abuse, or subversion. The problem of directorial freedom is especially pronounced in the case of ‘canonical’ texts, which are customarily regarded as agents of authority and may generate a range of audience expectations and directorial responses, from absolute reverence to the text’s accepted meaning to a radical reinterpretation of the source text.