Highlighting the communication of story as the central preoccupation of an adaptation may also indicate a desire to be free from the “trappings” of a text-its associations, expectations and histories of reproduction and reception-and thus clear a space within which it might become possible to tell and/or receive that story as if for the first time. Crucially, story also stands for a place in which different kinds of audience might come together, a common ground, not because a story means the same to everyone but because anyone can tell, listen, remember and retell a story and in so doing can make it significantly their own. “Story” announces a journey of the imagination, an undertaking to rouse curiosity, stir emotions and feed an appetite for discovery. Rather, the privileging of story is a popularizing move that conveys the promise of accessibility, entertainment and engagement. In practice, however, it does not follow that such considerations will be neglected. To regard the literary basis of adaptation primarily as a story, as Rice puts it, might seem to imply, naively, that the formal or contextual attributes of a work are less consequential. Storytelling as Adaptation: Adaptation as StorytellingĮmma Rice, director of the British theatre company Kneehigh, describes the group’s adaptation projects by saying simply, “We tell stories because they matter” regardless of the style, genre, theme or formal complexity of the material chosen by them, she has found that by “always treating the source as a story, not as a text, the landscape of choices gently alters” (“On Directing”). Such negotiations will of course be marked by tensions as well as opportunities. Adaptation proposes often unexpected connections between forms, genres, periods, styles, authors, preoccupations, cultures, languages-and in the case of adaptation for the theatre, as Mike Alfreds phrases it, between the “world of the written story and the world of its performance” (138). For while the appropriative move that adaptation necessarily makes is sometimes perceived as parasitic, a more generous interpretation of the adaptive impulse is precisely to see in this an affirmation of belief in the shareable. If storytelling is understood, as Kearney suggests, as a practice of articulation that seeks to shape human experience and imagination in purposeful and profoundly interconnected ways, then storytelling through adaptation can in turn be regarded as an adherence to, and perpetuation of, the same desire. ![]() In this light the apparent centrality of story in adaptation is unsurprising. ![]() Without this transition from nature to narrative, from time suffered to time enacted and enunciated, it is debatable whether a merely biological life ( zoe) could be considered a truly human one ( bios). It is, in short, only when haphazard happenings are transformed into story, and thus made memorable over time, that we become full agents of our history. ![]() The philosopher and literary critic Richard Kearney has argued, deferring to Aristotle, that the art of storytelling is “what gives us a shareable world.” He continues: Practitioners and playwrights regularly gesture towards story to signal the continued potency of a source text or, by contrast, its rediscovered relevance and timeliness recurrently, the borrowed work is described as a story that “needed telling.” ![]() However, whilst accepting that old assumptions about linear narrativity have been permanently unsettled in the twentieth and twenty-first century-not least through the development, expansion and impact of new communication technologies-it remains notable how frequently “story” is emphasized within the adaptation process, over and above other factors. Equally, the source text might itself entertain the idea of “story” explicitly to resist this, exposing the fractures in its telling, or withholding the anticipated narrative rewards acknowledging this, adaptations of such a text might strive to preserve in performance precisely these qualities of challenge and critique. Adaptations in the theatre need not, of course, be narrative-led: its makers might prioritize the formal challenges inherent in the chosen source material, or may be motivated by another agenda-cultural, political, economic-to which “story” becomes subordinate. This essay examines how concerns and critiques around stories and storytelling might be used productively to reframe an understanding of theatrical retellings, in performance practice and in adaptation studies.
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