When Does A Text Become A New Text? Simon Stone, EL James, and Crossing the Textual Rubicon

“’...as far as pure ideas are concerned, 1884 was the end. We were expecting the worst... but that didn’t happen. Against all expectations, recycled ideas were working.’

‘But isn’t it the way they are told?’ asked Havisham in her not-to-be-argued with voice. ‘Surely the permutations of storytelling are endless!’”

-          Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots

 

Quoted in a long article in The Australian about the current trend of adapting the classics, Simon Stone claims that his works “are closer to an original play than an adaptation”, and that “every play ever written is a rewrite of something”. He openly admits to cannibalising classic texts, reworking and remaking them and creating new texts. He stands in contrast to some of the other theatre makers interviewed in the article, including Andrew Bovell, who exhorts people to “write your own plays and stop effing around with everyone else’s”. He also earns the ire of the journalist, Rosemary Neill, who has also penned a terse editorial in which she describes Stone’s attitudes as “self-serving nonsense”. A (false, I think) dichotomy is set up between adaptation and new work, between refurbishing overseas texts and new, uniquely Australian stories.

Debate over adaptation has been going on for ages and I have no doubt that it will continue to go on for some time. It’s a complex debate with many dimensions, but from a narratological perspective, the one that interests me in particular is this idea of textual boundaries. When does a text stop being a text and become a different, new text? How far do you have to change a text before it is not that text any more? What is the point where an adaptation becomes a new text? To borrow a quote from Michel Foucault in his essay What Is An Author?:

“What is a work? What is this curious unity which we designate as a work? Of what elements is it composed? Is it not what an author has written? Difficulties appear immediately... A theory of the work does not exist, and the empirical task of those who naively undertake the editing of works often suffers in the absence of such a theory.”

The dichotomy set up between adaptation and new work seems to suggest that the two are a binary, two sides of a coin – and thus in competition with each other – when it would probably be more correct to place them on a spectrum. All texts are arguably on some level derivative. What is unclear is at what point a text like the ones created by Stone shifts toward the new work end at the spectrum.

Stone is right when he notes that shameless idea-stealing is a part of theatre’s history: the Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre would not exist without it. Many canonical plays are technically adaptations. Or are they? Romeo and Juliet has its roots in Arthur Brookes’ 1562 poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuliet, which itself probably has roots in a novella by Matteo Bandello. Does this make it an adaptation? Or is it something else? And is Stone doing the same thing when he, say, takes Death of a Salesman and changes the ending?

The question at the crux of this debate is, I think, authorship. I find this interesting, because in modern literary criticism, the author is the arguably the least important figure. (Listen to pretty much any academic moan about how irrelevant the authorship question is in the study of Shakespeare and you’ll hear what I mean.) Nineteenth century Schleiermachian criticism was deeply worried about the author, prescribing a hermeneutic method wherein the reader basically became a detective, combing texts for evidence of the author’s true intentions. In the twentieth century, New Criticism brought the text itself into the foreground, and this in turn was supplanted by the reception aesthetic, where the reader became the central concern. Foucault asserted that the author was more a function than an actual person, and in 1968, Roland Barthes famously declared the author dead. However, almost fifty years later, authorship on the stage seems to be a matter of great angst, the question of who writes or creates a text deeply vexed.

Even a cursory examination of the question of authorship and the stage (and I don’t pretend to be making anything more than a cursory examination here) shows us that theatrical authorship is already more complex than in a written text. Instead of there being a direct line that goes author à text à reader, in the theatre, there are filters laid on top. There are more mediators: playwright à director à actors à audience. You will note that the text does not appear in this second schema, because which text is the fixed text? We could argue that it is the script, the written text provided by the playwright to the director. However, because the play is an inherently performative form, the text can never be wholly experienced on the page. It must be performed to become an object of consciousness for the audience, and so it must pass through director and actors. There are a number of subjectivities in play here: to get to the audience, the playwright’s text must pass through a number of interpretations or readings. The director in particular becomes a figure who is both author and reader: at what point does the director’s reading of a text change the text itself? (We could veer off in a very Derridan direction here and start talking about how the theatrical text has no centre and how the play is quite literally play or jeu, but I’ll spare you that longwinded and probably pointless tangent.)

And so we get these confused textual boundaries, because the theatrical text is not fixed. It is fluid, and must by its nature be subject to a middleman’s reading to be realised. Can we call the printed script the text when it can never be fully realised in that form? Does each production constitute a new text? And if so, what barriers must be crossed for one text to become an entirely different one?

The word “faithful” is often used in conjunction with adaptations. There is a sense that the director has been loyal to the author’s intention, and has endeavoured to communicate this audience. What Simon Stone appears to be doing is essentially going rogue, rejecting this idea of faithful adaptation. He is not averse to changing the meaning of a text, to the extent where he argues that he is creating a whole new text. By claiming the position of primary author, Stone seems to be crossing a sort of textual Rubicon: if there is a line between old text and new, he is figuratively arguing that he has stepped over it. He is declaring his intention more important than that of the original author: “corrupting” texts and twisting them into something different. Roman Ingarden argued that the author was the source of the text, but that the meaning was intersubjective, transcendent of author, text, and reader. But what happens when that meaning is explicitly changed, as in Stone’s practice? Is that the point when it becomes a new text? Is what Simon Stone does imposing a reading (albeit an aggressive one) on a text, or is he creating a new text (albeit a derivative one) altogether?

This rewriting of a classic text is hardly an unusual literary phenomenon. In an example from my own academic field, Jennifer Crusie’s book Maybe This Time is a rewriting of Turn of the Screw, reimagining James’s terrifying novella as a light-hearted contemporary romance novel. Crusie’s intentions are clearly vastly different to James’s: she owes a textual debt, which she openly admits to, but, like Stone, obviously claims Maybe This Time as a new text, with herself as author. This practice is arguably more appropriation than adaptation: instead of attempting to translate a text through a new lens for an audience, it takes elements of it to create a new text.

The key difference, of course, is the names. Crusie’s book is not called Turn of the Screw, nor is it sold as such. Stone admits that the titles are a marketing technique, then handwaves it away, saying that titles are largely irrelevant. This seems to be at the core of the problem people have with Stone’s work: he is using the names of famous authors to mobilise audiences, but what he is presenting has more to do with himself than those authors. (And, by extension, he is making royalties off it.) It could be viewed as breaking faith not only with the author but with the audience, who came to the theatre to see Tennessee Williams but came away with Simon Stone. This creates a kind of authorial battle: who has the authority (pun intended) to dictate what a text’s meaning should be?

I’d be really uncomfortable with suggesting that directors had to even attempt to be loyal to an author’s intentions. Just because an author meant to say something in a text doesn’t mean they actually do, and it’s quite possible that meanings and readings exist in a text that the author was completely unaware of. We ditched Schleiermachian criticism a century ago for a reason. However, on the other side of this is the question of the audience, who has come to see one text but may end up with quite another. Simon Stone is well known enough now that people will see his shows on his own merits: having “Simon Stone after” on a theatre program may be a bigger sell for some people than the author’s name that comes after. He has become an authorial brand in his own right. But is he a sort of EL James to Tennessee Williams/Eugene O’Neill/Henrik Ibsen/etc’s Stephenie Meyer? Is what he does sort of like creating alternate universe fan fiction – and then marketing it under the moniker of the original?

I actually find this comparison to EL James quite a useful one (though I’m not sure if Stone himself would particularly like it). I’d like to be very clear that I’m not making an equivocation between the quality of James’s work and Stone’s – far from it – but in terms of textual appropriation, there are some similarities. James took Meyer’s characters, replaced vampirism with sexual dominance, substituted repeated sex scenes for repeated episodes of abstinence, and created a new text. At first, it was openly derivative – Master of the Universe was Twilight fan fiction – but then she simply changed the names and published it as Fifty Shades of Grey, a new text in its own right. Its roots in Twilight are obvious (even if one didn’t know about its literary history, I’m pretty confident a reader of Twilight who read Fifty Shades would be able to pick it), but it has an entirely remade dialogue and structure. It is not Twilight – it is something else – but it is not not Twilight either. I’d argue that Stone’s practice is not dissimilar: his The Wild Duck, for instance, remakes dialogue and structure. It is not The Wild Duck but not not The Wild Duck either. It transforms Ibsen’s text into something new and different (and, in this case, genuinely excellent).

Perhaps this question of ‘excellence’ is the key. One of the threads running through both pieces in the Australian is that adapting or appropriating rather than striving to create a new story is lazy or easy. In her editorial, Rosemary Neil writes,

“...let's not pretend that this director's penchant for reworking classics that have a proven track record is as courageous or important as a creating a new, powerful play with no track record.”

I’m not particularly interested in disputing this. However, does it matter? How much does the audience actually care about the courage of a text’s creator, as long as the end result is excellent? How much does it impact their enjoyment? I wouldn’t claim that it doesn’t impact it at all. Again, EL James provides a useful reference point here. Many readers find their enjoyment of Fifty Shades mitigated because they believe it to be an unethical reworking, unfairly capitalising on the popularity of Twilight. On the other hand, Fifty Shades of Grey is the fastest selling book of all time, so clearly it’s not bothering that many people. On the whole, I don’t think the amount of effort exerted by the author ultimately matters that much to a substantial amount of the audience. What does matter is the text and their own enjoyment and appreciation of it. And as his popularity shows, audiences are largely appreciating Stone’s work.  

Ramble-y Thoughts on Criticism (because I'm a nerd like that)

Theatre criticism in general and theatre blogging in particular has been a hot topic of late. This is no surprise. Stephen Crittenden’s recent article for the Global Mail on Shit On Your Play’s Jane Simmons has sparked a debate on the nature of criticism which I’ve watched with some interest – both as an emerging (or, less kindly, wannabe) theatre critic and as someone who studied a little litcrit at uni. This has led to a series of interesting online responses to Crittenden’s piece and Simmons’s blog and to some events in Sydney which I was fortunate enough to attend this weekend – the criticism panel at the excellent playwriting festival curated by Kate Mulvany under the auspices of Writing NSW and the Sunday Forum on theatre criticism held at Belvoir St.

I don’t think it’s at all contentious to say that there is nothing in the world as interesting as passionate disagreement. That is one of the things I really, really liked about the festival panel in Rozelle. The critics speaking on this panel included Dianna Simmonds, John McCallum, Kevin Jackson, and Augusta Supple, and while I don’t know if I agreed with everything they said – and they certainly didn’t always agree with each other – the debate had was robust and vibrant. It certainly gave me a lot to think about. I came away feeling like I’d learned something (as well as being a little terrified about the amount of people who must come away from my writing thinking I’m a giant narcissist because of how often I say ‘I’, but maybe that terror is just my narcissism showing – I don’t know). The Belvoir panel, which included Elissa Blake, Darryn King, Alison Croggon, Jane Simmons, and Chris Hook, was, by contrast, much tamer. I’m not trying to say that they should have thrown down and thrown punches on the floor of Belvoir’s Upstairs Theatre, but I don’t think I came away with much new insight into the critical process. I know that passionate disagreement exists between the panellists – hell, Jane Simmons was on the panel, and anyone who’s read even a little theatre blogging recently knows what a polarising figure she’s been – but it didn’t show that much in discussion. Maybe it’s the part of me that loves sport, loves competition, or maybe it’s the academic in me who thrives on debate, but the reserved civility really did nothing for me.

I’ve been mulling over why the two events were so different – why I got so much out of the first and notso much  out of the latter – and I can’t really come up with a satisfactory explanation. Perhaps the moderation styles were different, and that affected it: I did not, for example, really need to hear a detailed rundown of who does and who doesn’t take notes when they go to see a show. That mechanical level – for me, anyway – is really not interesting. But I didn’t intend to write this piece as a sort of review of the two events. Augusta Supple raised an excellent point on the festival panel – she said that she thinks of her reviews not as reviews, but as responses to the work, and that really resonated with me. This post is a response to the things I’ve heard over the weekend, not a review of individual reviewers or anything like that. This is a bit of a ramble on What Jodi Thinks About Criticism And Audience and Her Own Personal Critical Philosophy (feat. Jean-Paul Sartre, because I can be a wanker like that).

For me, the biggest question that was raised over the weekend – one that I feel the festival panel addressed with a lot more nuance and depth than the Belvoir panel – is the question of audience. The traditional publishing venues of reviews (ie newspapers) seem to make it clear that reviews are intended to guide audience behaviour, but ticket sales show that that isn’t always the case. As someone who has existed (and hopes to continue to exist) on the other side of the artistic/critical fence, I know that reviews can be vitally important on a personal level to artists, and that’s certainly the sense I got via some of the panels at the playwriting festival. In What is Literature?, Jean-Paul Sartre writes about the ideas of author and reader, subject and object. This is a massive simplification of a complex philosophy (I mean, come on, it’s Sartre), but basically, the reader exists outside an invented world and is able to perceive it objectively. The author, who has created the world, exists within it, and thus for them, the work is permanently subjective, never quite finished, always subject to change, a project into the future. It’s an imperfect philosophy, but it’s neat, and I think it can certainly apply to theatre: an artist necessarily perceives a work one way, an audience another, and who does the critic write for?

The problem with this kind of debate, however, is twofold. One, it homogenises ‘audience’, failing to recognise that an audience contains not only individuals but an artistic community as well; and two, it erases the fact that the critic is themselves a) part of the audience, and b) an individual. At the Belvoir panel, the question of a critic’s qualifications were raised, and a couple of the panellists responded with the idea that they’re just part of the audience. I felt like saying, ‘of course’, because who else is a critic supposed to be? The idea of a critic having to be somehow ‘qualified’ to comment on art is bullshit. Anyone can see a play, anyone can react to it, and any opinion is valid. Just because work might not be catered directly to your individual tastes does not negate your right to comment on it (and to comment on the fact that it was not to your individual taste).

I get really uncomfortable with the idea that someone is speaking for the masses. This was the biggest problem I had when the whole Shit On Your Play fracas happened – the idea that this blog spoke for a disenfranchised voice. Maybe this is very idealistic, and maybe it runs counter to all the links between criticism and commercialism that exist, but I think that as a critic, I only have the right to speak for myself. Criticism is not decentred. The person who watches theatre, who experiences any kind of art – the reader, for lack of a more inclusive word – cannot and should not divorce their experience of art from art. What is important to recognise is that one person’s experience may not be like another’s. I can speak only to my own experience. I can advise, I can warn, I can say what I did and didn’t like, but I can only ever speak from my perspective. Hell, I can call something ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and maybe people will agree with me, but does that mean that what I write is empirically true? Not so much.

Let me put my academic hat back on and get all lit-crit-y – noting that literary criticism is vast and complex and while I’ve studied it I’m certainly not any kind of authority and this is all a big, big simplification. (There is, I think, some interesting academic work to be done on the role audience and performance criticism and that kind of thing – I think it’s something that is totally under-studied.) In lit-crit’s formative years, criticism revolved around the author. The role of the critic was almost to ignore the text – to approach it as a detective might, to discern the author’s true intention. Then New Criticism became trendy, which is text-based: it essentially ignored the author and the reader and approached litcrit almost like maths. (I have many, many thoughts on why I hate New Crit, which I will not go into here.) And then along came Roman Ingarden, who gave us reception theory: reader-based crit. At the heart of reception theory is the idea that a text is incomplete until it is read. There is only one text, which can be read differently, and while a text is not the sum total of its interpretations, the meaning is dependent on the reader. In its most basic form, a text will mean different things to different people.

I think this is a useful way to approach criticism. It’s simultaneously comforting (‘I only have to speak for myself’) and complicating (‘how will we ever form any collective opinions on anything?’), but if we accept that art is incomplete until it is viewed, then centring the reader’s experience of art seems to make sense. Writing a review and offering detailed textual analysis with the artist specifically in mind might be useful for the artist but perhaps not for anyone else. There was some discussion on the Saturday panel about setting personal taste evaluating work on what it’s trying to do, which I think is a flawed idea – I feel like work should be evaluated on the merits of what it actually does, not on what it tries to do and whether it succeeds or fails, and the only yardstick a critic has to measure that is against their own experience. Divorcing ‘art’ from ‘how I feel about art’ – that is, trying to be objective? A lot, lot harder than it sounds. If a critic tries to be ‘objective’, I don’t think that really does anyone any favours. We get back to crit-by-numbers, and I don’t think anyone really wants art to be appraised that way.

There are no ciphers. There is no one out there that is just ‘audience member #5’. Every theatre audience, every night, is made up of individuals.  I think it’s important to have a diverse variety of critics because audiences are not homogenous. A piece of art – whether it’s a literary text or opera or circus or theatre – is going to mean something different to every single person in an audience, and vibrant criticism should be a microcosm of that. I’m not saying that all critics will (or should) disagree, but that nuance and the individual reading should be celebrated. As a critic, as a reader, I can offer my opinion, my reading, of a play. Some people will go and see a play and love it. Some will hate it. Some will read a review and agree with it. Some will disagree. I think what I’m trying to get at here is treating any group as a group is innately dangerous and ultimately infantilising. Who is qualified to be a critic? Anyone. Anyone can have an opinion. The responsibilities of a critic? To give an opinion, as they see it, as they understand it. It’s as simple as that.

...of course, it’s not as simple as that. In an idealistic bubble it’s as simple as that, but in real terms? Of course not. We come back, once again, to the question of audience, of who the critic writes for. One really interesting question raised at the Belvoir panel was when people read reviews – before or after they see a show. Personally, I read reviews only after I’ve written my own, and like Darryn King, I feel a frisson of excitement when someone passionately agrees or passionately disagrees with my point of view. Going back to Sartre – he talks about how writing is for reading, how text is freedom to collaborate in the writer’s art, how a text needs to be read, to be concretised, and how the writer needs to respect the reader’s freedom. If a writer writes a sunset, the reader is necessary to realise it. I think this point is valid across many different forms of criticism. When I review – or respond to, as Augusta Supple put it, which I think is a far more useful set of words – theatre, I try to reflect the sunset as I saw it.  Perhaps there are some sunsets I approach differently from others. As a ‘reader’ of theatrical art, perhaps I realise my sunsets in different ways sometimes. It’s exciting when someone sees the sunset in a similar way to me. It’s exciting when someone looks at what I thought was a sunset and sees a stormcloud. Diverse readings of texts are exciting, yo.

So who does a critic write for? I think everyone will have a different answer to that. Print critics, for example, are bound to write for a certain audience. For me? I could be super trite and say ‘myself’, but that wouldn’t be quite right. I do write to react, to respond, to express what I feel. I love the idea of criticism as art and there is something about art which is deeply personal. However, I come back to the wicked world of academia (as an analogy, not as an audience!). I am – if it’s not already painfully, excruciatingly obvious – an academic type, and when I write academic papers, I’m writing for my peers, to create or extend a dialogue with scholars in my field, hoping to further our collective knowledge and understanding. A point that was raised at the panel in Rozelle was the idea that theatre blogs have enabled an ongoing conversation about a show. When I write, I aspire to write for a critical community. Sartre (yeah, him again) said that we write for our contemporaries, our peers, and I think that we not only make art for them, but we provide our own readings of art for their own benefit. By ‘critical community’, I don’t just mean critics, but people who want to engage in ongoing dialogue about what a show did, how it did it, the ideas that it raised, anything. This could mean artists, companies, other critics, audience member #5 – anyone interested in continuing a conversation.

Do I succeed in doing this? Probably not. But in my ideal world, that’s what criticism looks like. (This has been a very longwinded, I’ve-had-a-few-glasses-of-wine-and-damn-it-I-have-things-to-say-I-have-a-bit-of-a-philosophy-crush-on-Jean-Paul-Sartre way of getting at it.) I’m glad that there have been so many opportunities to discuss theatre criticism and what it means and how it should be done and all those sorts of things over the past little while. Do I think these conversations have been conducted in the most productive way? Not really. I certainly felt that the Belvoir panel, for instance, danced around the issues and seemed to be terrified of offending anyone. But the fact that there are conversations happening about what it means to be a critic makes me happy. And if I think they’re not being done right... hey, that’s just my reading.