Atwood's Men Meet the Screen

Margaret Atwood’s famous work, The Handmaid’s Tale, offers innovative and intriguing perspectives on gender and gender roles, as they are dramatized and problematized in the context of a dystopian society that in many ways is a projection of our own. Particularly interesting in the novel are the roles on men, represented by the principal male characters: the Commander, Nick, and Luke. As Atwood employs these personae to describe at least three different manifestations of masculinity —all with their own conflicts and possibilities—, the first season of the television version of the novel, created by Bruce Miller and resealed in 2017, explores, expands, and exploits various visions of manhood that help understand not only the protagonist’s but also the reader’s/viewer’s world. This paper is an attempt to establish a dialogue of sorts between Atwood’s and Miller’s viewpoints on masculinity through their portrayals of these three characters and their interactions with their protagonist and their context.

‘He just isn’t my Frost’: Television adaptation of R.D. Wingfield’s Jack Frost.

This article presents an analysis of the police television series A Touch of Frost (Yorkshire Television, 1992) and the crime novels of Rodney Wingfield upon which it is based. In analysing characterisation of the protagonist of each version, Inspector Jack Frost, data is drawn from the pilot episode of the series and Wingfield’s debut novel Frost at Christmas (1984). Wingfield was less than impressed with television’s version of Frost, stating, ‘He just isn’t my Frost’. Given that a core motivation for stylistics is to ‘support initial impressions in various extracts’ readings’ and to ‘describe the readers’ response with some precision’ (Gregoriou, 2007:19), this article offers a linguistic explanation for the response of an author to the adaptation of his own work. The famously reticent Wingfield did not elaborate in detail on why he disapproved of the television version of Frost, although several critics contended that Wingfield felt television had ‘softened’ his creation. This article will analyse each version in terms of the elements of narrative outlined by Simpson and Montgomery (1995) and will in turn suggest an elaboration of this model by integrating frameworks for the analysis of impoliteness (Culpeper, 1996; 2010), examining pragmatic elements of Frost’s dialogue. In investigating whether television’s Jack Frost is ‘softer’ than the character envisaged by Wingfield free direct speech and accompanying physical behaviour in novel and television adaptation are analysed, focussing on whether the perceived softness of the latter has been partly achieved by making the speech of Frost less impolite on television. Keywords Adaptation, characterisation, A Touch of Frost, Frost at Christmas, impoliteness, free direct speech, dialogue, television drama, crime fiction

Realism Redux: Staging ‘Billy Budd’ in the Age of Television

Although the term ‘realism’ is frequently deployed in discussing opera productions, its meanings are far from self-evident. Examining four stage and screen productions of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd (1951–66), this article traces how this mode was reworked through television in the mid-twentieth century. Linking theatrical and televisual developments in the UK and the USA, I demonstrate how television’s concerns for intimacy and immediacy guided both the 1951 premiere and the condensed 1952 NBC television version. I then show how challenges to the status quo, particularly the ‘angry young men’ of British theatre and the backlash against naturalism on television, spurred the development of a revamped ‘realistic’ style in the 1964 stage and 1966 BBC productions of Billy Budd. Beyond Billy Budd, this article explores how the meanings of realism changed during the 1950s and 1960s, and how they continue to influence our study of opera performance history.

The Shifting Sand of Orientalism

This chapter explores the fascinating screen journey of The Desert Song (1926), the Romberg-Hammerstein operetta. Warner Bros. released no less than three full-length screen adaptations of the piece, in 1929, 1943, and 1953, and a television version was broadcast in 1955. The chapter addresses the work’s shifting relationships, in terms of world politics, depictions of Otherness, and the interplay between reality and fantasy. The 1929 version was the first full-length screen adaptation of a Broadway musical with all-synchronized sound and it recreated the theatrical original in a nascent medium. However, the 1942 version (a story of Nazi machinations in North Africa) was a piece of home-front propaganda and the hero (played by Dennis Morgan) was no longer a former French soldier but rather Paul Hudson, an American pianist who rides off to continue his fight for justice rather than remain with his beloved French chanteuse, Margot (Irene Manning). Meanwhile, the 1953 Kathryn Grayson-Gordon MacRae version combined elements of the stage musical and the 1943 movie to create a Cold War version of the story for a new political age.

“I Ought to Know How Negroes Talk”

The African American actor, writer, and director Spencer Williams, Jr. (1895–1969) has been the subject of a range of academic studies in recent years. Scholars have explored his pioneering work in early black film and his problematic role as “Andy Hogg Brown” in the television version of the Amos 'n' Andy radio program as a means of interpreting representations of black life within the confines of the Hollywood culture industry. This new scholarship, however, has reflected a limited and often inaccurate understanding of Williams' remarkable career. As will be discussed in this article, major events in Williams' life that have been unknown until now strongly influenced his filmmaking and his strategies to make the movie and television industries more racially inclusive. Most significantly, Williams was at different times a soldier in a segregated army unit, a convicted felon, and a committed artist and activist in Hollywood. These experiences helped to shape the themes and subject matter of his films, which ranged from religious dramas and singing cowboy westerns to backstage musicals and the first African American horror movie ever made.

Text, Image, Audience: Adaptation and Reception of Andrea Newman'sBouquet of Barbed Wire

Andrea Newman's 1969 novel, A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, has been adapted twice for television: first in 1976, and later in 2010. Controversially, the novel and its adaptations inferred father – daughter incest, a subject that was considered taboo during the 1970s. Arguably, though partly arising as a result of available technologies at that time, the repressed nature of incest is reflected in the claustrophobic aesthetics of the 1976 television version. In contrast, the more diverse cinematography, panoramic settings and less populated frames of Ashley Pearce's 2010 version correspond with an increasingly transparent approach to incest and child abuse, consistent with the contemporary zeitgeist, which fosters openness across all social and cultural structures. In particular, the changed climate involves a mounting preoccupation with, and sensitivity to, child welfare and legislation, arising as a result of national and international media revelations of child abuse in both domestic and institutional scenarios. Engaging theoretically with Raymond Williams’ concept of a ‘structure of feeling’, as well as referring to Freud's seduction theory, and television theorists including Karen Lury and John Ellis, this article locates parallels between the way that incest is represented and the socio-political and cultural contexts of the respective television adaptations of Newman's novel.

Celebrating Lindsay Anderson's In Celebration

On stage, Lindsay Anderson directed ten plays by David Storey, who also wrote the novel on which This Sporting Life is based. Anderson directed Storey's In Celebration both in the theatre, at the Royal Court in 1969, and on television, for the American Film Theatre in 1975. Although it focuses primarily on the television version of In Celebration, a work which is all too often neglected in critical discussions of Anderson's output, this article examines Anderson as a director for both stage and screen, and also explores the numerous significant links between Storey's and Anderson's oeuvres.

"The Karamazov Brothers" as intellectualgames

The article analizes the television version of EM. ПойоуелгекуЪ "The Karamazov Brothers". The author treats the TV series in question as a typical screen production possessing all the techniques characteristic of Russian television, as an adaptation of me classic text's philosophic and artistic richness in accordance with the laws of mass perseption. The artical gives a consise history of the novel's adaptations in the world cinema.