Od Trylogii do Chłopów. Strategie reżyserskie współczesnych inscenizatorów „wielkiej powieści”

The great Polish novel is a staging task willingly undertaken by directors. The term ‘great novel’ means a novel in the epic type. The essence of its theatrical potential is already determined by its volume – it is undoubtedly a tempting challenge for the director. Equally inspiring are the basic features of an epic itself – a wide, panoramic spectrum of the community, embedded in the discourse of breakthrough, solstice of ideas, values, and identity identifications. The text discusses five source clues leading to the stage adaptations of the ‘great novel’ – the idea of post-dramatic nature, the issue of theatrical adaptation of a literary work, the issue of the so-called ‘indecency’, the formula of engaged theater and the problem of confrontation between reading the novel with the perceptual order of theatrical staging. The second part of the text presents the producer’s strategies used in two, especially important novels staged in recent years – the Trilogy, directed by Jan Klata and Peasant Farmers directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski.

Conrad’s Artistic Returns: Perspectives on a Bulgarian Debut in Staging Heart of Darkness

Since 1989 (the fall of Communism) the performing arts in Bulgaria have suffered a long process of transition dominated by a certain dialectic tension between the necessity to meet economic needs and the desire to open new venues for dramatic art. Against this background and contributing its own perceptive “reading” of Heart of Darkness to Conrad’s Bulgarian reception, on the eve of the vigorous celebration of his 160th anniversary in 2017, stage director Valeria Valcheva’s theatrical adaptation represents a remarkable debut rendition of Conrad’s fiction. The aim of this article is to explore how her idiosyncratic, creative, poetically recognizable approach lends a new form to Conrad’s recurrent relocation in modern and contemporary Bulgarian art. * The present article complements, expands and rethinks the authors’ latest study of the Bulgarian dramatization of Heart of Darkness, published in Bulgarian in Proglas journal, aiming to contribute to the discussions of Conrad’s reception in a wider academic space. See Margreta Grigorova and Petya Tsoneva, “ ‘Sartseto na mraka’—idei i resheniya na parvata balgarska postanovka” [Heart of Darkness on the Bulgarian Stage: Creative Perspectives and Techniques], Proglas 28, no. 1 (2019), pp. 35-46.

Ẹnu dùn ń rò’fọ́…: Theatre design, audience cognition and dramatic adaptation of Fagunwa’s texts

The stage performance of Langbodo, a play, which Nigerian dramatist Wale Ogunyemi adapted from Soyinka’s The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, which, in turn, is a translation of D. O. Fagunwa’s prose, Ògbójú Ọdẹ Nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀. 'The bold hunter in the daemon-infested forest', exposed the limitation of the text as a bearer of meaning in the theatrical adaptation context. The limitation is analysed in this work to justify the centrality of adaptation in bridging the text-design-audience semiotic gap. This study examines the technical challenges of theatre design in D. O. Fagunwa’s works resulting from their adaptation as drama. The Yoruba apothegmatic idiom, Ẹnu ‘dùn ń rò’fọ́, agada ọwọ́ ṣeé ṣán’ko (which means, literally, that ‘vegetable soup can be prepared orally if a mere hand suffices for a cutlass’), a traditional derision for the inadequacies of the text, and the Barthesian notion of intertextuality serve as a dual theoretical structure in this study. A combination of methodologies including participant observation and ethnographic approach suffice for the retrieval and analysis of performance materials, respectively. Therefore, the study contends that the process of stage adaptation in Wale Ogunyemi’s play, Langbodo, used the technical contributions of theatre design, as a catalyst for connecting Fagunwa’s ideas to the final audience.

A theatrical metanarrative of Cervantes’ Don Quixote: Dramaturgy, corporeality and play

In 2018, Efi Birba offered the Greek public a different theatrical version of the famous Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote. Exclusively profiting the storytelling dynamic of the body, she used playing as the main tool of the literary interpretation and meaningfulness. Her directorial choices removed her from the concept of theatrical adaptation and introduced her into the field of metanarration. In this article, I explore the dramaturgical rhetoric of the performance and the narrative devices being used in. Highlighting the concept of ‘play’ as the main technique, I point out the performative flow as a non-verbal field where the body may not just represent or tell a story, but actually be that story and shift it from one level to another. Questions about corporeal awareness, timing and spatiality are raised, as well as questions about the metanarrative potential of a corporeal performance to translate literary meanings and deepen into allegorical insights and symbolisms.

Memórias da violência no drama pós-catástrofe / Memories of Violence in Post-Catastrophe Drama

Resumo: A partir, principalmente, de Walter Benjamin e Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, esse trabalho analisa a insurgência na dramaturgia de Plínio Marcos de um embrião narrativo que, fazendo uso da memória traumática dos personagens e da crítica do poder como violência (Gewallt), encontrará sua realização plena em Querô, uma reportagem maldita, romance e drama da década de 1970. Na adaptação teatral do romance, a forma biográfica da matéria rememorada, princípio constitutivo da ação dramática, impôs mudanças na fábula que, negando a estrutura sintagmática da ação, passou a assumir uma configuração pós-catástrofe da cena, na qual o passado de violências do personagem é agenciado no presente da enunciação por uma “dramaturgia do retorno” e por um processo descontínuo e disjuntivo das lembranças. Na comparação entre drama e romance, compreende-se como a memória da educação sentimental de Querô coloniza a ação teatral, caracterizando uma dramaturgia da intrassubjetividade em que o personagem, testemunha de si mesmo, narra a própria Paixão.Palavras-chave: crítica da violência; drama pós-catástrofe; Plínio Marcos.Abstract: Grounded mainly on Walter Benjamin and Jean-Pierre Sarrazac’s work, this article analyzes the insurgency in Plinio Marcos’s dramaturgy of a narrative embryo that, using the traumatic memory of characters and the critique of power as violence (Gewallt), will find its full materialization in Querô, a Damned Report (“Querô, Uma reportagem maldita”), romance and drama on the 1970s. In the theatrical adaptation of the novel, the biographical form of the remembered matter, constitutive principle of dramatic action, imposed changes in the fable that, denying the syntagmatic structure of the action, began to assume a post-catastrophe configuration of the scene in which the violent past of the character is settled in the present of the enunciation by a “dramaturgy of return” and by a discontinuous and disjunctive process of remembering. Comparing the drama and the novel, one understands how the memory of Querô’s sentimental education colonizes the theatrical action, characterizing a dramaturgy of intra-subjectivity in which the character, witness of himself, narrates his own Passion.Keywords: criticism of violence; post-catastrophe drama; Plinio Marcos.

Tres ingenios al servicio de un canónigo: de La cortesana en la sierra… a L’infanta villana de Carlo Celano

Analysis of the seventeenth-century theatrical adaptation of the Neapolitan Carlo Celano, L’infanta villana, and the Spanish source identified, La cortesana en la sierra y fortunas de don Manrique de Lara, written in collaboration by Juan de Matos Fragoso (I act), Juan Bautista Diamante (II act) and Juan Vélez de Guevara (III act). It focuses in particular on two sequences - one serious and one comic - that allow to verify the degree of dramatic and rhetorical adaptation and the translatability of humor compared with the prototext.