adaptation, stage, film, and TV

adaptation, stage, film, and TV. It was the development of the cinema that made adaptation a commonplace. The early pioneers of film trained their cameras on the stage, producing condensed versions or highlights of classic plays. The first film stars were the leading theatrical performers of the day. Shakespeare was a favourite. In 1899 Beerbohm Tree made a short film of King John, and in 1900 Sarah Bernhardt starred in a three-minute Hamlet.

Most of the acknowledged landmarks in the early cinema had literary origins. Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) was based on a stage melodrama performed in New York in 1896. D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) was adapted from The Clansman (1905), a stage play (originally a novel) by Thomas Dixon, in which Griffith had appeared as an actor in 1906. Griffith was credited with creating the language of cinema, but cited the 19th-cent. novel—in particular Dickens—as his major influence.

With the coming of sound, plays and novels could be reproduced with greater fidelity, but for the best film-makers were less vehicles of adaptation than points of departure. ‘What I do is to read a story once,’ commented Alfred Hitchcock, ‘and, if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema.’

William Wyler's 1939 version of Wuthering Heights was a polished piece of Hollywood film-making within the constraints of the two-hour feature, but was still criticized for omitting half of the Brontë original.

The advent of television, with the extra scope provided by weekly episodes, offered a more natural medium for faithful adaptation. From versions of The Forsyte Saga (1967) to such lavish productions as Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, and Vanity Fair in the 1990s, Britain's strong literary tradition produced in the classic serial an enduring commodity.

As the appeal of adaptation lay in the commercial value of exploiting an established property, it was perhaps inevitable that by the end of the 20th cent. the theatre should have turned back to the cinema. Long-running musicals were based on the films Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder) and Whistle Down the Wind (1961). A theatrical version of the classic Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949, adapted from Roy Horniman's novel Israel Rank, pub. 1907) toured Britain in 1998.