Prompt Corner
It's just a question of terms…
The Association of Performing Arts Collections (APAC) met up at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London recently, and
Jenny Fewster, Project Manager for AusStage, gave a talk about AusStage's work.
For those not familiar with what it does, AusStage [www.ausstage.edu.au] is the online resource for live performance in
Australia. It is driven by a consortium of universities, government agencies, industry organisations and collecting
institutions, and it receives about AUS $1m in funding every year. So it has a clearly "official" kind of remit, and a
degree of authority when it comes to what it says, which thus might be assumed to be what also, generally, goes.
And yet Jenny noted that AusStage was in some conflict with producing theatres in Australia as to what should
constitute (for example) a World Première. So the Annexe Theatre of Launceton, Tasmania, consider their 2010
production of Aeschylus' The Oresteia, adapted by David ER George, to be a World Première since it was the first ever
production of that adaptation. But for AusStage, the World Première of The Oresteia, whatever the version, was at the
Dionysia festival in 458 BCE.
Even without such vastly different scales of perception, this is not a trivial dispute. The prestige for any producing
house of doing a World Première is enormously important, and not only in terms of selling tickets. As in anything, it
counts some reputation points if you can declare that you were, in the whole world, the actual first.
Readers of Theatre Record might point out that there is also the question of whether a New play is necessarily
always actually "new", or of what makes a Revival, as opposed to a Return or a Transfer – and that the question of
what constitutes "adaptation" is quite often moot, as well. Is a translation always by definition an adaptation, say? Do
cuts and changes, re-orderings and character adjustments, and any number of directorial decisions such as might go
way beyond doing Peer Gynt merely "on the radio" amount to "adaptation", or might they leave you in fact with a wholly
new, because differently-formed piece..?
To be properly fair, writers and their agents and their publishers do check the limits of what they might morally assert
judiciously. And though there are for sure those who will rail against the influence of, say, German regietheater, those
looser, opened-up readings and reworked texts do not mean boundaries are blown so far that we might really not know
"whose play this is" any more. Adaptations and new versions "freely adapted from…" will generally thus declare
themselves as such – as often as not with cued-up drum rolls on the press release or programme.
So for some of these questions the answer is about a play's self-declaration, about "what it says on the tin". For others
though, Theatre Record, as the chronicle of (indeed) the UK theatre's record, has to settle the answers with itself
a few times every day sometimes. We might only ever hope to be consistent, but that is not only with the terms we use
and what we mean by them: it is also about our being consistent with what you will (we hope) understand by them.
THEATRE RECORD
was published from 1981-1990 as
London Theatre Record
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So let us offer one or two clarifications of where we start from, and see where we might end up…
telephone: 07777 697270
A World Première is quite simply the first production of a play that has never been produced before, ever, anywhere.
That's it. That's not to say that all new plays need be declared "World Premières" – many fringe venues, though proud
to offer a platform to new writing, do not insist on launching everything that's new with a career-establishing fanfare:
sometimes a new play is just "a new play", and needs to see where it might go… Conversely, where a company is
presenting something newly discovered, or which has been around and known about but never previously produced, or
is a first ever but posthumous production, then though the play may not be "new" at all, it merits the celebratory call to
attention, and the PR machine is right to stake its claims. For David ER George's adaptation of the Aeschylus, though,
there are different things to credit which first ought to be acknowledged.
Trustees:
Michael Billington
Ian Herbert
Dan Rebellato
Natasha Tripney
Whichever way you look at it, The Oresteia is not a new trilogy of plays. It has been performed before, and is well
known. Any new production might seek to "breathe new life" into it, but even if it's doing so by commissioning a new
translation, it can only still ever though howsoever literally "revive" it, short of declaring itself a different play "based on"
The Oresteia (but that's then a different play). So the George adaptation is a new version – so we have a World
Première of that adaptation, if that's a thing worth the fanfare. Theatre Record though would have this as a
"Revival in a new version by David ER George of the plays by Aeschylus". We would say the same now if we were
reporting at the time on the National Theatre's 1981 Tony Harrison verse version as well. So though the National might
be wanting to tack "World Première" onto the front of that – and that's fine: they were presenting the World Première of
a new version by Tony Harrison of the trilogy of plays by Aeschylus – the crucial information is still that the version is
the thing that's new, while the play itself is not: the "new" bit may come first, but the play is still "revived".
FRONT COVER:
Cherry Jones as Amanda Wingfield in
Tennessee Wiliams's The Glass Menagerie
at the Duke of York's (Johan Persson).
"New" does not always mean "brand new" though – or even, always, the newest thing a playwright has written. But it
does mean we're looking at the first production there's been that anyone could see. And since it's about the production,
and productions do go on tour, then throughout that tour it remains still "new"… until the tour gets long. And then we
scratch our heads.
THEATRE RECORD
A Revival is (as we've suggested) about bringing a play "to life" again, as if from scratch ("newly", perhaps…). So a
new production that's of a play that has been seen before, but in other productions that aren't this one, is a Revival. If
it's an old production that's being brought back out of mothballs then it's nice when that's done at the same venue as
did it originally because then "Return" makes every ounce of possible sense. We'd say that's a Return though now
even where it wasn't the original venue – point is that a Return brings a production back; it isn't that the production
actually has to "go" back somewhere specific. So casts might change, and the venue might change, and here and
there things will get tweaked. But if it's the same director and production team dusting their work off for us to see again,
it's a Return – and we'll cross-reference reviews of the same production's previous runs, where we can.
We'll do that with Transfers as well – though they might be a surprise, for though sometimes a Transfer may have
always been "part of the plan", usually a Transfer doesn't happen until a production's first run has proven successful.
So co-productions where a run at one producing house is followed by a run at the other aren't "Transfers" (and nor are
they "Touring" without some dates at receiving houses in between and around, either…). A Transfer, to be blunt, is
almost always about new money that's come in that's making something happen that's bigger, usually, than what first
got planned.
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And then there are productions that just run and run…
But thankfully, we don't too often have to work out how we're going to classify a production of something like Agatha
Christie's The Mousetrap…
Prompt Corner
87