Modern British Drama on Screen

by R. Barton Palmer (Editor), William Robert Bray (Editor)

Overview

This collection of essays offers the first comprehensive treatment of British and American films adapted from modern British plays. Offering insights into the mutually profitable relationship between the newest performance medium and the most ancient. With each chapter written by an expert in the field, Modern British Drama on Screen focuses on key playwrights of the period including George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Terence Rattigan, Noel Coward and John Osborne and the most significant British drama of the past century from Pygmalion to The Madness of George III. Most chapters are devoted to single plays and the transformations they underwent in the move from stage to screen. Ideally suited for classroom use, this book offers a semester's worth of introductory material for the study of theater and film in modern Britain, widely acknowledged as a world center of dramatic productions for both the stage and screen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107702424
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/05/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

R. Barton Palmer is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University, where he also directs the Film Studies program. He is the author, editor or general editor of more than 40 volumes on various literary and cinematic subjects, and a leading figure in the field of adaptation studies. Among other publications in this area, Palmer is the editor of two previous volumes for Cambridge University Press: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction on Screen (2007) and Twentieth-Century American Fiction on Screen (2007).
William Robert Bray is Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. He is the founding editor of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review and the founding director of the Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference. He is the author of Tennessee Williams and His Contemporaries (2008) and (with R. Barton Palmer) Hollywood's Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America (2009).

Table of Contents

Introduction R. Barton Palmer and William Robert Bray; 1. 'That filth from which the glamour is not even yet departed': adapting Journey's End Lawrence Napper; 2. Playful banter in Shaw's Pygmalion Douglas McFarland; 3. Knowing your place: David Lean's film adaptation of Noel Coward's This Happy Breed Neil Sinyard; 4. The Browning Version revisited Marcia Landy; 5. Screening for serious people a trivial comedy: Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest Tom Ryall; 6. The British New Wave begins: Richardson's Look Back in Anger Steve Nicholson; 7. The shift from stage to screen: space, performance, and language in The Knack … and How to Get It Christine Geraghty; 8. See-thru desire and the dream of gay marriage: Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane on stage and screen James Campbell; 9. Sleuth on screen: adapting masculinities Monika Pietrzak-Franger; 10. Educating Rita and the Pygmalion effect: gender, class, and adaptation anxiety Cynthia Lucia; 11. The madness of Susan Traherne: adapting Hare's Plenty Tiffany Gilbert; 12. 'A Tom Stoppard film': agency and adaptation in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Elizabeth Rivlin; 13. Rewriting history: Alan Bennett's collaboration with Nicholas Hytner on the adaptations of The Madness of George III and The History Boys Joseph H. O'Mealy; Filmography.