Modern British Drama on Screen

Cambridge University Press, 12/5/2013
EAN 9781107001015, ISBN10: 1107001013

Hardcover, 306 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm
Language: English

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.

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.