January Meme: Favourite Adaptations

[selenak]

aurumcalendula asked me about those. With the caveat that I could list more and of course it also varies depending on the mood I am in, and with the qualification that I'm excluding straightforward from-stage-to-screen film versions of a single play (the phrasing is not accidental, you'll see why), here are some of my firm favourites:

1) West Side Story. It's probably a cliché but true: a masterpiece in its own right, but also as an adaptation of a) Romeo and Juliet, and b) a stage play into a musical. Now of course you can produce West Side Story itself in very different ways on stage and we now have two different film adaptations to compare and contrast. But just looking at the music, the script and the lyrics, it's so very, very well done. It's not just that the took a few basic ideas (i.e. lovers from feuding communities/families, tragic ending) and left it at that, but that nearly every scene, character and storybeat has its parallel. (And Arthur Laurents was justifiable proud of doing good old Shakespeare one better in coming up with a reason why the message about Julia/Maria's survival doesn't reach Romeo/Tony in time that is both connected to the overall themes and a character decision when in the original play it's just random bad luck (i.e. a plague outburst means Brother Laurence's messenger gets quaranteened). And the music, good lord, the music. What can be said that hasn't already been? Balcony Scene/Tonight: a perfect match in genius, and despite all the million ripoffs and parodies, feels as urgent and passionate as ever.

(cahn, yes, I considered both Don Carlos and Macbeth and Othello from Verdi, but while I am fond of all of them, they're not my faves the same way West Side Story is.)

2) A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman (as well as the use of William Shakespeare as a character, still probably my favourite fictional version of Will S.). These two plays who are themselves very meta, containing plays-within-plays, the magic of stagecraft versus real magic and so forth, work terrifically juxtaposed with the Sandman themes. Plus I've said it before, I'll say it again: Neil Gaiman is the only author to pull off a use of Prospero's final monologue, traditionally regarded as Shakespeare's personal goodbye, use it as his own farewell to his opus magnum and make that feel not pretentious but entirely apropriate.

3) Black Ships by Jo Graham (as an adaptation of The Aenaeid). Here there is tough competition in the form of Ursula Le Guin's novel Lavinia, but I still love Black Ships best. The novel takes the Sibyl who guides Aeneas to the Underworld in Virgil's epic and makes her the main character, one of the Trojan refugees, originally called Gull but bearing other names and identities throughout the story. Any adaptation of a Greek Trojan War related myth has to decide whether or not to use the Gods, i.e. do they exist or do the characters simply believe they do (not the same thing, especially since in the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid, there are direct divine interventions galore). They do exist in this version, but not in their best known GraecoRoman forms, which hail from different eras, as the novel offers a plausibly feeling historical context for its characters to live in. (Thus for example Wilusa/Troy has been destroyed repeatedly, once in the sacking that followed the largest Greek vs Trojans war, which resulted in the capture of Gull's mother along with many other Trojan women, and a few years later in the sacking that leads to Aeneas & Co. starting their quest.) At a guess, the trickiest challenge must have been figuring out how to present the Dido story, and not jiust because Carthage was founded centuries after the most probable date for the Trojan War, but the choice Jo Graham made - swapping Carthage for Egypt - really works not just for this novel but in the overall context of her other books because of the significance Egypt has in them.

4) The first season of Jessica Jones as an adaptation of Brian Bendis' Alias comics. It used the best known storyline of the comics - the Kilgrave arc - and managed both to keep what made it effective and disturbing and put a slightly different, unique spin on it. The casting is superb throughout, both for the characters based on their comics equivalent and for characters unique to the show (like Malcolm) or taken from different comics (like Jerry, or Trish and her mother - Jessica's estranged blonde bff in the Alias comics when we meet her is Carol Danvers, who could not have been used for obvious reasons). The use of colour - purple, most obviously, but also others - and the general, in lack of a better term for a tv series, cinematography, is superb while serving the story, and given this is an adaptation of graphic novels, this is not unimportant as an adaptation quality. Just taken as its own thing - i.e. just this season, not regarding the second and third one, or The Defenders - it is probably my choice for favourite comics-to-tv-format adaption, if we're talking about specific comics storylines, not adaptations of characters (because Lois & Clark the tv show is still my favourite version of Clark Kent/Superman and Lois Lane, but Lois & Clark had decades of Superman lore in multi authored interpretations to base this on, whereas Jessica Jones adapted graphic novels written by one single author who invented the character and the story they were adapting.

5.) Speaking of novel-to-tv-screen: always and forever, I, Claudius (the tv series), based on I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves. Not only does it have some of the best actors available in 1970s Great Britain, but the usual small tv budget - no mass scenes possible, no special effects, such as there were - even works to the series' advantage. You don't need to be shown gladiator games to understand how the various characters respond to them. Whatever Caligula did exactly to his sister and lover Drusilla is not shown, but it's still one of the most terrifying scenes on tv when Claudius knockes and Caligula opens that door, precisely because it's left to your imagination based solely on John Hurt's and Derek Jacobi's performances. The script is immensely quotable, and while some of that is in the original novel, it manages to improve on it by giving us relationships Graves only hinted at (the friendship between Claudius and Herod Agrippa, say) or didn't bother with (the friendship between Julia the Elder and Claudius' mother Antonia). Even the old age make-up (especially for Jacobi and Sian Philips as Livia) is better than much of what I saw in decades to come.

The Other Days

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[selenak]

And not only other historical shows (and novels), but also even some sci fi - the character of Cartagia in Babylon 5 is based not just on Caligula in general but specifically on the one played by John Hurt in this series. And Una McCormack wrote a great DS9 novel where a Cardassian Livia shows up.

Mind you, some of its influence also comes out in annoying ways in the fact that films like Gladiator and, I hear, even current day tv shows starring ancient Romans all feel obliged to have its sympathetic Roman characters plot for the return of the Republic, no matter how unlikely that is (seriously, Marcus Aurelius???? Of all the people?), and without the realisation the Graves version of Claudius has at the end that this just doesn't work and no, there won't be one achieved this way). But still - I am very, very glad that we got I, Claudius the tv show.