Abstract/Summary

When the field of Adaptation Studies was at an early stage, its focus was on the comparison between the source and the adapted work, between words and images where fidelity to the source text was often the main criteria. In recent decades, scholars have argued that an adaptation should be considered as an independent work, while taking the production contexts and medium specificity into consideration. However, Adaptation Studies has also developed from dismissing fidelity discourse to recognizing the concept of ‘creative infidelity’ (Andrew 2011), which acknowledges the origin of the adapted work in the source text, but also the freedom to create a new work with its own medium specific conventions and shaped by its cultural and production contexts and its creative team. What insight does the focus on the adaptation process provide when there is an intermedial interchange between a theatre source work and a film adaptation? To look closely at the media transformation in adapting theatre to film, British playwright Peter Shaffer becomes an interesting case, as he had different experiences in adapting his own stage plays to screenplays and collaborated with film directors. The increasing metatheatricality of Shaffer’s dramaturgy in his later plays is a particular challenge to film adaptation, as it foregrounds issues of liveness, including direct audience address and non-realist sets. In this thesis, I will investigate the process of adaptation in Shaffer’s works to see how the concept of creative infidelity can be useful in the analysis of the process of adaptation between a metatheatrical play and a film adaptation. Other terms such as cultural mediality, intermediality and metadaptation will be used as part of the analysis. My thesis explores both Shaffer’s early drawing-room plays from the 1950s and his later more stylised plays, and it compares these plays with his different levels of involvement in the theatre to film adaptation process, with a special focus on Equus (1974), directed by Sidney Lumet and Amadeus (1979), directed by Miloš Forman.