Apparently Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking has been made into a play.
Here is the opening scene, taken verbatim from the first page of the book.
Vanessa Redgrave (who coincidentally enough we saw earlier in Howard's End) stars as Joan Didion in this play that premiered March 29th, 2007, two years after the book's release.
Here is the opening scene, I'm not sure what to make of it on stage.
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Perhaps you should do a comparison in your blog of writing and its translation to not only the stage or film (which you've tried to do so far with your clip from Howard's End and this clip above from The Year of Magical Thinking) but also in music. Iron Maiden writes a lot of songs based on poems- "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (a homage to the Coleridge poem) and "The Trooper" (based on Lord Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade".) Emilie Autumn has done a song on The Lady of Shalott (another Tennyson poem), and Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights is, of course, based on the Emily Bronte novel of the same name.
ReplyDeleteHere's a list of songs based on books that may help give you some ideas if you'd like to pursue it further: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_that_retell_a_work_of_literature
My high school English teacher saw this production while it was on Broadway, and she said it was heartbreaking. The content of the play actually extended past the content of the book by including what ultimately happens with Quintana. I wish I saw the play, but (a) it was prohibitively expensive, and (b) I'm pretty sure I hadn't read the book when the production was staged. Nonetheless, it's interesting to think about the translation of a story from one medium to the next. More commonly, this occurs between books and film. You can definitely find more examples about how texts transfer to the silver screen than probably any other medium. I think an interesting point of discussion is whether the statement "The book was better than the movie" is valid or not. Can two media really be compared on the same scale? The answer is obviously yes since it's done all the time, but is it right and fair to do that? Something to consider if you want to take this further.
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