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Film and Theatre: Some Revisionist Propositions BERNARD F. DUKORE For people like me who were born after 1927, when the generally acknowledged first "talkie," The Jazz Singer, opened, the sound film has been part of the world longer than they have and as much a part of their lives as the living theatre. Indeed, nowadays the living theatre is not a part ofmany people's lives. For them, plays are among the different types of productions they watch on television or see at the cinema. To millions, Shakespeare is what they read as homework and see, by courtesy of the BBC, on television. Performances of Gilbert and Sullivan also mean television to them. Usually, the public's perception of a nontelevised stage play, if the public perceives it at all, is through its movie version. Like it or not, "it" - drama experienced not in a theatre auditorium, but in one's home or in a motion picture house - is a fact of contemporary life. The various ideas and assertions in the preceding paragraph have several consequences. Unlike film theorists, too many of whom insist that film and theatre are basically different from each other, the public tends to regard a dramatic experience in different media, live or otherwise, in more or less similar terms. Typical of the public's conditioning is the question of a fifteen-year-old to his teacher (as the class prepared to attend aproduction at the National Theatre) whether Granville Barker's Madras House would be in color. 1 Today, audiences see a play, period, and the venue is immaterial. Essentially, I believe, the public view is accurate. In practice, moreover, distinctions between dramas written for the stage and for mechanically reproduced media (television, movies, and radio, the last of which is more popular in the U.K. than in the U.S.) are often evaporating. Harold Pinter wrote A Slight Ache for radio, Tea Party for television, and both have numerous scenes; subsequently, both works were also performed, unchanged or with insignificant change, on the stage. As I write these words, football player Joe Namath is appearing on stage in Sugar, a musical version of I72 BERNARD F. DUKORE the film Some Like It Hot. Today, the journey between theatre and mechanically reproduced media is on a two-way street. Furthermore, such dramatists as Pinter, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, and David Williamson, who are all younger than the sound film, write screenplays as well as stage plays. Despite differences between film and theatre, fundamental similarities ofdramatic writing remain: for instance, impersonated character and witnessed story. Does anyone really suggest that after writing for one dramatic medium, these authors immediately blot out their experiences when they write for another? Add to these factors concerning links between film and theatre the continuing influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose panoramic theatre stands, practically and theoretically, as an alternative to what, for convenience, we may call the Ibsenite theatre (actually, the Ibsen ofthe social problem plays in prose, such as Ghosts). As readers of this journal are aware, Brechtian epic theatre contains many scenes, sometimes extremely short, montagelike effects, and actions that span many places and years. In addition, in order to depict society, epic theatre may employ slides and sometimes film itself. This non-Ibsenite drama resembles Ibsenite drama in that it was composed to be performed by living actors before an audience. But its differences from Ibsenite drama resemble features of cinema and are characteristics often cited by film theorists when they argue that film and theatre, by which they tend to mean Ibsenite theatre, are entirely different from each other. True, a stage director cannot bring a real forest on stage, whereas a movie director can place actors in a real forest and photograph them in that locale. By means of slide projections or films, however, a stage director can provide, as Laurence Olivier does in his cinema version of Henry V, an aerial view of the London of Elizabeth I. Although he cannot have a close-up, a stage director can have what is more or less an equivalent by killing every light except a spot on an actor's face. Before going further, let me...

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