Jane Austen For Dummies (61 page)
Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
While Austen's novels are popular sources for screenplays, they're also difficult to adapt in their own way. One of Austen's great strengths as a novelist is her skill in narration, where her narrator is frequently a source of the irony for which she's famous. (For more on the narrator in Austen, see Chapters 1 and 14.)
But in a film, using a voiceover for a narrator can be awkward. While director Tony Richardson brilliantly used the camera to replace the narrator's voice in his 1963 film version of Henry Fielding's novel
Tom Jones,
the technique wouldn't work with Austen because
Tom Jones
is a broad comedy. So the hero turns to the camera and speaks directly to the audience, and it works. But Austen's novels are far too subtle in their use of irony, usually for comic effect, to sustain that type of narrative substitution. For example, the famous, ironic opening line (ironic because, as the novel shows, just the opposite is true: single women are looking for men of good fortune as husbands) of the novel
Pride and Prejudice,
which is delivered by the narrator â “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” â is usually given to a character as part of a normal dialogue, but directors have to adapt this line in different ways:
In the 1995 miniseries version of the novel, Elizabeth speaks the line in conversation with her sisters.
In the 1980 BBC miniseries, Elizabeth says it to her practical friend Charlotte Lucas.
The 2005
Pride and Prejudice
omitted the line altogether, though Austen uses the line to preview what the following pages show.
The 1999
Mansfield Park
adaptation resorted to actors facing the camera and speaking directly into it, causing reason in film viewers to believe the interpretation detracted from the film's Austen-ness.
Another difficulty is taking Austen's 300-plus pages of the novel and compressing them into a commercial film, which normally has a running time of less than two hours. Each of Austen's words and lines are deliberate, so deciding what to cut and/or compress is a tough choice.
Finally, Austen's talent for getting into the heads of her characters is hard to show on screen. A prime example of this is Elizabeth reading Darcy's long letter in
Pride and Prejudice
several times. She speaks to herself, debates the letter's meaning, examines her own behavior, and reassesses his behavior (PP 2:11). Capturing on stage the interior conversation that Elizabeth has with herself in the pages of the novel is difficult, leading to the awkward use of voice-overs or the heroine's talking out loud to herself.
While a staged production of a novel can't provide the gorgeous location sites that a film does, it can, when based on an Austen plot and characters, of course, offer the playgoer an entertaining evening at the theater.
Pride and Prejudice
is the only Austen novel adapted for the stage: five times (as far as I could find) as a play and twice as a musical â and more are undoubtedly coming.
Mary Medbury MacKaye (Mrs. Steele MacKaye) was the first to adapt the novel for the stage in 1906; it played in both NYC and London.
Next came Helen Jerome's
Pride and Prejudice
â
A Sentimental Comedy,
published and performed as a Broadway hit in 1935. This version has seen recent revivals in productions performed by university theater groups.
In 1936, A. A. Milne adapted the novel for the London stage under the title
Miss Elizabeth Bennet
. And no, Winnie the Pooh did
not
play Darcy.
Fifty years later, an American, Christina Calvit, also adapted the novel; it is available through the Internet as a reader's theatre production audio tape (1986), starring Kate Burton, Miriam Margoyles, and Steve Toland.
A newer version by James Maxwell and revised by Alan Stanford is part of the famous Guthrie Theater's National Tour repertoire for spring 2007. Internet browsing is likely to reveal more dramatic renderings for local theater groups.
In addition, the novel has been frequently adapted for radio drama, especially in the UK.
Most interesting are the musical versions of the novel. One was called
Pride and Prejudice
. But the second, called
First Impressions
after Austen's early rendition of the book, is better known. (For more details on Austen's early
First Impressions,
an epistolary novel or a novel told through letters, see Chapter 3.) Playwright and columnist Abe Burrows based
First Impressions
on Jerome's play, with music and lyrics by Robert Goldman, Glenn Paxton, and George Weiss. The musical had 92 performances between March 19 and May 30, 1959, at Broadway's Alvin Theater. Actress Polly Bergen played Elizabeth; Farley Granger, known for his romantic film roles in the 1940s and 1950s, was Darcy; Phyllis Newman, who went on to star in many Broadway plays, played Lydia; and the great character actress Hermione Gingold played Mrs. Bennet. The show's original cast recording has been remastered and is available on DVD over the Internet. It features such numbers as “Five Daughters” sung by Mrs. Bennet (Gingold), “This Really Isn't Me,” sung by Elizabeth (Polly Bergen), and one piece called “Polka/The Assembly Dance,” which must be the novel's Meryton Assembly â though Austen's characters never oom-pah-pah to a polka! What personally intrigued me was seeing that the show's musical director was Frederick Dvonch â he was music director for the first Broadway version of
The Sound of Music,
and the father of my delightful and lively childhood camp counselor Peggy!