By Filmink Staff
This December, two iconic movies, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year With 13 Moons and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, are being reimagined for the stage by graduating students for this year’s Directors’ and Designers’ Productions at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA).
“It is interesting to work with existing content that addresses all of the issues in the screenplay,” said Christopher Baldwin, a third year BFA (Design) student, who is working on In a Year With 13 Moons. “I had to be careful not to look at the movie too much. Because the director Sarah Hadley and I love the movie, we got to a point where we had to put it aside and decide what we were actually looking for within the screenplay. Ultimately, it doesn’t work if you try to recreate a movie on stage.”
Matthew Taylor, an MFA (Directing) student who is directing the adaptation of Bergman’s Persona, said: ‘Bringing it from the cinema to stage presents a challenge in that the stage requires a greater degree of coherence, especially for 40-minute pieces, which is the length we are working to. The film format allows for more imaginative and surrealist imagery.’
MFA (Directing) student Sarah Hadley, who is directing the stage adaptation of In a Year With 13 Moons, said: “Our stage space tends to de-personalise what is a very personal story in the film; the stage is a public space that doesn’t belong to anybody and yet these really personal, intimate stories are happening on them. We’re trying to stage the tension that’s in the film by using the set design and elements of the story that I’ve adapted and picked out.”
Taylor continued, “I adapted the Persona screenplay to suit my own needs. The screenplay and the film are very ambiguous and have many different meanings. They’re very surreal and existential. I had to find a way to make that digestible on stage.”
“It’s about looking at what’s happening thematically and at what the director and writer initially intended,” said Hadley. “I’ve done a lot of research on Fassbinder, his life and other projects. It really helped cement what parts of the story to pull out, because it would have been impossible to use all locations and moments in a stage context. We’re also translating what the camera is capturing in the film in terms of the form and trying to realise that in a stage space , while at the same time conveying the same effect to the audience.
“I also had to look at what I really loved about the characters in the story and make sure that it all came out. From a writer’s or director’s point of view, I believe it’s a good place to start to successfully adapt a screenplay in a new environment.”
The use of technology is also proving vital in helping bring the film to the stage.
“We’re going to stage Persona as a live cinema experience. As it’s a film, we wanted to make it as filmic as possible and create a live cinema show, which has a live-feed camera as well as pre-recorded content. This approach sets up two separate worlds: the screen world where the character Elisabeth resides and lives, and the stage world where Alma lives. Slowly, by the end, everything is reversed so that the person who was originally filmed is now mostly only seen on stage and the person who was on stage is now filmed,’ said Taylor.
Hadley added, “Our set features embedded screens, which will play live and pre-recorded video content. The aim is to create multiple images within the stage space, which in a way is what Fassbinder achieved through camera work in his film.”
NIDA Directors’ and Designers’ Productions 2017 is a collection of short productions presented by NIDA’s Master of Fine Arts (Directing) and Bachelor of Fine Arts (Design for Performance) students running concurrently at NIDA Theatres, Kensington, from 6 to 9 December. Tickets released 20 November. For more information shoot over to the NIDA site.
