Introduction: All the screen’s a stage – the critical– theoretical background to the present study

This book adopts a crossover approach to the adaptation studies and intermediality studies debate, as it relates to the stage-screen relationship, and seeks to reconcile the two in a process of dialectical synthesis. Current theorising on the relationship between theatre and film engages with an older, recurrent debate about the interrelationship between the two performance media. Walter Benjamin in his influential 1935 essay ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’/ ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Reproducibility)’ made a strong case for con - sidering the respective media as incompatible with one another: ‘Any thorough study proves that there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is . . . like the film, founded in mechanical reproduction.’1