Hannah Simpson (Edinburgh Univeristy)
“Homage, Hero Worship and Homoerotics: Theorising Adaptation Relationships through Harold Pinter and James Joyce’s ‘Exiles’”
Discutante : Pascale Sardin
In 1971, Harold Pinter directed a hit production of James Joyce’s beleaguered play Exiles (1918). Pinter’s decision to stage this previously unpopular playtext aligns with his oft-reiterated admiration for Joyce – “Joyce has always been my boy, from the word go”, “You know, I read Ulysses every night before I go to bed” – which sometimes shades into an intensely personal intimacy: “I certainly had a wonderful relationship with James Joyce. Unfortunately it was never embodied, for obvious reasons. […] I would have loved him to have seen my production of Exiles”. Exiles itself is a play concerned with questions of intimacy (and over-intimacy), jealousy, inheritance, and homoerotic hero worship. If much scholarly attention is turned on adaptations which subvert or reorient the original text, how do we think about those adaptations which pay unstinting homage to the original, and which seem more like an adapter’s urgent attempt to get ‘closer’ to a much-admired hero? And how does such an approach influence the shape and success of the adaptation itself? This paper uses Pinter’s adaptation of Exiles to theorise a new lens on the intensely productive, sometimes unsettling intimacy of the ‘hero-worship adaptation’.
Dr Hannah Simpson is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness: Pain in Postwar Francophone Drama (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). She works primarily on the representation of the human body on stage and politicised representations of the body more generally, and her current project explores the forgotten stage plays of modernist novelists.