CULTURE SHOCK:A playwright has gone to court to defend his 'moral rights' over an adaptation of The Playboy of the Western World, but is it possible to decide who owns a piece of theatre?
WHEN OSCAR WILDE wowed American customs officials – and, more importantly, expectant journalists – in January 1882 by telling them he had nothing to declare but his genius, the line was not off the cuff. Nor was it merely a brilliant act of self-promotion. It was also an act of promotion, full stop.
Wilde (not yet the famous playwright) had been brought to the US as an advertisement. The American representative of the D'Oyly Carte opera company had suggested a tour for Wilde in order to generate publicity for the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience. The character of Bunthorne the Fleshy Poet in Patience– a caricature of the fashionable aesthetes – was generally taken to be based on Wilde.
This episode may seem to be a million miles away from the court case in Dublin this week in which the playwright and director Bisi Adigun is suing the Abbey Theatre, the director Jimmy Fay and the writer Roddy Doyle for alleged breach of copyright and violation of his moral rights.
The action concerns what Adigun alleges to be an unauthorised staging by the Abbey in 2008 of a version of The Playboy of the Western Worldthat he wrote with Doyle.
What could possibly connect this rather sad affair to Wilde's brilliant posturing? The answer is actually a question: who owns a piece of theatre? The promotion of Patiencethrough Wilde's visit was part of a strategy by D'Oyly Carte to establish an authentic Gilbert and Sullivan brand in the US and overcome the problem of pirate productions. There were no reciprocal copyright arrangements between the UK and the US, meaning that, in the words of one theatre historian, a show was the "unquestioned property of anyone in America who chose to appropriate it". HMS Pinafore, for example, was first produced in Boston and then staged by dozens of companies in almost every major US city before the "official" version arrived from London.
The ideas that Bisi Adigun is appealing to – copyright and the “moral rights” of the author – are both relatively new and rather fragile. There is an inherent tension between the nature of theatre – open, collaborative, fluid – on the one hand and the closed, precise notion of legal ownership on the other.
Without getting into the rights and wrongs of the case, it is a fair guess that such conflicts can never be fully resolved, because theatre is too unstable a form to be entirely controlled and owned by anyone.
As it happens, the Doyle/ Adigun version of the Playboyis itself a prime example. The idea of the "moral rights" of the author is that the original creator of a work has an aesthetic as well as a legal ownership of that work. In the case of a play, the implication is that it should not be performed in a way that traduces or undermines the author's fundamental intentions.
Samuel Beckett, for example, invoked his "moral rights" to prevent all-female productions of Waiting for Godot. The issue wasn't the economic one of whether he would get royalties but the aesthetic one of whether he could insist that violence not be done to his original vision of the work.
But where does the "moral right" to The Playboy of the Western Worldlie? Not, surely, with Bisi Adigun, Roddy Doyle or the Abbey. There's a gentleman called JM Synge in the picture somewhere. The Adigun/Doyle version takes its entire plot and structure – and even its title – from Synge's original. Synge's work is long out of copyright, but where are his "moral rights" as author when his famous closing line – Pegeen Mike's "My grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the only playboy of the western world" – becomes, in the Adigun/Doyle version, "Fuck!"?
Even the very clever idea of transposing the Playboyfrom the west of Ireland in the early 20th century to boom-time Dublin, with Christy as a Nigerian immigrant, was not unprecedented. Playwrights have been using Synge for their own purposes for a long time. Riders to the Seawas adapted by Bertolt Brecht in 1937 as Senora Carrar's Rifles, which transposes the action to civil war Spain. Mustapha Matura's 1950 transposition of the Playboyto Trinidad, as The Playboy of the West Indies, established a template of appropriation by writers from former colonies.
The Adigun/Doyle version, which Adigun described as a “perfect synergy of creativity rooted in two distinct cultures”, was consistent with a longer tradition of using Synge to connect different worlds.
The fact is that plays are damn hard things to pin down. Even Beckett, whose struggle to control his work generated so many conflicts with those who had their own notions of how to do it, is a case in point. His ideas about his texts changed not just between his two languages – English and French – but between productions.
To take a tiny example, when I first saw Krapp's Last Tape, almost 30 years ago, in Dublin, in a production by Beckett himself, Rick Cluchey referred to his neighbour as being from Kerry. In the text, and the recent Gate production, she's from Connacht. Why? Because Cluchey, an American, had trouble getting his tongue around "Connacht". Or, to take a more striking example, the stark Not Ihas one character, the mouth. Or perhaps two, with a silent observer added. Beckett could never make up his mind.
The point is not that copyright and the moral rights of authors don’t matter. They do. But they are slippery concepts in the context of the way theatre works. They imagine as fixed and legally definable something that is inherently fluid and contradictory. That innate uncertainty may be a nightmare for courts of law, but it is the glory of theatre itself.