Live Performance ACTING AND ADAPTATION IN ALISON MACLEAN’S THE REHEARSAL
‘All the world’s a stage’ is one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines, even more relevant in social-media-mediated twenty-first century life than it was when he wrote it in 1599. Yet, if that maxim has been so often repeated as to seem hackneyed, New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton audaciously reclaimed its resonance with her debut novel, 2008’s The Rehearsal. Written, as her Master’s thesis, when she was just twenty-one, it’s about students at a drama school who are put through their paces, and contains ‘post-structuralist ideas’ that she sought to apply to the adolescent female experience. What resulted was a work in which chronology is jumbled; plotlines bleed into one another; and ‘performance’ and ‘reality’ are deliberately confused, stage directions and theatrical effects employed even when stories aren’t playing out in the theatre. Thus, all the world of The Rehearsal really is a stage – and it’s up to readers to interpret who is acting, and when.
It isn’t the most obvious text to bring to the screen. But, following the wild success of the author’s epic, Man Booker Prize–winning second novel, 2013’s The Luminaries, the appeal of a cinematic Catton adaptation only grew. The eventual film’s director, Alison Maclean, was, like Catton, born in Canada and raised in New Zealand. Having lived in New York since the success of her debut film, Crush (1992), Maclean had long been looking for a reason to return to New Zealand, and saw in The Rehearsal something ‘brazenly original and female’. Approaching the text, she and co-writer Emily Perkins had to find a ‘way in’ to the story: to turn narrative misdirection into linear form, find straight drama from a work of slanted
