The politics of adapting Behn's Oroonoko.

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-JUN-03

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'Biyi Bandele's 1999 adaptation of Aphra Behn's novel, Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave (1688), commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, proved to be an interesting play theatrically. Bandele and the RSC director, Gregory Doran, were particularly successful in evoking the African culture of Coramantien through song, dance, and mythology. As reviewers of the production noted, Bandele's Oroonoko was visually stimulating and emotionally arresting. However, some critics noticed that the second half seemed lackluster in comparison with the African first half. Jane Edwards, for instance, remarked that "the originality of the African scenes only serves to show up the more predictable scenario in the West Indies"; Patrick Marmion wrote, "One moment it [the first half, set in Coramantien] is bright and breezy and the next it blazes with incandescent choreography before the descent into darkness. Perhaps the second half loses dramatic focus as the plot diversifies into melodrama, but its momentum is sustained by the memory of paradise lost"; and Susanah Clapp observed that "the second half of the play cracks under the weight of melodramatic events." (1) What these critics instinctively realized is that Bandele's writing in the first half is much different from what he has stolen in the second half from two earlier dramatic adaptations of Behn's novel, Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko: A Tragedy (1695) and John Hawkesworth's Oroonoko (1759). That the half in which Southerne's hand is most evident is viewed as less effective dramatically makes one wonder why Bandele stole from Southerne or Hawkesworth at all. Clearly, he is more attuned to contemporary audiences' tastes and has a keen instinct for dramatic pacing and ironically paired incidents in the two parts.

The borrowings that we find in Bandele's adaptation may suggest that the meaning of the term plagiarism as it was established for unacknowledged literary theft in the seventeenth century may no longer matter. Yet, though the use of literary material in the public domain is legally not a crime, the adaptation in this case needs to be redressed since it is certainly morally and ethically unfair to three authors, not only Behn but also the two playwrights who previously adapted her work and from which he takes a great deal of material. Of particular concern are his changes that affect the way in which contemporary audiences are led to view her work. Bandele's adaptation revises Behn to make her appear more interested in the native culture of her African slave prince than she really was, but this has the unfortunate effect of erasing the troubling similarities between Oroonoko and the white slave owners (and, in particular, the white female narrator) which the novel emphasizes. Her novel is not the easily assimilated tale about politically correct "good" and "bad" characters that Bandele's adaptation makes it appear to be, for it concerns characters whose actions cannot be characterized with such broad strokes. On the other hand, Southerne and Hawkesworth are not given the credit they deserve for the segments that are lifted from their work.

Part I: Adapting Behn's Novel

Part 1 of Bandele's adaptation, in which Oroonoko meets and marries Imoinda--along with the misfortunes that follow--is very loosely based on Behn's novel. As Doran has written in his preface to the published edition, other exercises in adapting the novel for the stage focused instead on Oronooko's life as a slave and ignore the first half of her fiction. Doran trumpets Bandele's achievement and implies that he has created the most faithful adaptation of the novel because the playwright "brings both halves of his hero's story together, from warrior and prince in the West African Kingdom of Coramantien to slave in Surinam. This is the first time, therefore, that Oroonoko's entire story has been presented on the stage." (2) But we may wonder whether Bandele has in fact left room for "Oroonoko's entire story" when we realize he has created five entirely new characters. In addition, other characters that existed in Behn's novel, such as Imoinda's father and the King of Coramantien, have been fleshed out, and he has split the nameless English captain of Behn's novel into two--captains Green and Stanmore. He has transformed Behn's Onahal, Imoinda's keeper in the king's otan, into the fiesty, independent, and anachronistically feminist Lady Onola, whose presence focuses the audience's attention in this first half of the play on the female characters rather than on the protagonist. But more importantly it is his creation of Chief Orombo as an unquestionably evil character that further simplifies Behn's complicated and fascinating text into a war between easily defined "good" and "evil" forces. One result is that Oroonoko himself becomes marginalized in this adaptation of Behn's work since he becomes overshadowed by Bandele's dominant theme: the evils of slavery.

Bandele might claim that his loose adaptation of the novel in part 1 (and of Southerne's and Hawkesworth's plays in part 2) is in accordance with earlier writers' ideas about originality. Originality, however, is a complex subject that we can begin to understand better if we turn to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of translation. Adaptations, though markedly different from translations because they use the language of the source text more freely, share a similarly debated relation to their sources. While dramatic adaptations in particular make an "original" text more accessible and are often created in response to substantial changes in theater architecture or in audience attitudes, writers of the period nevertheless perceived any adaptations as secondary to the original source. Hence even judged according to these earlier and rather more elastic standards, Bandele's adaptation still must be seen to derive its worth primarily through its relation to Behn's work.

If Bandele is an adaptor, he is also an imitator who has produced a loose and simplified text from the substance of Behn's novel. If in one sense his imitation (to borrow the words of Edward Young) "raises [the] Original's reputation, by showing [it] to be inimitable," (3) so also Behn's work needs to be placed among the originals--and "Originals are, and ought to be, great Favourites, for they are great Benefactors; they extend the Republic of Letters, and add a new province to its dominion: Imitators only give us a sort of Duplicates of what we had, possibly much better, before.... [A]n Imitator is a transplanter of Laurels, which sometimes die on removal, [and] always languish in a foreign soil" (10). John Dryden also valued a close correspondence between a primary text and its translation, though he favored a style in which the translator's changes aimed more to capture the spirit of the original. In his preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), he asserted the right of a translator, for example, to "alter" and add to the primary source in order to serve its author and thus "perpetuat[e] his memory." (4) The object was to provide access to the original author's works, and this has been done by Bandele for contemporary audiences. Unfortunately, his revision of Behn's characters and theme fails to preserve the original meaning of the text. There is a vast difference between making a text comprehensible to a later audience and creating a new text that panders to that audience's interests so that the very meaning of the source text is misrepresented. While the original portrays one character's grotesque fascination with a Europeanized black man, Bandele unacceptably turns Behn's Oroonoko into a twentieth-century antislavery tract.

Present-day adaptors and directors more often than not consider the primary text less sacrosanct than his or her audience, at least when members of that audience are familiar with the original. He or she may cut, add, and rewrite the source text to make it more appealing. Jacques Derrida, in his book Dissemination, provides support for this radical approach to adaptation and production in his discussion of the "supplement." He denies that any text can be primary or complete, for language itself is a "supplement" to memory. Supplements reverse the traditional idea that translations or adaptations are secondary to an "original" work:"[Writing] is that dangerous supplement that breaks into the very thing that would have liked to do without it yet lets itself at once be breached, roughed up, fulfilled, and replaced, completed by the very trace through which the present increases itself in the act of disappearing." (5) The implications of Derrida's theory are that supplements are necessary for a work's transmission--they "complete" an original work. Adaptations can also be considered necessary for keeping an original familiar to subsequent societies. If this is so, an adaptation is not secondary to the primary text; instead, it plays the important role of reinforcing and being reinforced by its source, for the public's memory of the source would be forever linked to a memory of the supplementary adaptation. In the case of 'Biyi Bandele's adaptation of Behn's Oroonoko, however, his supplement overwhelms and overwrites the original text and the memory of the original is wiped clean.

The most striking aspect of Bandele's adaptation--and the clearest example of how his work strays from even our contemporary ideas about "originality" and "imitation"--is his colorful presentation for RSC audiences in part 1 of the morally flawed but fascinatingly "other" culture of Coramantien, a striking contrast to the more serious second part set in Surinam. The Kabiyesi's court is displayed with aural and visual pomp in the first scene: the king's entrance is heralded by drumming, a mat being rolled out, large umbrellas being carried on, and several courtiers straining to catch a glimpse of the monarch sitting in the middle at the back of the stage. Elsewhere in this part, firepots illuminate the stage, drumming punctuates tall tales about the Kabiyesi's penis, actors sing African songs to underscore scenes of joy, and dances are neatly woven into the story. The result is an arresting narrative about African culture in its own right. Yet for an adaptation of Behn's work, in which Oroonoko's native land is only sketchily described as the setting for the developing love between her hero and Imoinda, the increased emphasis on the African atmosphere highlights the scant resemblance that Bandele's play bears to her novel. If we may recall Doran's applause for the playwright for presenting Oronooko's "entire story" (6) we will see that Behn's novel is focused instead on his time as slave in Surinam, as her subtitle, The Royal Slave, indicates. Of course, the entire novel must be set there because that is where the narrator meets Oroonoko, and the actual "entire story" is filtered through her vacillating viewpoint. Bandele has erased the narrator altogether through his introduction of Coramantien culture.

The narrator's inconstant support of Oroonoko underscores the novel's wavering racial politics, since she seems unable to resolve whether Oroonoko is a savage, despite his European education and, in her opinion, his "civilized" outlook. She clearly intends this to be the highest praise of his character: "He had nothing of Barbarity in his Nature, but in all points address'd himself, as if his Education had been in some European court." (7) Based upon her habit of fleeing when Oroonoko most needs her, however, she continues to associate violence with dark-skinned peoples, and even with Oroonoko himself. She repeatedly calls Oroonoko a "great man" yet when he is captured after the slave rebellion and cruelly punished, she is absent because she fears him: "We were possess'd with extream Fear, which no perswasions cou'd Dissipate, that he [Oroonoko] ... wou'd come down and Cut all our Throats. This apprehension made all the Females of us fly down the River, to be secur'd; and while we were away, they acted this Cruelty [torturing Oroonoko]" (111). This passage also illustrates the complex irony underpinning Behn's novel. Who is acting the most "savagely" here? Not the slaves, who only fight in self-defense during their escape, but the white plantation owners who promise mercy and then gratuitously torture Oroonoko. The layers of irony that Behn builds up in her novel prevent the reader from judging any of the characters as blameless: all demonstrate racist attitudes, and all have at one time been slave owners.

Such an ambiguous moral stand on violence and slavery is absent from Bandele's adaptation. Reviewers noted that Bandele's rendering is clearly a political statement against slavery, and regrettably, some of them mistook his politics for Behn's. Michael Billington in the Guardian wrote: "[T]his latest version by Biyi Bandele for the RSC is a highly creditable affair that preserves Behn's moral outrage against slavery while giving the story narrative drive." (8) Clearly, the adaptation has...

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