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Copyright ProblemsDateline: 27th January, 2002I looked at copyright law in some detail in a feature in March 2000, but one problem I did not touch on has been exercising posters in some of the theatre newsgroups recently, that of making alterations to play in performance. I'm not talking here of major alterations, like changing the plot or something of that nature, but small things. For instance, I have sometimes found that an actor has problems with a line. It happens sometimes that an actor just cannot say a line the way it is written. It may be, of course, that the writing isn't that good, or it may be that the problem is personal to the actor. For example, in a production of Grease I did, the actor playing Eugene got the words "alumni" and "aluminum" (aluminium in Brit-speak!) confused. he would intend to say "alumni" but it came out "aluminum". Nothing we tried could break him of it - and he did try hard - so that eventually we simply changed the word "alumni" to "former students" (which actually makes more sense in a UK context: we simply don't use "alumni" in reference to schools). Now there are those who would condemn this, as we had changed the text written by the author and so had infringed his copyright. In strictly legal terms, of course, the critics are right. However, what were our alternatives? Should we have changed the casting? Because of the circumstances of the production, that wasn't possible. Should we have just gone ahead and hoped that he wouldn't get confused? Had he been a pro, then I probably would have done that, but he was a young (16 years) amateur actor and would have worried himself sick over it. So we changed it. In a school production of Educating Rita, I changed all the f***s and s***s because that sort of language is not acceptable on a school stage. Was I wrong to do that? The alternative was not to do the play at all, which meant that two young, very talented actors would not have had the opportunity to show their relatives, friends and peers the full extent of their talents. And Willy Russell would not have got his (admittedly not huge) fee for the performances! (By the way, the use of asterisks above is not because of any feelings of prudery on my part: some firewalls will not allow pages containing such "forbidden" words to be downloaded.) This may seem to be a bit arcane, too esoteric a problem, but it is, in fact, quite important. Copyright law protects a work in its entirety. These changes were small, and done for very good reasons, but when does a change cease to be small? Where is the borderline between a minor alteration and changing the nature of the work? Cutting (or, worse, adding) a scene is obviously major, but what about cutting a speech? We cut Shakespeare a lot. I wonder how many people have seen, for example, Hamlet in its entirety? Later this year we'll see Edward Hall's Rose Rage at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. He's taken Henry VI parts I, II and III and condensed them down to two parts. Shakespeare's plays, of course, are well out of copyright, so we can do what we will with them. We accept that. If he were alive today, would he object to this cutting? Would he, as some modern playwrights have, attempt to close down a production of one of his plays which had been so cut? Would he be right to do so? If someone takes my version of the Mystery Plays and replaces the Geordie shepherds with Scousers or Cockneys, should I take exception? Theatre is a collaborative art. Writing the play is just the beginning: it takes the diverse skills of a large number of different people - director, actors, designer, lighting designer, soundscape designer, carpenters, painters, costume and props makers, and so on - to get it from the page onto the stage. Any director, actor or techie will tell you that getting a play into performance requires compromise at some stage: should the writer be the only one whose work is immutable? I don't know - even though I am a writer myself - but I would welcome your thoughts. Why not express them in our Forum? Articles Indices:
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