Introduction

Teaching film adaptation creates pedagogical opportunities to bring together creative and critical skills in the service of a humanizing practice. The adaptation workshop discussed in this paper demonstrates the capacity for creativity and values-based education in teaching adaptation, whilst simultaneously developing skills across disciplines in the academy. The assignment prompt was to adapt a canonical text, in this case, Can Themba’s “The Suit” (1963), into a contemporary setting. “The Suit” holds specific considerations relating to the cultural status of the text in South Africa which allow for an active exploration of theories and contexts extending across disciplinary boundaries. Students reinterpreted the text in terms of their own contexts, bringing in fresh and relevant themes of generational bullying, homophobia, and technological surveillance, that speak to the themes of coercion, psychological control, and gender-based violence (GBV) in the original, classic text. The study of adaptation is highly relevant to film and media industries in which adaptation is a ubiquitous and persistently popular form; however, the workshop aimed to do more and move beyond technical skills into the realm of critical conscientization and emancipatory pedagogy, a development of the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire.

Theoretical Background

The teaching of film adaptation has historically resided in traditional university contexts within English Literature, Film Studies, and Cultural Studies Departments, whilst screenwriting as a skill has been prioritized in Higher Education environments that focus vocationally on production and preparing students for industry. These differing disciplinary traditions mean that the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has been somewhat intermittently applied to the teaching of adaptation. The adaptation of texts within the university classroom has elements that touch on many approaches within the SoTL, including student-centered learning (Weimar; Cook-Sather), active learning (Biggs), and constructivist learning (Fosnot and Perry; Weimar). However, McKinnon rightly says that the SoTL has been less commonly referenced in discussions of pedagogy within the discipline of Adaptation Studies (“The Pedagogy” 54).1 Studies with a greater consideration of SoTL have emerged primarily from vocation-based schools focusing on film production and from those teaching language courses (see Henderson; Sahin and Raw), where the focus is as much on practice as theory. Although methods of teaching adaptation may be similar (see Berger; Hudelet), there are many benefits that come from a greater consideration of SoTL within the learning design, including the conscious design of learning engagements that bring together learners to collaborate in meaning-making that is directly connected to learning outcomes – not as a boundaryless activity but, in the manner of Vygotsky, as a scaffolded learning experience (Fosnot and Perry 22; Sahin and Raw 71).

While the use of SoTL in film education has many benefits and also some challenges (see Henderson; Sava), relating it particularly to adaption has additional benefits. The activity of adapting, with its combination of the new and old, supports the realization of knowledge that is “individually and idiosyncratically constructed or discovered” (Liu and Matthews 387), with the learner able to bring their “existing conceptual framework” (McKinnon “The Pedagogy” 55) and capitalize on existing knowledge and experiences (Lewis and Williams 9) as in the active and experiential model of constructivist learning. If learning is itself “a holistic process of adaptation to the world” (Kolb and Kolb 194), adaptation’s emphasis on engaging and remaking is itself applicable beyond the realms of film production departments.

The workshop under discussion here was organized primarily in relation to the concept of emancipatory pedagogy, which aims at “humanization, critical conscientization, and a problem-posing education system” (Nouri and Sajjadi 76). Emancipatory pedagogy is a refinement of the critical pedagogy set out by Paulo Freire (77). As such it has a somewhat different emphasis than constructivist pedagogy, despite having many similar elements in being a problem-posing, student-centered, and collaboratively conducted form of learning. Critical and emancipatory pedagogy is primarily focused on democratic and transformative principles (Bercaw and Stooksberry 2) with the aim of “changing the social order and making positive social and political reforms” (Nouri and Sajjadi 77). The context of South Africa and the thematic and historical resonance of the adapted text speak well to this aim, which will be further explored in the sections following.

As with student-centered learning, an approach based on emancipatory pedagogy favors student participation and engagement, although as the lecturer I maintained certain boundaries and cooperative elements. As Dovey notes, courses still need design and preparation (32) and, in this case, students required more lecturer support to reach their goals.

Design and Learning Outcomes

The group profile helped to form the overall learning design and outcomes in key ways. The class consisted of fifteen BA Film Honors students from a private Higher Education institution, AFDA Durban, based in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. AFDA aims to prepare students for entry into the creative industries. As part of their undergraduate studies, students acquire creative, technical, and commercial expertise. This includes many hours of screenwriting classes (six hours a week by third year), meaning that students should have acquired screenwriting fundamentals prior to this workshop.

The aim of the workshop was, in part, to encourage a greater appreciation and awareness of the role of adaptation in screenwriting: something which, as will be seen, I could not take for granted despite the students’ extensive prior training. It also aimed to explore adaptation as “a conceptual and practical model for developing critical and creative skills simultaneously” (McKinnon, “Creative Copying?” 54). The workshop was three hours long, with a 30-minute break, and took place partly online using Microsoft Teams during COVID in 2021. In accordance with university ethical practices, students signed consent forms to allow their data to be anonymously used. The forms allowed them to opt-out if they wished. I asked students to read Themba’s short story, “The Suit” (1963), and an article by Diane Lake, “Writing the adaptation: Teaching an upper division college course for the screenwriter” (85-94), in advance of the class. Writing from her personal experience as a Hollywood screenwriter, Lake emphasizes how essential it is for aspiring screenwriters to be capable adaptors.

My prior experiences with postgraduate students at this university suggested that students could be relied upon to have read the short story prior to the class, allowing for quicker and more meaningful progress during the engagement. The class represented a range of ethnicities (Black African, white, and Indian) typical of KwaZulu-Natal, as well as gender diversity. However, all the group were of similar age in their early 20s. As will be shown in the findings, students drew upon their own backgrounds and life experience to inform their creative approaches to the adaptation.

I began the workshop with an introduction to film adaptation, in which definitions and key concepts, such as faithful or transgressive adaptation, were discussed. This was followed by a discussion of the background of Themba and context of his short story, and why it is considered important in South African literature – this was to ensure the students’ understanding of the work they were being asked to adapt. The group was given a background on historical factors within the text, such as its setting of Sophiatown in the early 1950s. Sophiatown is a suburb of Johannesburg which was redesignated as white under the Group Areas Act of 1950 and similar apartheid legislation. The traumatic, forced resettlement of non-white families began in 1955. Famously a Black cultural hub, the suburb is presented with a degree of nostalgia in the text. Also indicative of the time is the role of the “dompas” in the narrative (an identity document Black people were required to carry, which restricted their movements within the country) and the impact of the South African pass laws. In addition to a discussion of the context, literary tropes such as characterization, tone, plot, narrative voice, and the themes explored in this work of short fiction, which include gender relationships, jealousy, pride, and humiliation, were discussed.

For the adaptation screenwriting task, I divided the students into three small groups. Two of these groups were online. The other group were the students who had chosen to come onto campus. Each group consisted of five students, and students were grouped randomly. The students’ task as given was: “Your challenge is to adapt “The Suit” into a contemporary setting. What would have to change? What would stay the same? How can you find parallels for the themes/characters/plot/setting in “The Suit” that are meaningful for today?” My aim in setting this brief was to force an individuality of response and thereby a deeper and more personal engagement with the text, as there are elements in the text such as the “dompas” which cannot be straightforwardly transposed into a contemporary setting. I also asked the students to write the first few pages of screenplay – in other words, to consider how their film would begin. At the end of the group work there was a combined feedback session. The workshop finished with the lecturer showing the group some of the other adaptations and reworkings of “The Suit.”

Context and Findings

Can Themba’s short story is a canonical text in South Africa. Its canonicity is in many ways indicated by the number of adaptations it has inspired, including “traditional” adaptations, such as director Jarryd Coetsee’s 2016 short film, a variety of literary reworkings and post-ludes, such as Siphiwo Mahala’s “The Suit Continued” (2011), Makhosazana Xaba’s “Behind “The Suit”’ (2013),2 and even a musical, The Suit – Concer-tized (Mutloatse, 2023).

Themba’s story is set in Sophiatown in the 1950s, prior to the destruction and renaming of this suburb of Johannesburg. Philemon, a highly intelligent and egotistical man, discovers his wife, Matilda, in bed with another man. The man flees, leaving behind only his suit. Priding himself on his non-violence toward women, Philemon sets out instead on a course of psychological cruelty where he forces his wife to treat the suit as if it were a guest in their house. His highly conventional wife becomes increasingly desperate as the humiliation begins to extend beyond their private relationship into the public space. Eventually, Philemon returns to find she has committed suicide, and is overcome with regret. Themba’s story contains elements of nostalgia for the lost Sophiatown amid striking characterization and highly sophisticated use of language. The key theme of gender-based violence remains relevant in a South African society with sky-high levels of GBV (Malatjie and Mamokhere 1062-3; Rapanyane 213). However, Themba’s treatment of it as psychological cruelty is subtle and unusual. In addition to its literary qualities, the text allows for a discussion of apartheid and its concurrent undermining of Philemon’s Black masculine virility that is subtly suggested within the narrative, all of which serves to sustain the text’s popularity as a set text within the South African academy. 

When a so-called canonical text is adapted, it brings with it a variety of additional considerations that are not brought into play by an original screenplay or with the adaptation of a generally unknown text. The original is assumed to have value (MacCabe 8) – in this case, “The Suit” has cultural, political and historical, as well as literary value, which suggests why the one mainstream film adaptation of this text (Coetsee, 2016) takes a very traditional approach to the adaptation, attempting to recreate the short fiction’s era, context, plot and characters. As per Bourdieu’s comments on the value of “a known, recognized name, a capital of consecration implying a power to consecrate objects […] and therefore to give value” (Bourdieu and Nice 262), cultural value and recognizability are part of a film adaptation’s commercial value. They have definite practical implications: adaptors strive to preserve this perception of value as it is linked to the ability to sell an adaptation both in pre- and post-production. Asking students to update the text investigates “the extent to which these now-classic texts still can or should serve to shock, provoke, and break conventions” (McKinnon, “Creative Copying” 59). It requires a dialogue between students’ current knowledge and experiences and those referred to in the text; the “defamiliarization” experienced by the students in relation to a classic text is then contextualized into their own familiar context (Hudelet 43).

Although students were Honors film students, I found they were not as familiar with adaptation as either concept or practice as had been anticipated. More time had to be spent on discussing what an adaptation is than was expected. Whilst students were, with guidance, able to name adaptations, a concept of adaptation had to be developed, initially via a broader discussion of forms of adaptation. Students appeared to be more familiar with adaptations such as video games or graphic novels, and the discussion thus redirected and narrowed their focus down to film adaptation. However, as will be seen, this apparent lack of familiarity with conventional film adaptation appeared to assist in disinhibiting the students’ responses to the brief. During the workshop, we also discussed other transgressive or contemporized adaptations, such as Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Heckerling’s Clueless (1995),and Cherot’s G (2002), a contemporized version of The Great Gatsby, giving the students further insight into the possibilities of a less faithful adaptation.

Whilst there are a range of possibilities in terms of defining adaptation, for the purpose of this session the focus was on written text-to-film adaptations. The ability to adapt texts into film scripts is a key selling point when approaching studios and producers. Students of film are, in general, not aware that they will be asked to do screenwriting adaptations but expect to create their own original screenplays. Lake notes that although aspirant screenwriters imagine placing their own original work, they are far more likely to be asked to work on an adaptation, as studios feel that the risks are lower (85). Lake writes that,

[…] if writers have experience writing only original material, they will be at an extreme disadvantage in the real world of screenwriting. If you don’t know how to take material from another source and adapt it into a screenplay, you can lose your shot at breaking into the business. (86)

Adaptations are a persistently popular and recognized genre, historically winning a high proportion of the Best Picture Academy Awards – a commonly cited figure is that around 50% of Hollywood films are based on written texts (Kuhn and Westwell 5). While the percentage of original content might be different in South Africa, many of the students anticipate working internationally. In short, I found that the students did not have an intrinsic knowledge of or concept of film adaptation or of its importance to the industry they were intending to enter. Ideas of other kinds of adaptation (such as video games) resonated more with them. The workshop hence served to raise their awareness of this aspect of film production.

The outcome of the screenwriting exercise varied widely in its success across the groups. The first group adopted the most radical approach to adapting, reducing the story to its fundamentals and building up a new concept based around the idea of a suit and the betrayal theme. In the spirit of respecting the students’ voices and the nuances of their expression, I have transcribed their feedback verbatim:

It would be set in contemporary Durban, South Africa, and instead of focusing on a married couple it would focus on a father and son. And what we would do is, like, the father is a principal at a school and his son is the model student, and also head boy […] he raised his son to be disciplined and set a high bar for him which the son has always been made to try and reach that high standard by working hard. So what happens is, the inciting incident, his son takes his dad’s car without permission and crashes it after sneaking out to a party. The father finds out and feels betrayed; the son is fine, he doesn’t get hurt or anything, but feeling betrayed the father makes the son wear a suit, because, it’s what he’d wear if he died and what he’d be buried in. He doesn’t allow his son to clean it, and if he does clean it, he will notice and reprimand his son, so the suit slowly begins to deteriorate. (Vooght “Film Adaptation Workshop”)

Interestingly, Group One brought in a theme of generational abuse: “The reason for this is [the father’s] own father made him wear it and, eventually, he was allowed to take it off, and he raised his son disciplined, so he would never have to wear it, but this act made him bring out the suit” (Vooght “Film Adaptation Workshop”).

Other elements of their conception echo Themba’s text, where Matilda joins a social club, trying to escape her home environment:

Because he’s, like, the school principal he even makes his son wear it at school, and his son attempts to join the drama club, so he can wear costumes and, like, wear character costumes and be someone else for a brief time. You know, become a character. It’s his form of escapism. Eventually the father finds out and seeing his son enjoying it and what he’s trying to use it to [do], to escape from reality, he forbids him from participating any further. (Vooght “Film Adaptation Workshop”)

As with Themba’s story, the narrative ends tragically:

Eventually the son takes his own life, and the father then realized how far he had taken it and damage it had on his son’s psyche. And, feeling remorse, the father cleans the suit for his son to be buried in, almost like an apology. So in terms of the themes that are carried over, there’s no forgiveness. You know, like, the father doesn’t forgive his son and punishes him, there’s that feeling of betrayal, the father feels betrayed that his son would rebel against him, in the same way Philemon felt betrayed by Matilda’s affair, and there’s also a lack of understanding of how you are affecting one’s mental health, like Philemon didn’t realize how emotionally and mentally damaging his act was to Matilda, and likewise the father, doesn’t understand his son’s psyche yet. (Vooght “Film Adaptation Workshop”)

Group One’s highly creative and imaginatively free approach had begun with them considering a number of ideas around the core concept of a suit – at one point, even the idea of a gimp suit was discussed! They ran with the given task with no real need of intervention from me. The start of the film was determined not by the short story but by the needs of their own vision:

Regarding how to open the film we can establish, well, we need to establish that the father’s the principal, and the son is obedient and disciplined and a model student. So I figured we would open up during a school assembly with the principal announcing that his son is head boy and showing like how much pride he has in his son and the high standard that he has set his son, the high bar that he has raised for his son, that he has to work hard to like achieve, so then when the betrayal does eventually happen later on, it would like all come crashing down, show[ing] how intense this betrayal is. (Vooght “Film Adaptation Workshop”)

Regarding the updating to a contemporary setting, the group explained:

We had to come up with this because we really felt like the patriarchal, the gender roles and everything between a father and wife as seen in the setting of “The Suit” originally – it wouldn’t translate to a contemporary setting… that’s why we had to change it to a father and son relationship – well, parent and child. (Vooght “Film Adaptation Workshop”)

Interestingly, this group was largely made up of white young males, and the outcome is suggestive of this, whereas Group Two had a larger proportion of females and Black and Indian participants. This appeared to inform their group’s response in which they determined that there could be parallels in a marriage situation amongst the Indian community. Group Two, who were also online, required some of my support to get going but came up with a good strategy with a bit of gentle prompting:

We decided to bring it to Durban, South Africa, and it’s basically a lower or a middle-class Indian household in Durban. The opening shot that we had in mind, or how we wanted to start the film, was basically with Matilda in bed, and she’s sleeping quite peacefully, which is also quite true to the original and the husband is sort of in the background and maybe he drops off a cup of tea for her and he stops to catch himself in the mirror… because he’s obviously quite, you know, full of himself so we thought it would be nice to start the film that way because it sort of foreshadows what happens in the end where Matilda is dead, and also I guess just how oblivious she is in the beginning as to how things are going to change so drastically in her life. (Vooght “Film Adaptation Workshop”)

Group Two drew on the start of the short story, where Philemon brings his wife a cup of tea in bed, and stops to admire his appearance in the mirror whilst congratulating himself on being a good partner; the story ends with him finding Matilda dead in the same bed. The group drew on this visual parallel as a typical “foreshadowing” device for the knowing viewer. The group was asked why they thought the setting would work well, culturally speaking: “The reason why … is that the idea of patriarchy is still quite intense, you know, the couples who do believe in like gender roles, so that’s the reason why we do believe that being an Indian household would best represent that idea” (Vooght “Film Adaptation Workshop”).

At one point, the group had a heated debate about whether a traditional Indian man would ever bring a cup of tea to his wife in bed, insisting that this was impossible – their final version had him bringing her a rose. The radical nature of Philemon’s care for his wife met with resistance from the group, notwithstanding that it formed part of the characterization of Philemon’s unconventional (for his time and culture) masculinity within the story itself. Instead, they chose what they thought would be believable for an audience – an acknowledgement of his wife that remains resolutely gendered, as giving flowers is a traditional male acknowledgement of women. Flowers represent something pretty and relatively insubstantial, whereas feeding Matilda would have represented something that is more clearly within the domain of “women’s work.” In this respect, the group was perhaps less bold than Themba. However, as Grossman writes, “Adaptations are often born resisting the original desires of their sources” (2). The group drew upon their intimate knowledge of their own communities and asserted their agency as to how a story could or should be told about those communities.

Group Three, who were face-to-face, intriguingly had the least productive and most superficial approach, possibly due to a lack of lecturer support as I was not physically present with them. (There was another lecturer with them, but they were there purely as a steward and did not engage with the group on the task.) This lack of engagement was reflected in the language they chose when feeding back: “We kept pretty much the narrative beat the same, the characters are the same, the themes of faithfulness and unforgiveness and revenge are kind of the same, the one thing that we did change was the gender roles” (Vooght “Film Adaptation Workshop”).

This change in gender roles was to make Philemon’s wife a working woman: “The characters would be the same. The one thing we did change was the wife not being a stay-at-home wife; she has a job, and besides that, the characters are relatively the same…” (Vooght “Film Adaptation Workshop”). However, although the group felt this change would bring the narrative into a contemporary setting, there didn’t seem to be any narrative motivation for the change. As with Group Two, the group chose an Indian couple as the protagonists. The group made superficial changes to the storyline in order to accommodate the wife working outside of the home, but once again did not give any deeper thought to the meaning around the change in gender roles:

They leave in the morning in the same Uber and then because they work in different places, the guy goes with his wife to drop her off first, and then uses the same Uber to go to his work, but upon his arrival at work he misses his access card, so he goes home to fetch it and then that’s kind of where we replace the pass for an access card because it has kind of the same physical meaning. (Vooght “Film Adaptation Workshop”)

Group Three made changes that would allow for a practical updating of dated elements of the story, but did not consider more deeply the potential for a deeper impact within a contemporary setting: “We didn’t really quite get into the details of the suit or anything else, lack of time, but besides that it’s kind of the same story but set in a more urban environment” (Vooght “Film Adaptation Workshop”).

Following each group’s feedback, there was a discussion where I encouraged them to consider the commercial implications of their choices by asking them which of their adaptations would be the most likely to attract investment. In some ways, Group Two’s creation seemed the most likely to find this support as an adaptation that was recognizably linked to the original, canonical text and hence able to draw upon the perceived value of the original in terms of its marketing and audience. Group One’s adaptation, whilst the most imaginative response to the task of adapting, would need to be able to stand on its own as the connection to Themba’s “The Suit” is less obvious. Attracting investment might well be an issue – however, their concept could well be strong enough to stand in its own right. Group Three was asked why they thought a studio would choose to sponsor their production – there wasn’t a clear answer. Group Three had taken the text at face value only, while Groups 1 and 2 could be said to have demonstrated emancipatory pedagogy through demonstrating

habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse. (Shor 129)

These groups demonstrated that, as previously posited, classic texts can still serve to shock and provoke within a contemporary context (McKinnon, “Creative Copying,” 59). Understanding why some groups dug deeper could also have been a useful avenue of learning for the group, given more time to discuss.

Lessons learned

A nuanced knowledge of film adaptation should not be assumed – in this case, students could name film adaptations but needed to create a greater understanding of how they work. Developing the students’ concept of adaptation, acquainting them with its chief dilemmas, grounding the text to be adapted, and allowing for the group work and feedback session required the workshop to proceed at a quick pace. The group size for this workshop was ideal, nonetheless I was stretched too thinly due to the combination of online and face-to-face groups. Despite this, there is an ideal size for small group work which was met in this situation. Very large or very small classes would present different challenges.

There was time pressure. It would be helpful for the lecturer to have a more extended contact with the students, allowing their responses space and time to be developed and explored. The only interaction I had with this particular Honors class was during the workshop itself. If I had known the students, there could have been some conscious choice as to which students were grouped together (this was randomly conducted in the workshop), which might have created more balanced groups. It would have been useful if a lecturer who had a longer contact with the group spent some time with the group at a later date, discussing their experience of the workshop, asking whether their ideas or concept of adaptation had changed or developed, and exploring with them how their own personal background and experiences had shaped and motivated the choices they made when adapting which would have encouraged greater reflection “on their own positions and subjectivities” (Dovey, et al. 26). Groups made forceful, but debatable, comments about what they decided would be believable in a contemporary setting – a larger group discussion would have been useful here. More reflection on how students managed the tightrope of connection with the original text, personal preferences and a commercial filmmaking industry, as well as a deeper consideration of their choices and why they made them, would have helped to further develop the emancipatory side of the pedagogical encounter.

For all the virtues of allowing the students to independently brainstorm unique ideas, some of the students needed my support to delve deeper. In this case, a student-centred approach meant that I functioned more like a counsellor who encourages reflection and provokes thought than an instructor who tells students what to do. In working with the students, as the lecturer I tried not to impose my own conception of how the text should be adapted onto them but rather worked through questioning – for example, “If you change that, it will affect the ending – how will you deal with that?’” or “Is there a visual way of making this point?” Equally important was listening and building students’ self-confidence through reassuring them with positive feedback. In doing so, I gained new insights into both the possibilities of the text and contemporary cultural contexts.

As Raw notes, films are not “produced in a vacuum but evolve out of a collaboration” of writers, directors, producers and so on (95). Students need to learn to work collaboratively and accommodate or negotiate different viewpoints. Nonetheless, the lecturer needs to provide guidance upon which the learning experience can be scaffolded. A learning point was that it is essential to touch base with each group. My intervention proved crucial in developing a good outcome from the second online group, and the lack of direct lecturer guidance no doubt contributed to the poor performance of the third, in person, group.

A greater opportunity for the students to reflect on the change or lack of change from the apartheid environment of Themba’s novel might have allowed for more emancipatory aspects of the pedagogy to bear fruit, while bearing in mind that “it is absolutely crucial that people within particular, local contexts decide what positive transformation means to them” (Dovey, et al. 32). Why did Group One choose to erase the gender theme of Themba’s work, whilst preserving his themes of pride and humiliation? Does the political side of Themba’s work, the apartheid background, have to be jettisoned, or is there a subtle way this could be alluded to in the current context? Reflections on this could be productive in developing analysis across boundaries of the academy and developing the self-awareness and humanity referenced by Freire as a purpose of education.

Adaptation and the self

In preparing these students for entry into the film industry, it was important to stress the commercial value of a recognizable adaptation of a South African classic, while not negating the possibility of a strong interpretation. My aim was to balance this commercial awareness, however, with an educational approach that is developmental and emancipatory; that is, to balance knowledge with “the development of individual abilities” (Raw 89).

Allowing for a comparison to be made, the workshop was held again in 2025 although with a different group of students – this time, undergraduate BA Creative Writing students. Once again, the groups demonstrated the potential for adaptation to express “the stories by which communities make sense of their lives” (Raw 91) and their own contexts. This time, the student demographic was almost entirely Black African and it was notable that, instead of the traditional Indian couple favored by the previous groups, one group reimagined the story as that of a conservative pastor whose wife is having an affair with another woman. In this version, the suit became a dress. This scenario raises the stakes for a 21st century audience for whom a mere affair may not hold the same shock value as it did in the 1950s. The revisions suggest the adaptability of the gender theme of Themba’s short story and underscore the ability of an older text to “resonate” (Stam, “The Changing Pedagogies ”) with a continuing ability to provoke. A knowledge of the original in this case enhances the cultural commentary; differences allow for reflections in the classroom on the theme of gender-based violence and psychological abuse that humanize and develop a critical conscience, as in Nouri and Sajjadi’s interpretation of emancipatory pedagogy (76).

Another group developed a scenario where the wife was the bigger earner. The left-behind suit then operated as a sign that Matilda’s lover has a higher status than Philemon. This served to adapt the theme of feelings of emasculation as an underlying driver of Philemon’s anger that is subtly present in Themba’s story. The third group brought in elements of technological surveillance, with Philemon gifting Matilda a device that secretly tracks her movements (an echo of apartheid’s “dompas,” putting the power now into Philemon’s hands). As a lecturer, I was impressed by the courage and fearlessness of my students in adapting and speaking to their own concerns. Their ideas demonstrated how adaptation can be a way of demonstrating, exploring, and reinforcing identities and culturally diverse scenarios. I also felt a sense of what was lost in allowing them free reign to do so; primarily, the apartheid setting that haunts Themba’s story but is not the dominant theme of the short story. Whilst South Africa may still be feeling the aftereffects of apartheid, for these students, born after the end of apartheid, these concerns were not at the forefront of their vision.

As new contextual interpretations emerge, it is important to note that there are losses as well as gains when adapting. Adaptation scholars often argue for a moving forward and away from ideas of recreating that dog adaptations of the canon – Grossman, for example, speaks of the “distinct value in an amnesiac relation” (7) and suggests that we should “train our critical eye on cultural progeny rather than on origins” (3), and Stam has influentially written of “texts generating other texts […] with no clear point of origin” (“Beyond Fidelity” 66). The concept of ancestry is, however, an important one in South Africa. As the students themselves have adapted to altered circumstances, to paraphrase Raw (93), the changes reflected in the students’ reconceptualization of the work allow for a reflection in the classroom on what has changed (legal structures of oppression) and what may have remained the same (other abuses of power, such as gender-based violence). In this way, the agency of the students as the heirs of Themba does not and should not erase his legacy.  Students drew upon their experiences and reshaped them, connecting both with issues of their histories and their present, with a view to their communal future. In doing so, they asserted their right to their own historical moment: “agency in the process of adaptation is shared and shifting, just as the identity of a text shifts as it is read, viewed, and performed differently over time” (Grossman 191).

Feedback from the second workshop served to confirm some of the strategies described in this article. Students learned about the flexibility and potential of adapting: one said, “I learned that you can add or remove characters when adapting which is something I didn’t know I could do;” and another observed that “Adaptations are more than just taking existing work and adding a new spin to it” (Vooght “Adaptation Workshop Evaluation”).  The workshop was felt to enhance and support their theory work: a student said that “Having a text to link to the theory we learned was very helpful,” and the general class enjoyed the challenge of the brief:

Having […] restrictions can make the exercise more fun and engaging, like the restriction we had was to make the work set in a contemporary South Africa. I think more restrictions like that help in engagement. (Vooght “Adaptation Workshop Evaluation”)

As students engaged, they also adapted, shaping their own narratives as well as that of the pedagogical environment in which they found themselves.

Conclusion

Choices made in adapting for film require critical and conscious decisions on what to include, leave out or change – most obviously in terms of plot and character, but also subtly in terms of themes and message. The exercising of these choices allowed for a reflection that built the students’ interdisciplinary knowledge and skills, touching on aspects of Themba’s text, South Africa’s history and current realities, the creative requirements of adaptation, and commercial decision-making. Asking the students to adapt the text into a contemporary setting enabled students to build on concepts that they already held whilst encouraging a deep and active reading of the text. It also built through students’ active learning an awareness of the theoretical issues raised by adaptive transposition and remodeling.

Creating a pedagogical encounter around adapting is hence not just raising awareness of the “realities of screenwriting in the modern media industries” (Sherry 98), but encourages the active reading of texts and treats adaptation as one of the “sites of personal and cultural struggle and perhaps revelation” (Boozer 24). This was evidenced by the deeper consideration of their own environment and context demonstrated by some of the groups. The encounter once again demonstrated the many advantages and pedagogical possibilities involved in the study of adaptation that extend well beyond the realm of film production studies.