FROM SCREEN TO STAGE: EDGAR

NEVILLE’S LA VIDA EN UN HILO

Throughout its history, the fiction film has regularly exploited the theatre for
its storylines. Screen versions of plays abound, and the theory and practice of
such adaptations have consequently received a substantial amount of critical
attention. Yet next to no interest has been shown in adaptations in the opposite
direction, despite the number of such productions that have appeared of late,
especially on the English-speaking stage.
This study concerns an early instance
of screen-to-stage adaptation from Spain: Edgar Neville’s 1959 play La vida
en un hilo, based on the film of the same title that he scripted and directed
in 1945. The aims of this enquiry are to identify and explain the principal
changes made by Neville and to see what light such modifications can shed on
formal similarities and di·erences between theatre and cinema in general, an
area of study that continues to be characterized by vague and often excessively
abstract reflections despite the considerable interest shown in it recently. For
this reason, it is first argued that stage drama ought to be viewed as narration,
as described by David Bordwell, rather than as mimesis or diegesis. Such an
approach in turn enables the structure of plays to be broken down into their
component plot units using Christian Metz’s grand syntagmatique. While it is
acknowledged that Metz’s theory possesses several limitations and flaws, its
application does prove particularly useful in comparative analyses of films and
plays, especially when it is a question of looking for formal connections between
the two art forms. Applied to La vida en un hilo, Metz’s theory enables the clear
identification of a number of important changes made in the adaptation process,
many of which can then be ascribed to di·erences between screen and stage,
some fundamental, others related to the contexts in which film and play were
written and realized. These modifications are then scrutinized to see what sort
of di·erences in meaning they create. Finally, two other types of alteration are
examined. These do not lead to especially di·erent interpretations of the ac-
tion, but are interesting because they highlight significant di·erences between
theatre and cinema as practised at the time. While the first of these—changes
made to the film dialogue for the stage—can be attributed, like the major alter-
ations, to formal factors, the greater number of topical references that comprise
the second of these ‘minor’ types is by far the most important non-formal dif-
ference between original and adaptation.
In theoretical approaches to narrative, theatre only ever merits mention in
opposition to other narrative art forms such as the novel and the epic poem,
which are generally held to tell a story. Many still view the theatre as an art
that simply shows what happens in accordance with the Aristotelian approach

While the musical genre is without doubt the most frequently adapted, a number of ‘talkies’
have been turned into plays in recent years, such as When Harry Met Sally and The Graduate.
 Curiously, a rather large number of plays based on films have been produced in Spain. In 1956
Neville’s fellow humorist Miguel Mihura adapted for the stage the film Mi adorado Juan (Jer‹onimo
Mihura, 1949), for which he wrote the original script. Stage adaptations of Entre tinieblas/Dark
Habits (Pedro Almod‹ovar, 1983), El verdugo (Luis Garc‹§a Berlanga, 1963), and Atraco a las tres
(Jos‹e Mar‹§a Forqu‹e, 1962) have also enjoyed successful runs in Madrid in the last decade.
1016 Edgar Neville’s ‘La vida en un hilo’

to stage drama as mimesis, an approach that tends to naturalize what is seen on

stage. The complexities and contradictions involved in discussing this facet of
theatre can also be observed in discussions of the term ‘diegesis’, a synonym
of narrative that has sometimes been employed to refer to the world created by
the action (and therefore clearly applicable to theatre), but which has also been
contrasted directly with mimesis, notably by G‹erard Genette. Broadly, the
main obstacles to the theatre being classified unequivocally as narrative are its
directness (the fact that it is performed live) and its apparent lack of narratorial
voice. This view is implied in a recent declaration that ‘narrative is necessarily
bound up with re-presentation’. To complicate matters still further, the Span-
ish theatrical terms ‘representar’ and ‘representaci‹on’ would suggest that stage
drama falls into this category, too.
Sidestepping these di¶culties, it can be contended, as David Bordwell does
in reference to film, that theatre is neither mimesis nor diegesis (in the sense of
a recounting by someone else) but narration, a process that ‘cues the spectator
to execute a definable variety of operations’. These operations as regards plot
involve the application of template schemata to the events on screen in order
to understand narrative order and construct the story. Like film, theatre pos-
sesses no unified (mimetic or diegetic) narratorial presence, but both possess
an implied author on the level of plot. Strictly speaking, a play cannot be said to
reproduce pro-theatrical events in the same way that pro-filmic (i.e. real) events
are recorded on camera in order to produce a film; rather than re-presenting, it
might be better to say that at each performance theatre creates anew, as if for the
first time, the world described in the play text. However, the hand of the im-
plied author, here the dramatist, is present in the selection of which moments
of a story to include on stage, which to reject, and how to order the chosen
events. This process can be seen most clearly in the many recent docudramas
that are based on real incidents.
An approach to stage drama as narration, on the level of plot at least, can
be of use to the interdisciplinary study of cinema and theatre. The most valu-
able methodology for pointing up this influence (and the best known of the
semiological approaches to plot structure in film) is the grand syntagmatique,
Christian Metz’s ‘list of all the main types of image orderings occurring in
films’. Metz gives the various orders in which shots are arranged in a sequence
the label ‘syntagms’, of which he distinguishes seven types plus the autonomous
shot (by definition a single shot and therefore not a syntagm). These image-
ordering units are: the parallel syntagm, the bracket syntagm, the descriptive
chronological sequence, the alternating syntagm, the continuous linear narra-
tive sequence, the ordinary discontinuous narrative sequence, and the episodic

 Narrative Discourse, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 30.

 Paul Cobley, Narrative (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 84 (emphasis original).
 Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 29 (emphasis original).
 This claim by Bordwell has been the cause of some misunderstanding. Bordwell contends that
arguments for a filmic narrator are unsustainable as the narration cannot be ascribed to a single
entity for the duration of the film, as in the camera-as-eye theory, for example.
 Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. by Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1974), p. 121.
 stuart nishan green 1017

narrative sequence. Breaking down a three-act well-made play into its syn-
tagms, it can be seen that this traditional dramatic form is formed of three
‘continuous linear narrative sequences’. This unit of cinematic narrative ‘rep-
resents a spatio-temporal integrality experienced as being without “flaws” (by
“flaw” I mean those brusque e·ects of appearance or disappearance that are the
frequent corollaries of the very multiplicity of shots [. . .] which constitute one
of the major di·erences between filmic perception and real perception)’ (Metz,
p. 129). While Metz acknowledges the resemblance between this syntagm and
the scene in the theatre, the complete absence of such ‘flaws’ on stage arguably
makes this a more theatrical than cinematic syntagm. The additional significa-
tions that camerawork and other devices on film may bring to such sequences
are often cited in the various criticisms levelled at Metz’s theory since its ini-
tial appearance, but it must be borne in mind that Metz’s theory focuses on
plot only. In this respect, as Stam et al. maintain: ‘The Grand Syntagmatique,
whatever its flaws, still o·ers the most precise model to date for dealing with the
specific image-ordering procedures of the narrative film.’
The theory’s consi-
deration of image alone to the exclusion of sound can be remedied by dividing
the auditory component into separate sets of syntagms (background music, dia-
logue, sound e·ects, etc.), many of which coincide with the image syntagms.
Examining the way action is structured in plays and matching these struc-
tures to Metz’s film syntagms prove very useful in the interdisciplinary study
of cinema and theatre. The presence of syntagms closely associated with film
narration in a play will often give it a cinematic feel. Metz’s grand syntagma-
tique can therefore be drawn on to support some arguments for the influence of
cinema on a play that would otherwise remain speculation. The value of Metz’s
theory for the study of theatre is at its most immediate when applied to a stage
adaptation of a film, such as La vida en un hilo.
After the opening credits, which allude to questions of fate and the superna-
tural through the image of a crystal ball over which the names of cast and crew
appear, the original film La vida en un hilo begins with the young widow Mer-
cedes catching a train back to Madrid from her late husband Ram‹on’s home
town. By chance she shares a sleeping compartment with clairvoyant Madame
Dupont, a circus artist able to see what could have happened in the past but did
not. Dupont reveals that the very afternoon Mercedes met the man she married,
she met another man with whom she would have been much happier. Through
flashbacks alternating between the present and the two pasts (real and hypo-
thetical), the spectator witnesses the monotony and narrow-mindedness that
Mercedes had to endure when married, and her unrealized life with bohemian
sculptor Miguel.

When the train arrives in Madrid, Mercedes takes leave of

 For his definition and investigation of these, see Metz, pp. 124–33.
Other criticisms are Metz’s over-rigid matching of certain syntagms with certain meanings, the
di¶culty in distinguishing between certain syntagms, Metz’s marginalization of cinema outside
the classical canon, and a failure to deal with the emotional impact of film on the spectator.

Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film
Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 48.


The term ‘spectator’ is used in this study to refer specifically to one who watches film, while
‘audience’ is employed to describe the equivalent in the theatre. Likewise, the term ‘sequence’ is
used to refer solely to a group of shots that together constitute a single narrative block in a film, e.g.
1018 Edgar Neville’s ‘La vida en un hilo’

her new friend and goes to catch a taxi home, where chance again intervenes to
give her a second opportunity to be happy with Miguel.
Despite the very positive reviews it garnered, the film La vida en un hilo did
not enjoy a great deal of commercial success on its initial release.
 Motivated
by this and by his conviction of the appeal of the story, Neville soon began
to harbour a desire to turn his film into a play. In order to describe Neville’s
basic approach to the adaptation, Dudley Andrew’s theory of film adaptation
proves useful. In his discussion of screen versions of prose fiction, Andrew
groups elements of a narrative into two categories according to their adaptabi-
lity across sign systems. The first includes ‘characters and their inter-relation,
the geographical, sociological, and cultural information providing the fiction’s
context’.
 The second consists of ‘stylistic equivalents’, which are far more dif-
ficult to transform: ‘fidelity to the spirit, to the original’s tone, values, imagery,
and rhythm’ (Andrew, p. 100). Even a brief glance at the text of Neville’s adap-
tation reveals that Neville retained many elements of the first category in his
adaptation, for instance, the ‘what if?’ scenario, the protagonists, and a number
of locations; this approach is to be expected when the same person is responsible
for both original and adaptation. The most significant modifications in the film’s
adaptation for the stage are brought about by elements of the second category.
It is to the structure of the narrative and the rhythm of the storytelling that
Neville referred when he remarked upon the problems involved in fulfilling his
desire to adapt his film: ‘en vista del e‹ xito que tuvo en el cine, quise convertirlo
en comedia, pero confieso que las dificultades t‹ecnicas eran inmensas’ (Neville,
p. 294).In the present limited study, the comparison of film and play focuses
on one particular sequence—the moment when the flashbacks begin—and its
rendering on stage in order to identify these ‘technical di¶culties’ posed by the
film, as well as Neville’s solutions to these.
This sequence, with its jumps back and forth between the train compart-
ment and the florist’s where Mercedes met Ram‹on and Miguel, can be seen
as a variation on Metz’s alternating syntagm. This moment of the film cues
the understanding that the spectator is witnessing the events being narrated
in the train (rather than suggesting simultaneity, the function with which this
syntagm is most often associated). The dialogue on the soundtrack is similarly
an alternating syntagm, although it is not always synchronous with the images,
sometimes straddling the wipes that signal a change of the time and fictional
place shown in the image.

In theory, nearly all the elements of this sequence were available to the theatre
the opening credits, a conversation, or a car chase. Where the term ‘scene’ is employed, it refers
only to similar units of the stage adaptation, and not to the more common acceptance of the term
in theatre, which defines a scene according to the entrance and/or exit of characters.

 As Neville later explained, this stemmed from the popularity of Hollywood films at the time,
which meant distributors understandably gave preference to these titles over those produced na-
tionally: ‘Se la di a una distribuidora, que no se gast‹o un c‹entimo en hacer publicidad, que la
present‹o de cualquier manera, al revuelo de un capote, sin saber que ten‹§a un fil‹on, y [. . .] no se
cuidaron de hacer un buen contrato con el cine ni de haberle dado la propaganda necesaria’ (Edgar
Neville, Obras selectas (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1969), p. 292).

 Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 100.

 Gay McAuley coins the term ‘fictional place’ to describe ‘the place or places presented, re-
presented or evoked onstage and o·’ (Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann
 stuart nishan green 1019

in Spain in the 1940s and 1950s: the set for the two fictional places could be
moved on and o· stage when needed (naturalistic staging was still de rigueur
in commercial Spanish theatre at this time), and recordings of the non-diegetic
music and voice-overs could have been used (although the equipment was pri-
mitive in comparison with that available to many other European stages). In-
deed, the only elements not available to the stage are the wipes, cuts, and camera
angles, all of which belong to the second area of narrative identified by Andrew.
In practice, however, the sequence could plainly not be reproduced on stage: the
set changes would have taken far too long to execute and the rapid alternation
between live and recorded speech would have been disconcerting to the audi-
ence (and still would be today). In any discussion of the changes made in screen-
to-stage adaptations, therefore, practical considerations in the latter medium
must be given pride of place over theoretical ones. In the adaptation in ques-
tion, these considerations include the structure of the theatre company, accepted
practice in the commercial theatre in 1950s Spain, and theatre technology.
In the adaptation of this sequence, the rapid switching between the train in
the present and the florist’s in the past has been modified to produce a greatly
simplified alternating syntagm. Firstly, Neville dropped the train journey as a
whole and replaced the introductory sequence at the station with one in which
Mercedes prepares to leave the home she shared in the north of Spain with her
husband and his aunts to return to her native Madrid. Since the train also pro-
vided a suitable public space where Mercedes could meet a clairvoyant, in the
play Neville transformed this character into an elderly lady who visits the house
to sell clothes, renaming her dona~ Tomasita. Secondly, Madame Dupont’s re-
counting of the events of the past in the film punctuates this sequence a number
of times, either as on-screen dialogue or as voice-over narration. In the play all
the information contained in this character’s comments is grouped together in
a conversation between Mercedes and dona ~ Tomasita at the end of the open-
ing scene in the house. In this way, Mercedes and the audience hear almost
everything about the incidents in the florist’s before the events are actually
shown (after a set change replacing the drawing room with the florist’s). The
two fictional places of present and past are thus kept separate from one another
and do not overlap as in the film, where the voice-overs blur the edges between
these two time periods.
Whereas the first flashback in the original film opens with Mercedes enter-
ing the shop, the second scene in the play begins with conversations between
Miguel, Ram‹on and two assistants. This change is again due to the require-
ments of live theatre: the actress playing Mercedes needed time to change out
of her character’s widow’s attire and into the clothes she wore as a young single
woman. After Mercedes is shown refusing Miguel’s o·er of a lift in the play,
there is a commentary on the action by Mercedes, who addresses the audience
directly.
 Ram‹on then re-enters the florist’s and the action continues without
intervention from the present. The concession that Neville had to make here
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 29). Such terminology is helpful when applied to
film as well.

 There is some uncertainty in the play text at this point. Turning to the audience, Mercedes
says: ‘Dona
~ Tomasita, &d‹onde se ha metido? %Ah!, ya la veo . . .’ (Neville, p. 304). However, there
1020 Edgar Neville’s ‘La vida en un hilo’

(Mercedes delivers her monologue still wearing clothes from the afternoon in
the florist’s) in order to retain even a semblance of the film’s switching between
the true and unrealized pasts and the ambiguity to which this gives rise is evi-
dence of the greater narrational capacities of cinema.
The reduction of on-stage fictional places in these scenes is a change found
throughout the adaptation. The film presents twenty-five such places, many of
which are frequently revisited over the course of more than forty sequences. In
addition, there are those featured in inserts such as the stock footage of a rail-
way station and the image of a train travelling through a landscape. In contrast,
the play creates only fifteen fictional places on stage. Moreover, as mentioned
above, the action on stage does not jump from one to another with such rapid-
ity: whereas the film is ninety minutes long, the stage version would have lasted
at least two hours; on average, therefore, the time spent in each fictional place
is almost four times greater in the adaptation than in the original.
The only new fictional place in the play is Mercedes’s flat in the epilogue, a
consequence of the dropping of the train journey. Since the heroine’s second
encounter with Miguel in the film takes place at the taxi rank outside the railway
station in Madrid, Neville had to find another way of bringing him back into
Mercedes’s life at the end of the play. The new epilogue performs this function:
it happens that Miguel lives downstairs from her.
The play’s relative ‘immobility’ arises because Neville’s adaptation is very
much a product of its time: principally in his single-space approach to staging
(in which the performance space holds only one fictional place at a time) and
a set design that employed large numbers of flats, backdrops, and furniture, all
of which necessitated a number of complicated set changes. To conceal these,
Neville introduced the device of front-cloths, flown in at the corresponding
pauses in the action. These are the tel‹on del tedio and the tel‹on de la felicidad,

used during the real and hypothetical flashbacks respectively and decorated
with images of the world to which each corresponds.
These cloths double as a backdrop to Mercedes’s monologues, which are the
second substantial modification in the play.
 The monologues, in which there
is a brief return to the present, replace Mercedes’s and Madame Dupont’s
conversation on the train in the original. The reduction of these remarks from
over twenty in the film to seven in the play was most probably due to Neville’s
deeming it too complicated to stage them all: many in the original are very short
and would have struck an audience as an unwarranted interruption. Moreover,
because they are monologues, dona ~ Tomasita does not appear when they are
spoken, and features only in the play’s opening and closing scenes.
The third major di·erence in the play is the slimming down of the cast, a
consequence of theatre as a live phenomenon involving actors. The film features
a cast of more than twenty people as well as a host of extras in the street, at
is no stage direction indicating whether the actress playing the clairvoyant entered the stage at this
moment.

 On occasion Neville also uses the terms del aburrimiento and de la alegrܤa to refer to these
front-cloths.

 Of these monologues, Neville wrote that they were specifically his solution to the project’s
technical di¶culties: ‘s‹olo despu‹es de pensar en la soluci‹on di con e‹ sta de que la protagonista
contase su propia historia adelant‹andose al publico
‹ durante las mutaciones’ (Neville, p. 294).
 stuart nishan green 1021

the dance, and on the train platforms. Clearly unable to employ actors to fill all
these roles on the stage, Neville also had to bear in mind the fixed number of
actors and very strict internal hierarchy of the commercial company for which
he was writing. Directors and actors were not used to doubling up roles, and
impresarios were averse to adding to the payroll for the run of a single play. As
a result, several characters had to be dropped, the most important of whom are
Contacos, dona ~ Purificaci‹on, the manager of the fur-coat shop, the art dealer,
and Isabel. Many of these absent characters appeared in the film in sequences
that Neville did not include in his stage adaptation.
Characters and their Functions in ‘La vida en un hilo’

Film Function Play

Mercedes Heroine Mercedes

Escol‹astica, Ramona Impede Mercedes’s happiness; repre- Escol‹astica, Ramona
sent bourgeois values
Madame Dupont Instigates flashback storylines Dona
~ Tomasita
Miguel Aids Mercedes’s attainment of happi- Miguel
ness
Ram‹on Hinders Mercedes’s attainment of Ram‹on
happiness
Vallejo family Enables Ram‹on to marry Mercedes Vallejo family
Contacos Broadens world of bohemia
Sres. de S‹anchez (Comic) bourgeois parochialism Senores
~ de S‹anchez
Tomasa, Marܤa Hierarchy within bourgeois society Dolores
Dona
~ Encarnaci‹on, Espousers of bourgeois values and Dona
~ Encarnaci‹on
dona
~ Purificaci‹on habits
Arregolita family Culmination of satire of bourgeoisie Vallejo family
Waiter, Arribachu Highlight Ram‹on’s personal defects Waiter, Arribachu
Fur-coat shop ma- Highlight Miguel’s virtues and margi-
nager, art dealer nalization
Isabel Mercedes’s counterpart in real past
and hypothetical past

The dropping of these sequences and characters in the adaptation process

gives rise to the greatest di·erences in meaning, as nothing is introduced to
serve their function. This can be seen in the accompanying table. As dona~ Pu-
rificaci‹on shares her role with Encarnaci‹on (who appears in both film and play
with the same function), this part of Mercedes’s true past does not undergo sig-
nificant changes in meaning in the translation from screen to stage. The other
four characters missing from the adaptation, however, belong to the film’s hypo-
thetical flashbacks and these absences do bring about di·erences worthy of note.
Mercedes’s hypothetical happiness and the world of bohemia are not explored
to the same extent as in the film: the absence of Miguel’s musician friend Con-
1022 Edgar Neville’s ‘La vida en un hilo’

tacos means that the humorous interplay between Miguel and Mercedes does
not blossom so obviously when she visits his studio for the first time; the theatre
audience does not see the generous side of Miguel when he sells his valuable
El Greco to buy Mercedes the coat she desires so much; the compromises that
the bohemian artist unwillingly makes in order to have an income in a world
ruled by Ram‹on’s social group—constructing monuments in honour of self-
interested small-town mayors, sculpting figures to be used in advertising—are
similarly nowhere to be seen; and finally, Mercedes’s mistake and her su·ering,
her timid e·orts at breaking free stifled by her new circle’s stubborn adherence
to tradition and hypocrisy, are no longer contrastively highlighted by the char-
acter of Isabel, Mercedes’s mirror image in the imaginary storyline.
The fact that most of the cuts were made to Miguel’s storyline is due to
the internal hierarchy of the company of Madrid’s Teatro Mar‹§a Guerrero,
which first staged the play on 5 March 1959. This structure, typical of the time,
dictated that the female and male leads, Marܤa del Carmen Dܤaz de Mendoza
‹
and Angel Picazo, had to be given considerably more time on stage than the rest
of the cast. In the film, Ram‹on and Miguel share more or less equal screen time,
so Neville trimmed the flashbacks in favour of the former character in the play.
As a result, Ram‹on appears in eleven scenes in contrast to Miguel’s six, and
the satire of the bourgeoisie comes to occupy a much larger proportion of the
action. This satirical element is further strengthened by the expansion of some
of Ram‹on’s scenes to include longer discussions of food and recipes, as well as an
extra round of torture in the form of young Luisita Vallejo’s out-of-tune singing.
Of these three substantial changes, it is the monologues that are principally
responsible for our impression that the play does not reach the heights of the
film. Although they perform the narrational function of the conversations in
the train, informing the audience of incidents, explaining what the audience has
just witnessed, and setting the scene for episodes that follow, they do not serve
their emotive function. The chance encounter in the film, where Mercedes is
befriended by Madame Dupont on what would otherwise be a long and lonely
train journey, presents the ideal opportunity for Mercedes to reveal very per-
sonal information without fearing the problems that such candidness with an es-
tablished acquaintance might have caused her. The spectator thus feels a consid-
erable sense of empathy with her, a feeling reinforced by the fact that Mercedes’s
reactions to the flashbacks are displayed in close-up. Without the clairvoyant
on stage, Mercedes does not have the opportunity to open her heart in the same
way. As a consequence, these monologues, their theatricality, and the aforemen-
tioned ambiguous identity of the narrator result in a diminishing of what com-
passion the audience may have for her, perhaps even a certain dehumanization.
While the small-scale changes Neville made in the play are too numerous to
discuss in detail in this study, there are two of particular interest: approaches
to dialogue and the introduction of a greater number of cultural references.
Comparison of the conversations in the car interiors in both original and
adaptation demonstrates that Neville’s approach to dialogue in the theatre dif-
fered fundamentally from that which he used on film. In the original, almost all
the interventions at this point are one or two sentences long, and frequently elicit
an immediate response through the use of a question. The equivalent scenes in
 stuart nishan green 1023

the adaptation, on the other hand, feature interventions that continue uninter-
rupted for longer; Neville extends many of the lines from the film considerably,
employing digressions and sudden changes of subject matter. Furthermore, the
fact that many of the sentences that open each intervention do not stem from
the previous remark suggests a rhythm of delivery that is much slower than
in the original. Although in the film Neville shoots these two conversations in
long takes, framing both Mercedes and her interlocutor (Ram‹on and Miguel),
these two characteristics of brevity and linkage are in general ideally suited
to the shot/reverse shot technique that characterizes many dialogue scenes in
classical film. While this approach to writing dialogue is regularly found in
modern plays—surely a consequence of dramatists’ and contemporary theatre
audiences’ familiarity with film—Neville’s 1959 adaptation was clearly written
for theatregoers accustomed to a slower style of delivery.
The adaptation also contains a large number of spoken or sung topical refer-
ences to culture in Spain. The original contains hardly any of these, and when
such references are made, they do not allude to contemporary Spain: Miguel
quotes a poem from the nineteenth century (Ram‹on de Campoamor’s ‘El tren
expreso’) and promises to conduct himself ‘como el pap‹a de Juanito’, a reference
to a model of good behaviour from a turn-of-the-century children’s educational
book. This lack of cultural references makes it impossible to situate the time
of the action any more precisely than some time in the twentieth century. This
is something that Neville may well have intended if the epoch in which he
made the film is considered, state censors not being particularly receptive to
social criticism aimed specifically at the Spain of the early post-war period.
In the play, however, references abound and encourage an understanding that
the action is taking place in the Spain of the late 1950s. Those interested in
the space race would have picked up the reference to Cape Canaveral, Real
Madrid’s dominance of European football in the second half of the decade is
alluded to, and there are mentions of psychoanalysis, radio commercials, Eng-
lish theatre, and popular music. Cinema is referred to twice: the women discuss
The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957), and Luisita comments on
the film Mogambo (John Ford, 1953) that caused consternation and amusement
in equal parts at its premiere in Spain because the alterations enforced by cen-
sors unintentionally turned the a·air between Clark Gable and Grace Kelly
into an incestuous relationship. The play’s much closer ties to its social context
can be ascribed to the fact that it was written for a single run and for a specific
audience in Madrid. Film, on the other hand, is made to be shown in many
places and in the knowledge that it can be rescreened at any time. Any explicit
references it contained, therefore, might not be grasped by certain spectators
and the film would also age more rapidly.
 The overall e·ect of these additions
in the play is to endow the central dilemma with a greater relevance for the
audience at the end of the 1950s. Ironically, they might produce the opposite
e·ect in theatregoers from a di·erent place or time.
While this study has focused on the schemata utilized to comprehend plot, it
has not taken into consideration what connection may exist between the stylis-

 Such references can easily be altered in a play if staged at a date when they will not be
understood.
1024 Edgar Neville’s ‘La vida en un hilo’

tic schemata associated with cinema and theatre (those applied by the spectator
and audience to understand film style and its stage equivalent respectively).
The mise en sc›ene, cinematography, editing, and other post-production techno-
logy available to film-makers have all been examined extensively, as have those
devices employed by dramatists and stage directors. The possible overlaps and
dissimilarities between these, however, have not been given due attention by
academics. For instance, there is the matter of point of view: e·ortlessly mani-
pulated in film through camera positioning, it is not unchanging on the stage,
despite claims to the contrary.
Such a statement may be true for a continuous
moment of action (a scene or act), but it proves unsustainable when changes of
location and multiple simultaneous spaces are considered. The matter is further
problematized if the ways in which reception is a·ected by the seating arrange-
ment in a performance space are taken into account. Theatre can also employ
visual and audio cues in order to elicit certain responses from the audience in
the same way that mise en sc›ene is exploited in the cinema, most obviously in
the anti-naturalistic use of lighting and sound e·ects.
This is surely an area for future study, and while this would be di¶cult as
regards stage-to-screen adaptation (made from the printed dramatic text rather
than from a particular staging), screen-to-stage adaptations lend themselves
neatly to such investigation, especially if a recording of the performance is
available.
To sum up, many approaches to the formal similarities and di·erences be-
tween theatre and cinema have tended to focus on abstract notions of what the
two art forms are rather than looking at practical examples. Films that have later
been adapted for the stage, while a rare phenomenon, do provide an interesting
opportunity to explore this relationship hands-on. Viewing ways in which nar-
ration cues the construction of a story and using Metz’s grand syntagmatique to
classify them prove a useful method for the study of plays as well as film. As
theatre’s capacity for complex narration was something of which many play-
wrights were made aware through exposure to the cinema, this is particularly
true for twentieth-century drama. A comparative analysis of films and their
adaptations can also illuminate other areas of overlap between the art forms,
such as the form and function of dialogue, although the technological context
in which both works were produced must always be taken into account. A stage
adaptation of La vida en un hilo done today, before an audience accustomed to
actors doubling up and the use of multiple simultaneous spaces, and at a time
when directors enjoy exploring new readings generated by strategies such as
the incorporation of film projections and the swapping of gender roles, would
surely be very di·erent from that produced in 1959.
U    ⁿ G

Erwin Panofsky maintains that in the theatre ‘space is static, [. . .] unalterably fixed’ (quoted
in Susan Sontag, ‘Film and Theatre’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. by
Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, 4th edn (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1992), pp. 362–74 (p. 364)).
 Perhaps this variety of responses is the reason why the factor has been underestimated in
comparative analyses of film adaptations of plays.