The poster for the 2006 production of “The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood” - adapted by Barry Freeman, Gillian Levene, and (Gatherings Co-Investigator) Mark Turner.
Notes on the Production
Mark Turner
In 2006 I adapted a film called The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood for the stage with Barry Freeman, Gillian Levene and Graham Wolfe. The adaptation was part of my doctoral research on filmmaking in Newfoundland and Labrador at CDTPS. I wasn’t looking to answer specific research questions with the adaptation. Rather, I saw it as opportunity to practically think about how film was being made in the province in the early days of domestic production. Films were being made in Newfoundland and Labrador since at least 1910, but sustained domestic production did not begin until the 1950s and the first domestic narrative film appearing in the 1970s. A lot of that narrative work was done be people who had established careers as theatre artists and it seemed to be that the best way to try to understand their work was to reverse engineer it in a sense. Faustus was the logical choice because of its scale.
The cast. Image supplied by Mark Turner.
When I first encountered the film, there weren’t a lot of contextualizing materials—artifacts, records, etc.—available. There were some articles on the film published around its release in 1986. During the 1990s it received a little bit of academic attention, but mostly in the form of unpublished work. And in the aughts, author Lisa Moore interviewed screenwriter and star, Andy Jones, in Brick. But most of what I knew about the film came from local legend. My first order of business was to transcribe the film. I shared that transcription with Andy, which led to some more discussion and eventual discovery of other primary documents created during its production. Really, though, the script was the primary document for the project and, I was happy to hear, also helped Andy, his brother Mike (director) and NSCAD University professor Darrell Varga in a project to restore the film. The other material was useful, of course, but the script does so much. It is an archive unto itself. Working with others to adapt that script allowed me to see exactly how much was in there.
The experience of working with different communities was probably the most important part of the project. This, of course, is probably nothing new to anyone who has working in collective creation or devised theatre, but doing this work outside of Newfoundland and Labrador with a majority Ontario cast and crew allowed me to see with greater precision how the film was made. I don’t think I would have learned as much if I had done this project in Newfoundland and Labrador as the cultural production context remains similar. Also, at a more fundamental level, explaining the humour helped me to understand what it is actually doing and who it is doing it for.
