Earlier this year, a TV movie called King of Texas was released in the United States. It told the story of a self-made Texan ranch tycoon, John Lear, who divided his holdings among his daughters only to find that once they had his property, they, like, totally rejected him. Lear was played by RSC veteran (and Enterprise captain Jean-Luc Picard) Patrick Stewart, complete with Kenny Rodgers beard and a Texan drawl. "Get off ma land," he yelled at one point.
Also released this year was a film called King Rikki. In it, the eponymous gangland hood Rikki Ortega fixes a hit on a guy called Alejandro from a rival gang in contemporary east Los Angeles. He then kills Alejandro's assassin, rather than paying him off, and scores with the victim's girl. Next, he plots to bump off his brothers in the Ortega gang so that he can become the only crystal meth supplier in town. But before he can do so he is totally wasted by a crooked cop who is hip to Rikki's dastardly scheme.
In last year's film Scotland, PA (the PA stands, one is to suppose, for Pennsylvania), a woman called Pat badgers her husband Mac to bump off some fast-food joint owner called Duncan so he can take over the place. "We're not bad people, Mac," she insists. "We're just underachievers who have to make up for lost time." Duncan gets quite literally fried, facilitating Pat and Mac to take over the concession. At the grand opening of their McBeth's, investigating officer Lieutenant Ernie McDuff (Christopher Walken) approvingly tells the proud couple: "This place really looks great. Of course, the last time there was a dead body in the fryer."
And in a movie entitled O, also released last year, the only black student at a white prep boarding school is called Odin (Mekhi Phifer) and is a star basketball player. His confidant Hugo (Josh Hartnett) is jealous of Odin's success with women, and has a cunning scheme to change all that, as he indicates in the following speech. "Odin is a hawk. He soars above us. He can fly. One of these days, everyone's gonna pay attention to me. Because I'm gonna fly too."
All four of the above are recent screen adaptations of Shakespeare set in today's America. It wouldn't take an iambic pentameter aficionado to recognise which plays were adapted in each case, but if you can't guess, King of Texas was an adaptation of King Lear; King Rikki was based on Richard III; Scotland, PA on Macbeth and O on Othello.
These are just the latest examples of Americans doing English culture. But why is there such a dearth of Britons adapting their own literary classics in anything other than period dress? Why hasn't Ken Loach set Hard Times in a Cumbernauld call centre? Why doesn't Michael Winterbottom do George Gissing's New Grub Street with ring tones and set it among the self-hating scribblers of Wapping and Docklands? Because if nobody gets to grips sharpish with our literary classics and adapts them for new times, the Americans, in a nice piece of reverse cultural colonialism, will cherry-pick the whole canon.
It's not just Shakespeare who has been plundered by Hollywood. The 1995 film Clueless, starring Alicia Silverstone as Cher, was about a clothes-horse of a Valley girl and inept fixer-upper of other people's romantic lives. It was a knowing adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma, set in the milieu of Beverly Hills 90210. It was, like, way different from the orginal, but very droll in its own right. Cher's take on English literature is demonstrated by the following exchange with a friend. Heather: "It's just like Hamlet said: 'To thine own self be true.'" Cher: "Hamlet didn't say that." Heather: "I think I remember Hamlet accurately." Cher: "Well, I remember Mel Gibson accurately, and he didn't say that. That Polonius guy did." And in the 1995 adaptation of Great Expectations, the story was moved from London to New York. Pip, played by Ethan Hawke, became a painter, Robert de Niro was a well-cast sinister prisoner and Gwyneth Paltrow was the untouchable eye candy.
Recently, there have been, for the most part, two types of modern American adaptations of English literature, and they're both very different from anything tried in this green and cinematically naive land. There's the gangland milieu, which facilitates the juxtaposition of gritty reality with proverbially poncy English texts, and then there's the ironic high- school-set nubile fluffhead genre of which Clueless was the leading example. Typical of the first was Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet.
He moved the feuding Montagues and Capulets from Renaissance Verona to gangland Verona Beach in LA. In Luhrmann's film, a TV anchorwoman replaced the narrator, gun play replaced sword play, gang violence supplanted family rivalries, there was a drag queen and the injudicious ingestion of illicit pharmaceuticals. Luhrmann changed everything - apart from the original script. By contrast, 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) was an example of the latter, a version of The Taming of the Shrew set in a US high school. At one point, a character called Walter Stratford says: "I'm down, I've got the 411, and you are not going out and getting jiggy with some boy, I don't care how dope his ride is. My mama didn't raise no fool," which you'll remember from the original. You'll also recall the following shrewish exchange that Shakespeare wrote: Patrick: "Don't get your panties in a twist." Kat Stratford: "Don't think for one minute that you had any effect whatsoever on my panties." Patrick: "Well then, what did I have an effect on?" Kat: "Other than my upchuck reflex, nothing."
What can be done to reclaim our heritage from these clever barbarians? The question becomes interesting given that BBC1 is showing a three-part drama called Sparkhouse next week, which is being billed as a modern reworking of Wuthering Heights, but with a twist. It's set in the Yorkshire Dales, but Heathcliff becomes a woman and Cathy a man. The woman, Carol Bolton, is a spunky chick doomed to life working on a hopeless farm. On Christmas Day she is in a JCB, digging a trench to bury a cow, wearing wellies and a purple festive hat. "I'm diggin' trench for t'cow," she says. She bled to death givin birth and we couldn't afford t' knacker's." It's grim up north, you know. At another moment, she puts a jar of pickled onions next to a can of Jeyes fluid on the pantry shelf, a piece of sheer folly which for me intensified the mood of impending doom.
While it's clear that the BBC hasn't much faith in this series (a three-part dramatisiation offloaded in the summer just before the new TV season starts suggests a lack of confidence), it is the most radical reworking of Emily Brontë since Kate Bush did her interpretative-dance-and-caterwauling number on Top of the Pops way back in the late 70s. There's shoplifting, Merc convertibles, incestuous rape, social exclusion, schematic sex scenes, Big Secrets, and a male lead (Joe McFadden) who looks like he should be in a boy band. The serial recalls little so much as a combination of a high-octane Emmerdale special and Jimmy McGovern's The Lakes.
The best thing about it is Sarah Smart, who plays Carol, and is a dead ringer for Juliette Binoche. The latter fact is a problem, however, because Binoche starred as Cathy in the 1992 film version of Wuthering Heights (the one in which, memorably, Sinead O'Connor narrated and appeared as Emily Brontë).You keep thinking Carol is Cathy when of course she's really Heathcliff. "I liked the idea of a young, feisty woman at odds with the world," says writer Sally Wainwright. Thankfully, there's more to the role of Carol and to Sarah Smart's performance than that might suggest. She has a row with her star-crossed lover after he marries another woman. "I'm not the other woman, she is," Carol tells him. It reminds one of something Sartre said to de Beauvoir: she was the essential lover, his others were merely contingent.
If Sparkhouse is rather lumpen in a lugubrious, Sunday-evening-BBC1 kind of way, it has some excellent scenes, notably a bourgeois birthday tea à l'herbe marred by one of those Big Secrets coming out inopportunely. But while the story uses Brontë as a springboard, it isn't really an adaptation of the novel, only one that riffs in a mostly unedifying way on the novel's central relationship . We need to try again. We need Nick Hornby to write a screenplay based on Diary of a Nobody about a Crouch End microserf. We need Zuleika Dobson set in modern Oxford, Middlemarch in post-industrial Nuneaton, Wodehouse's Leave It to Psmith in the Groucho Club, Sons and Lovers in the wake of the last miners' strike and The Secret Agent among anti-globalising Hackney anarchists. If we don't, our culture is, like, way doomed.
· Sparkhouse, Sunday September 1, 9pm, BBC1; Clueless, tonight, 10pm, BBC2
