For, of course, the story is a short one, on the shorter side even by the standards of Christie’s shorter fiction. For this reason, it is not clear whether the effect of the pause was to heighten anticipation, and thus to madden readers, or to enable them to take time out to review the case and to ask questions that the reader of the short story may not have time to ask. Thus, viewers were forced to pause for thought, but not over a week, which has traditionally been the cadence for episodes of television mini-series instead, the 24-hour pause represented something of an extended intermission.
THE WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION SERIES
The series was originally aired by the BBC on two consecutive nights over the 2016 Christmas period (26 and 27 December). As a mini-series, and thus an adaptation for television rather than a feature film, Phelps’s text presents something of a readerly paradox in and of itself. This source text is not an alternative solution, but runs parallel to the actual reading-appealing, almost subliminally, for readers to produce it it also runs idly, however, and, unlike its hasty corollary, is content to wait to catch a distracted eye.īefore shifting the focus more squarely from the 2016 adaptation to the original text (and its status as auto-adaptation), I should like to draw attention to the format of Phelps’s screenplay. Rather than simply conjuring its own adaptation in a virtual future, “The Witness for the Prosecution” contains, in an immediate pre-diegetic past, the original source of itself as adaptation. Christie’s text, in other words, if I may myself adapt a term from Walter Benjamin, has an inherent adaptability. Thus, the meanderings of Phelps’s adapted text cause us to take stock and to read the original itself as loiterature (Chambers) and thus as a text that eschews self-coincidence, that offers more to the idle reader than an efficient delivery of truth.
The relationship between the two resembles, for Blin-Rolland, a vortex. My understanding of adaptation follows Armelle Blin-Rolland’s model, which refuses to privilege either the source or the adapted text, considering both instead to form part of a textual multiplicity. Sarah Phelps’s screenplay The Witness for the Prosecution (2016) does more than simply rekindle interest in Agatha Christie’s original short story rather, it points to its salvation.
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