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Ivo Michiels, besides being one of the most acclaimed and radical experimental literary authors in Dutch literature, is arguably the first Flemish professional screenwriter. These two occupations, that he continuously tried to combine, resulted in screenplays that either have been published as novels (and awarded important literary prizes) or repurposed as fragments in the Journal Brut cycle. Michiels developed a specific style for the screenplay by turning away from economical concrete descriptions. Instead he pursued a more literary way of writing, using narrative strategies aiming at certain effects in the mind of the reader, over conventional description. This article situates Michiels’ script writing as ‘performative’ in its intention and offers a case study of his work, as an expanded notion of the screenplay that elevates the form beyond mere description of what will be visible/audible on-screen. In Michiels’ practice, a screenplay is not just a text that ‘desires to become another text’, in the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini. In contrast, this article frames Michiels’ screenplays as ‘postdramatic’ texts which become artefacts, in and of themselves, claiming a certain independence from the film, whilst at the same time maintaining dialogue with the film (Bakhtin), realized or not.

El objetivo de este trabajo es teorizar acerca de la relación entre texto y puesta en escena a través de un recorrido por diferentes maneras en las que el texto es trabajado en la escena en obras de teatro flamencas contemporáneas. En este sentido, el artículo plantea que a partir de estas prácticas en la escena posdramática, el texto teatral pierde jerarquía, pero a la vez se constituye como un objeto autónomo.

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From stageplay to screenplay to film -tragic to melodramatic: the case of The Broken Circle Breakdown abstractThe Broken Circle Breakdown is one of the most successful theatre plays (2008) in recent years in Flanders. The film adaptation (2012) by Felix Van Groeningen was even more successful. Nevertheless, theatre play, screenplay and the final film differ considerably. This essay aims to reconstruct the genetic evolution of the screen idea from stage play to script to film. It tries to elucidate the dramaturgical choices made by the playwrights, screenwriters and last but in this case certainly not least, the editor, and how this influenced a shift from the tragic (play) towards the melodramatic (film). The adaptation thus can be described as what Jacques Rancière has called a 'thwarted fable'.This article discusses how, when adapting the play The Broken Circle Breakdown Featuring the Cover-Ups of Alabama into the film The Broken Circle Breakdown, choices made by screenwriters have a considerable influence on the resulting film. Although the original theatre play and the film tell the same story about the loss of a child and how that unhinges the relationship between the parents,