Dickens and Twentieth-Century Stage Adaptation
vii
Between 1977 and 1978 Edgar wrote Teendreams with Susan Todd for the
Monstrous Regiment and Our Own People for Pirate Jenny. In this period he also
adapted The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs for the RSC and Mary Barnes for the
Birmingham Rep. At the end of 1978 he left for the States where he spent a year
on a Bicentennial Fellowship and married Eve Brook, then lecturer and later a
Birmingham City Councillor. In 1980 he worked with the RSC, Trevor Nunn and
John Caird, on the adaptation of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby,
which won the Society of West End Theatres award and the New York Tony
award and gave him international fame.
In 1981 Edgar joined the Labour party. Two years later he became literary
adviser to the RSC and wrote Maydays, which won the Plays and Players Best
Play award. In 1985 he was commissioned by Ann Jellicoe to write Entertaining
Strangers, a community play for Dorchester which was later revised for the
National Theatre. In this period he wrote ‘The Free or the Good’, a piece about the
distinction between the authoritarian and libertarian elements of Thatcherism.
In 1988 he published The Second Time as Farce, a collection of his
political and theatre journalism. A year later he founded Britain’s first MA course
in Playwriting Studies at the University of Birmingham. From 1990 he initiated a
series of annual conferences on theatre and playwriting at Birmingham University.
In the same year, he wrote The Shape of the Table, his first play directly
concerned with Eastern Europe.
In 1991 he wrote his fourth adaptation, his third with the RSC, The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekill and Mr. Hyde, directed by Peter Wood, and was elected
chair of the Theatre Writers’ Union. A year later he was appointed Honorary
Professor in the School of Performance Studies at Birmingham University. In
1994 he wrote the screenplay of Citizen Locke for Channel Four and his second
play on Eastern Europe, Pentecost, which was directed by Michael Attenborough
for the RSC at The Other Place and then transferred to the Young Vic Theatre in
London.
In 1998 Edgar collaborated with small fringe companies (Lunchbox
Theatre company and Steam Industry) on a new version of his one act play Ball
Dickens and Twentieth-Century Stage Adaptation
viii
Boys and on Dirty Tickets, a reworking of his The National Theatre, combined
with Peter Simmonds’ Final Call. In June 1999 he left the directorship of the MA
in creative writing at the University of Birmingham, which was taken over by
April De Angelis. In May 2000, he adapted The Secret Parts for Radio 4, a crime
novel by his late wife Eve Brook, and in the same month he worked with Trevor
Nunn on the dramatization of Gitta Sereny’s biography of Hitler’s confidant
Albert Speer, which was later performed at the National Theatre. Edgar’s latest
play, the forthcoming The Prisoner’s Dilemma, will open on 11
th
July 2001 at the
Top Theatre in Stratford.
Dickens and Twentieth-Century Stage Adaptation
ix
Introduction
This thesis arises from an attempt to investigate a dramatic genre that has been
developing in British theatre over the last twenty years: the stage adaptation of
classic novels.
1
Naturally, the stage adaptation of narrative texts is hardly a new
practice. From the great Elizabethan playwrights to the Victorian adaptors, there
is an extensive tradition of superb – and less so – theatre based on narrative
fiction. However, there is a major difference between the practice of stage
adaptation in its generic sense of dramatic rewriting of a pre-existing story or
motif, and this contemporary tendency towards the dramatization of classic
novels. In attempting to defend the creative quality of his adaptation works,
playwright David Edgar remarked:
When Picasso found a bit of an old gas oven in a junkyard, put it on a
plinth, called it ‘Venus de Gas’ and declared it a piece of sculpture by
Picasso, he was making the point that one of the artist’s functions is to
look out for and reveal those everyday things in the world – whether
objects or forms of behaviour – that are usually unnoticed, or taken for
granted. The act of choice is in itself an artistic process.
2
In a similar fashion, the modern adaptor, by means of theatrical presentation
frames in the here-and-now of the theatrical event, a work of literature, making
the statement that that work ‘has something important to say to our times’.
3
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, one of the minor novels of
Charles Dickens, is an example of a work of literature, forgotten on the shelves,
neglected by the critics and avoided by readers, that became a popular theatrical
success in 1980 when it was put on stage by Edgar and the Royal Shakespeare
1
With regard to this, Fry writes ‘A recent survey of the annual repertory reports from British
theatres (…) shows how, over the last few years, the number of new and classical plays presented
has decreased in favour of a huge profusion of adaptations. M. Fry, ‘Introduction’. In M. Fry,
Frontline Drama 4: Adapting Classics. Methuen Drama, 1996.
2
D. Edgar, ‘Adapting Nickleby’. In D. Edgar, The Second Time as Farce. London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1988, p.144.
3
Ibid., p.145.
Introduction
x
Company’s adaptation.
4
However, my choice of Dickens does not depend solely
on this successful adaptation by the RSC. Dickens is one of the most adapted
novelists in British literature. His works and his worlds have been popularised and
dramatized throughout two centuries, in different languages and means of com-
munication. His narrative is engaging, his characters full of life and his fiction is
as much indebted to theatricality and melodrama as his contemporary adaptors
were indebted to him. During his life and after, his stories and people have always
lived on the stage as well as on the pages of his serialised issues.
In this sense Dickens was the ideal subject for a discussion of stage
adaptation of classic novels. His fortune with dramatization through the centuries
makes possible a comparison between a variety of different types and contexts of
adaptation. His distinctive narrative style and his ironic wink provides an inter-
esting point of departure for the study of the possibilities of theatrical renderings
of irony and authorial vision. And finally, his robust attack on social injustice and
the overwhelming power of money, which is one of the key elements of Nicholas
Nickleby, allow an analysis of the representation of present political issues
through historical remoteness.
The choice of Edgar and the RSC’s adaptation is also the result of a series
of factors. Firstly, the adaptation text resulted from the work of the whole team –
writer, directors and actors – working together on the novel, thus producing an
adaptation style that was representative of a number of different voices. Secondly,
the majority of the theatrical devices were developed during the rehearsals, which
are widely documented by Edgar and the assistant director, thus providing an ideal
source for the study of the adaptation techniques in their making. And finally, this
1980 production is one of the first successful examples that paved the way to the
development of the genre of stage adaptation of classic novels on the British stage.
4
The RSC’s success contributed considerably to the revival of Dickens’ novel. New editions of
Nicholas Nickleby followed the adaptation and notably one of these was published in association
with the Channel Four broadcast of the play and had scenes from the RSC’s production on the
cover page. See C. Dickens, The Illustrated Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. London:
Published by Joseph in association with Channel Four Television Company Limited, Primetime
Television and RM Productions, 1982.
Dickens and Twentieth-Century Stage Adaptation
xi
In an attempt to account for the transformations from the novel to the play
I have proceeded in my analysis as follows. First I have identified what I consid-
ered to be the most interesting presentational techniques of the play – the various
types of narrative techniques, the mime element, the agitprop presentation, the
cinematic techniques and other dramatic devices – for their capacity to telescope
and synthesize in a modern fashion the style of the text and its context. Secondly I
have tried to contextualise these techniques by relating them to more general cur-
rents and methods of contemporary theatre. Then, I have returned to the novel and
I have attempted to explore the sections that had constituted the point of departure
of such techniques – the narrative sections, the authorial comments, the descrip-
tive passages, and the moments of characterisation – in the light of the choices of
the adaptation. And finally I have drawn from the many studies of Dickens’ life,
works, and narrative style, those elements I saw related to what Edgar and the
others had highlighted in their production.
In terms of presentation, after an introductory section where I give a brief
survey of the theories of adaptation of classic novels and of the history of Dickens
dramatizations, as well as presenting the RSC’s production, its participants and
their approach to the text (Chapter 1), I structure my analysis in four chapters,
each corresponding to one of the tasks with which the adaptor is faced when
adapting a text from page to stage. He has to find a new way of telling the story
(Chapter 2). He must show the author’s as well as his own attitudes to the story
and the characters (Chapter 3). He is required to develop theatrical means to
describe the novel’s moods and atmospheres (Chapter 4). And finally, perhaps
most essentially, he needs to present and develop the characters (Chapter 5). Each
chapter is then divided into two sections which explore some representative
examples of the process of transformation from the narrative sections of the novel
to the theatrical solutions of the play. In each section, I will start by analysing
relevant passages in the novel in the light of recent studies on Dickens’ style, his
themes, his literary career and the times he lived through. In this way, I will try to
highlight the elements that have been drawn on and developed in the adaptation. I
will then proceed to the analysis of the techniques actually used by the Nickleby
Introduction
xii
team to reconstruct the meanings of the novel and contextualise them in the light
of currents and methods of contemporary theatre. In each section I will thus
follow the development of the themes of the text and its context from the narrative
version of the novel to the theatrical rendering of the play.
As well as newspaper reviews and articles on the first run, I have based my
analysis of the production and the performance on three major sources: David
Edgar’s own account of the experience in ‘Adapting Nickleby’,
5
the detailed
reconstruction of the making of the production by director Trevor Nunn’s assistant
Leon Rubin,
6
and the eight-and-a-half hour video recording of the Broadway
production
7
that was broadcast in four episodes by Channel Four from 7
th
to 28
th
November 1982.
5
Edgar, Op. cit., 1988.
6
RUBIN
7
Although the text of the video version is publicised as a screenplay by David Edgar, very minor
changes have been made from the published version of the play in D. Edgar, Plays Two. London:
Methuen, 1990.
Dickens and Twentieth-Century Stage Adaptation
1
Chapter One: How to Adapt a Dickens Novel
1.1 Adaptations of Dickens
This is to give Notice,
TO PIRATES.
THAT we have at length devised a mode for execution for
them, so summary and terrible, that if any gang or gangs thereof
presume to hoist but one shred of the colours of the good ship
NICKLEBY, we will hang them on gibbets so lofty and enduring, that
their remains shall be a monument of our just vengeance to all
succeeding ages; and it shall not lie in the power of any Lord High
Admiral, on earth, to cause them to be taken down again.
1
Dickens has been both a literary and a popular phenomenon. The extraordinary
number and range of dramatic adaptations of his novels through the decades
2
reveal both the immediateness and the accessibility of his characters and stories
and the enduring validity and fascination of the worlds he portrays. From his very
beginning as a novelist, his literary career and production were essentially inter-
twined with the duplication, the popularisation and the diffusion of his novels
through dramatisation and, most importantly, much of his popularity in recent
years is indebted to this universe of dramatic replicas and reproductions. Such
enduring suitability of Dickens’ texts to the stage opens a double itinerary of
research. On the one hand, it can serve to investigate Dickens’ texts and his literary
significance and, on the other, it can provide an invaluable point of departure for
the exploration of the practice of adaptation today. This binary purpose constitutes
the focus of this study, and will be attempted through the comparative analysis of
the novel Nicholas Nickleby and its most renowned twentieth-century stage adapta-
tion, the 1980 production by David Edgar and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
1
C. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby Proclamation. In Appendix to DNN, p. 2.
2
There have been over a thousand adaptations of Dickens works for the stage, TV, cinema and the
radio. Of these 250 were productions from Nicholas Nickleby. The authority on Dickens adapta-
tions is Bolton, Dickens Dramatized. London: Mansell, 1987.
Chapter One: How to adapt a Dickens novel
2
However, before embarking on the analysis of the process of adaptation of
Nickleby it is necessary to both briefly review the development of the adaptation of
Dickens’ novels over the years and to provide an account of recent studies on the
adaptations of Victorian novels and on contemporary stage adaptation in general.
In one of the latest studies on Victorian stage adaptation of novels,
3
Cox
explores the form of stage adaptation in the light of the distinction between ‘high
and low culture’ which in the first half of the 19
th
century was developing towards
the modern dichotomy of ‘art and the marketplace’. By analysing the literary pro-
duction of the early 19
th
century in terms of ‘cultural artefacts’, Cox argues that
drama in this period defines itself in relation to the novel, ‘which, as a genre,
appears to relate most effectively to contemporary social structures’.
4
In this light,
he views adaptation as a manifestation of this process of self-definition of drama in
relation to the novel at a time of economic transformation. He goes on to claim that
the role of the novelist was also undergoing a transformation at that time. The
development of the figure of the professional writer who secured his place in soci-
ety according to his popularity and literary success – another consequence of the
emergent interrelationship between literature and the marketplace – complicated
further the relation between the novelist and popularising adaptations of his novels.
Dickens is an ideal example of this conflicting relationship. He always
entertained an ambiguous position towards the adaptation of his novels. On the
one hand, he would often attend productions and comment positively upon the
acting and the adaptation itself; indeed, at one point he proposed to write his own
dramatisation of Oliver Twist
5
. On the other hand, he utterly despised the ‘pirates’
who made a living out of the vulgarisation of other people’s work and strenuously
condemned the wild and uncontrolled exploitation of his novels by the so-called
Victorian hacks. In a period when authorship was not fully recognised and pro-
tected by the law, when literature and especially the novel were coming to terms
3
P. Cox, Reading Adaptations. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
4
P. Cox, Op. cit., 2000, p. 19.
5
In a letter to Friedrick Yates, Dickens writes ‘supposing we arrange preliminarily for our mutual
satisfaction, I propose to dramatize Oliver for the first night of next Season’. In C. Dickens, The
Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume One: 1820-1839. Edited by Madeline House and Graham
Storey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, p. 338.
Dickens and Twentieth-Century Stage Adaptation
3
with the rules of the marketplace, and when the role of the writer of imaginative
fiction was coming to be seen as a professional one which would define his posi-
tion within the social hierarchy, the issues of artistic and commercial control that
are raised by adaptation are enormous. To have his work corrupted by a hack from
one of the minor theatres could threaten Dickens’ earnings and seriously damage
his literary and social position. But, on the other hand, as Bolton argues about
Dickens’ relationship with his hacks:
The playwrights kidnapped the children of his imagination, yet promoted
public awareness of his novels.
6
In what is to be regarded as the authority in the field of Dickens adaptation,
Bolton’s substantial and comprehensive encyclopaedia of dramatizations of
Dickens novels entitled Dickens Dramatized, nine different phases of dramatisa-
tion are identified ranging from 1830 to 1987. The first five phases, from 1835 to
the turn of the century, characterise a period in which stage melodrama and
vaudeville provided the framework within which Dickens’ stories were com-
pressed and his characters and their relationships were emphasized and exagger-
ated. It was the period of the first adaptation of Nickleby – Nicholas Nickleby: or
Doings at Do-The-Boys Hall. Burletta in 2 acts, by Edward Sterling for the
Adelphi theatre – which came out in November 1838 with an ‘apocryphal’ ending,
as the novel was at that time but one third complete. Stirling’s play ends so
improbably with Smike inheriting a fortune that no playgoers could have mistaken
this solution for the plot of Dickens’ novel. It was a farce, and as such it was
accepted and even praised by Dickens himself.
7
This was then followed by the
hack work of Dickens’ most hated adaptor, William Moncrieff – the playwright
on whom he then based the character of the ‘literary gentleman’
8
in Nickleby.
Dickens bitterly disapproved of Moncrieff’s adaptation Nicholas Nickleby and
Poor Smike: or the Victim of the Yorkshire School. 3 or 5 Acts. In its sequel of
6
P.H. Bolton, Op. cit, 1987, p. 154.
7
‘He (Dickens) remarked especially on the clever tableaux formed to imitate Brown’s
illustrations.’ P.H. Bolton, Op. cit., 1987, p. 157.
8
‘…there was a literary gentleman present who had dramatised in his time two hundred and forty-
seven novels as fast as they had come out – some of them faster than they had come out – and who
WAS a literary gentleman in consequence.’ In DNN, p. 597.
Chapter One: How to adapt a Dickens novel
4
tableaux vivants and separated episodes – manifestly publicised in the playbill
9
–
this version of The Adventures represents an example of the most theatrical and
dramatically flimsy renderings of Dickens’ novel. The paramount attention to the
spectacular and exterior elements of the novel, from the grotesque locations to the
costumes, produced in the text a lack of unity and an absence of structure.
However, many elements of Moncrieff’s dramatically fragile Nickleby are
the extreme consequences of a tendency that was typical of the dominant dramatic
genre of the period: melodrama. Melodrama resulted from the conflation of circus
spectacle and comédie larmoyant. It quickly gained ground, becoming the most
popular voice of 19
th
century theatre.
10
To account for this success were various
factors. On the one hand, there was the circus element which brought in a focus on
mise en scène, the necessity for a completion to the written text in the form of
theatrical devices which were to create grand spectacle and entertainment. On the
other hand, the legacy of the comédie larmoyant made its claims on the themes
and tone of the text. The use of the pathetic mode, the moral teaching at the end
and its consolatory effect, as well as the circular structure of the plot with the
ever-present final re-establishment of order, contributed in making melodrama the
most successful theatrical machine of the century. And melodrama also consti-
tuted the basic form into which Dickens’ novels were dramatised at least until the
turn of the century.
The last four phases of Bolton’s analysis describe the evolution of
Dickens’ adaptation from the turn of the century to 1987, when the study was
published. This period is characterised by the emergence of what Bolton calls the
‘new electromagnetic media’: radio, film and later television. After an initial
endurance of a certain interest in Dickens’ novels among professional managers
and actors in the early years of the twentieth century, from World War I onwards
9
The playbill reads ‘Scenes include Act I: Kitchen at Dotheboys Hall; Room at Madam Mantalini,
Best Parlour at Dotheboys Hall, School Room at Dotheboys Hall; Act II: Ralph Nickleby’s
Counting House; Newman Noggs’ Garret; Private Room at the Saracen’s Head (…) Last scene of
all that ends this strange eventful history – Poetic Justice and the Outcast Restored’ In P.H. Bolton,
Op. cit., 1987, p. 161.
10
Melodrama also influenced nineteenth-century fiction as explored in P. Brooks, The
Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Dickens and Twentieth-Century Stage Adaptation
5
Dickens’ fame by proxy was mainly entrusted to film, radio and television adap-
tations. A 1903 production of Nicholas Nickleby was most probably the first film
to come from a Dickens novel. It was silent, black-and-white, and proposed a
segment from the schoolroom episode only. The other famous Nickleby on the big
screen, which is also the most recent one, was Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1943 black-
and-white version of the saga of the Nickleby family. In 1938 and through the
second world war, the first BBC radio dramas of Nickleby were broadcast.
11
The
majority of these were performances of radio adaptations, but at times, especially
on anniversaries of his novels, dramatic readings from the novels also contributed
to the diffusion of Smikes and Ralphs in the British consciousness. These dra-
matic readings later gave birth to a series of radio readings ‘from the very voice of
Charles Dickens’ through the Forties and Fifties. As to television, it has been the
most successful medium of Dickens-dramatising since the war. Especially in its
serial forms of broadcast, BBC TV has a considerable number of productions to
its credit. The first BBC televised version of Nicholas Nickleby was in autumn
1957 with Vincent Tilsley’s ten-episode version. The most recent TV serialized
version of Nicholas Nickleby was the ITV’s two-episode Sunday prime-time ver-
sion, with a screenplay by Martyn Hesford, broadcast on 8
th
and 15
th
April 2001.
The RAI also broadcast a version of the novel on 28
th
May 1958 making Le
avventure di Nicola Nickleby one of the few Dickens novels to arrive in Italy
12
(along with Il Circolo Picwick, Davide Copperfield and Oliver Twist). The new
electromagnetic media have certain undeniable advantages over the theatre in the
dramatization of long novels like Dickens’. The possibility of serial broadcast is
closer to the serialised publishing method with which the novel was first
published and also gives the opportunity to take in and assimilate the various plots
and subplots and the vast array of characters over a longer period of time. The
frequent changes of scene on the screen make possible a highly faithful rendition
11
The very first radio drama was a script written by G.P. Earl and V.C. Clinton-Baddley for a
regional broadcast. During the war a ten-episode radio version of Nickleby by Audrey Lucas was
aired on the Home Service. It was one of the few Dickens dramas broadcast during the war. See
Bolton, Op. cit, 1987, p.155.
12
In the 1958 RAI production the role of ‘Rodolfo Nickleby’ was interpreted by the renowned
theatre actor Arnoldo Foá.
Chapter One: How to adapt a Dickens novel
6
of the episodic and diffuse nature of a novel like Nickleby. However, both the
radio versions and the televised renditions did not, in general, deviate
substantially from the popularising and abridged versions of the nineteenth
century melodrama. With some important exceptions such as Alberto Cavalcanti’s
film and a number of BBC radio and TV versions, it was not until the late Sixties
early Seventies that an interest in the dramatic potential of Dickens’ fiction,
beyond and within its stereotypical characters and larmoyant stories, moved
outside lecture theatres and literary magazines into the practice of adaptation.
In the ninth phase of Dickensian adaptation, from 1970 to the present day,
Bolton argues that ‘Dickens’ live theatrical posterity has been to some consider-
able degree reborn’
13
:
It is as if Dickens’ immortality survived, from 1920 to 1960, mainly in
ghostlike electromagnetic form, to be reborn again today upon the stage,
in the living, gesturing, speaking bodies of actual actors.
14
The subject of this study, the ‘gala’ RSC 1980 production of Nicholas Nickleby,
was the epigone of a new stirring theatrical interest in Dickens’ novels. Stagings
of Nicholas Nickleby occurred at the Citizen Theatre in Glasgow in 1969 and in
1970 at the Nottingham Playhouse. A version of the novel entitled Nickleby and
Me, which presents the story from the point of view of the Crummles with the
actors playing the Crummles theatricals performing the novel, was written and
produced by Brahms and Sherring in 1975 at the Theatre Royal, Stratford. As
these examples suggest, the story of the Nickleby family, the tragedy of Ralph and
Smike, the farce of the theatrical Crummles and the horrors of Dotheboys Hall
had been all but neglected on the British stage when Trevor Nunn decided to
embark on the adaptation of the entire novel.
Not half as much has been written on the practice of contemporary stage
adaptation as on Victorian dramatization or film adaptation. However, a compre-
hensive theoretical study of the practice of contemporary stage adaptations of
novels by British playwright and adaptor Michael Fry, entitled Playing the Novel,
13
P.H. Bolton, Op. cit, 1987, p. 6
14
Ibid., p. 6.
Dickens and Twentieth-Century Stage Adaptation
7
is forthcoming.
15
In one of Fry’s earlier articles, his introduction to Frontline
Drama 4: Adapting Classics, he very pragmatically accounts for the merits that
stage adaptation of classic novels holds for the contemporary British stage.
[…] whilst there may be more status for the inexperienced playwright in
having an original play produced at the Royal Court, s/he may find it
ultimately more lucrative to have an adaptation produced at five or six of
the larger repertory theatres. Performers as well as audiences have be-
come rather partial to adaptation. The Victorian novelists, in particular,
created an inimitable pageant of characters to play, wrote glorious dia-
logues and told mesmerising stories. The actors usually play more than
one part, and the play can be written to order, to suit length, budget, cast
number, male-female proportion (there is a happy bias towards female
characters in much of Victorian fiction), gender irregularities (always
fun) and the directors and designers, composers and choreographers can
all vaunt their resourcefulness and brilliance.
16
Adaptation, Fry argues, is therefore convenient for the playwright: it flatters the
performers, gives director and technicians the opportunity to show their value and
ultimately provides the audience with that concoction of novelty and tradition that
has constantly proven to work exceptionally well on the British public. However,
the fascination of contemporary playwrights and directors for the theatrical re-
reading of classic novels, I believe, does at times manage to go beyond the ever-
present reasons of convenience and audience approval. In many cases, the project
of adaptation springs from a playwright, an actor or a director’s passion for a par-
ticular author, novel or indeed historical period that they have come across in their
readings and that they consider relevant or indeed enlightening in relation to a
contemporary situation. Playwright and adaptor Helen Edmundson, for instance,
who has worked for more than ten years with the Shared Experience company,
and whose adaptation of Anna Karenina won the Time Out Award for Outstand-
ing Theatrical Event in 1992, says of working with Tolstoy:
15
See the bibliographical note on the author in M. Fry, Frontline Drama 4: Adapting Classics.
London: Methuen, 1996, p. 97.
16
M. Fry, Op. cit., 1996, p. xi.
Chapter One: How to adapt a Dickens novel
8
Tolstoy admits that his philosophy is not an easy answer and this throws
up all sorts of questions which I felt should be at the centre of the play.
[…] Should we make peace with our mortality or should we fight it to the
bitter end? Is it ever right for one person to impose his or her will on
others? […] These are dilemmas; ones which are perhaps particularly
relevant to our politically apathetic and introspective society.
17
A veteran of adapting novels and perhaps the most famous living adaptor in
Britain
18
, Steven Berkoff reveals a similar experience of dialogue with the original
text, with its author and themes, in the introduction to his version of Kafka’s The
Trial:
The trial is my life. It is anyone’s trial. It is the trial of actually creating
the production. The four months of preparation. I read the book several
times before I tried to hew out of its guts its theatrical essence. A meta-
physical theatre. I studied it for years and became Joseph K. I was K
struggling in the abyss of self doubt and yet wanting, like Kafka, to be
that man who ‘cannot live without a lasting trust in something indestruc-
tible within himself.’
19
And finally David Edgar himself, who has produced two adaptations of Victorian
novels, both jointly with the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Life and Adven-
tures of Nicholas Nickleby in 1980 and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1996, has also
commented on various occasions on the function and value of stage adaptation of
the classics on the contemporary stage:
17
H. Edmundson, ‘Working with Tolstoy’. In H. Edmundson, War and Peace. London: Nick Hern
Books, 1996, p. v.
18
Naturally, Berkoff is also one of the leading figures of contemporary British theatre at large and
his experimentation with the theatrical form of the monologue, is perhaps the most accomplished
and certainly the most influential aspect of his theatre.
19
S. Berkoff, ‘Steven Berkoff on the Trial’. In S. Berkoff, The Trial, Metamorphosis, In the Penal
Colony. London: Amber Lane Press, 1988, p. 3.
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