The art of taking page to stage
Are novels better read than seen? Two adaptations bring mixed results
IONCE suggested that ‘le vice Anglais’ was adaptation, by which I meant the urge to turn all great novels into plays. I’ve since modified my views. David Edgar’s version of Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby and Christopher Hampton’s of Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, both for the RSC, showed that fiction could make mesmerising theatre. However, I still hunger for original work and will go to my grave a happy man if I never have to sit through another stage version of Kafka’s The Trial.
The subject is on my mind because I recently saw, in the same week, Laura Wade’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s The Watsons at the Minerva, Chichester, and Stephen Sharkey’s version of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth at the Kiln in north London. The former is a total triumph, the latter a mixed blessing, but why?
The easy answer would be to say that Miss Wade has simply had to expand an uncompleted novel that runs to 43 pages, whereas Mr Sharkey has been forced to compress a 462-page work. There is, however, more to it than that. I was struck by the remark of a young friend, who’s currently turning a recent Booker Prize winner into a play. ‘There’s no point in doing it,’ she says, ‘unless I feel I can add something to the book.’
That is the nub of the matter. You see from The Watsons how Miss Wade has used Austen’s work to ignite a fascinating debate. She starts by giving us a crisp summary of the original: Emma Watson, having been brought up by a wealthy Shropshire aunt, returns to the genteel poverty of the family home in Surrey.
For Emma and her sisters, the only escape lies in marriage and three possible candidates are on display at a local ball. Tom Mus- grave is a posturing cad, Lord Osborne is a diffident aristocrat and Mr Howard is the kind of commonsensical cleric you often find in Austen’s later fiction. Who will Emma choose?
‘ Laura Wade has used Austen’s work to ignite a fascinating debate ’
Miss Wade does a good job of preserving Austen’s irony. When Lord Osborne loftily suggests that the impoverished Emma should ride on horseback, she tartly replies: ‘Female economy will do a great deal, my lord, but it cannot turn a small income into a large one.’
Rather than simply filling out Austen’s slender story, however, Miss Wade’s boldest stroke is to bring on a modern writer, unsurprisingly called Laura, who seeks to work out with Emma her best course of action. However, Emma and the other characters rebel against this puzzling intruder. Who’s really in charge? Is it Miss Wade or is it the figures from Austen’s elliptical fragment?
On one level, the question sounds absurd, as we know Miss Wade has written the play. However, I recall doing a public interview with Harold Pinter in which he told me that he felt that the character of Ruth in The Homecoming, whom he had created, was determining her own destiny. That raises the whole question of whether a vividly drawn character takes on a life of its own.
Miss Wade not only pursues this, but, like Pirandello in Six Characters In Search Of An Author, explores the whole theatrical process.
I should add that the play is brilliantly directed by Samuel West, beautifully performed by a cast headed by Grace Molony (Emma) and Louise Ford (Laura) and proves, once again, that adaptation thrives on addition rather than subtraction.
Mr Sharkey faces a wholly different situation with White Teeth. This dazzling novel spans the period from 1945 to 1999 and pursues the postwar friendship of the English Archie and the Bangladeshi Samad, offering a panoramic vision of multicultural modern Britain. You could say that Mr Sharkey has added a good deal to the original. He creates a framing device that sees the story from the vantage point of 2018 and has incorporated songs by Paul Englishby that reflect the pop styles of the 1970s and 1980s.
Indhu Rubasingham’s production is also a cheerful affair that’s
a love letter to Kilburn, where much of the action is set, as is the theatre itself.
It’s a perfectly pleasant show and there are lively performances, including Michele Austin as a voluble vagrant, Tony Jayawardena as a traditional patriarch and Naomi Frederick as a liberal busybody, but, as with so many adaptations, you’re conscious of what’s missing.
The stage show skips around in time, with the cast holding up number cards to indicate precisely which year we are in: what you lose are the gradations of growth that are the essence of fiction.
The other key thing you sacrifice is the authorial voice. Sometimes, that’s loudly insistent —I’ve been re-reading Vanity
Fair and had forgotten how often Thackeray is at our elbow, commenting on the hypocrisies and snobberies of English life. At other times, the authorial voice is quietly insidious: Henry James is a supreme example, as in when he remarks of the wealthy artistic patron in Roderick Hudson, disappointed by his dissipated protégé, that what he really admired was ‘the essential salubrity of Genius’.
In the case of White Teeth, Miss Smith is not a constant presence, but she gives you a strong sense of the immigrant experience. A first-generation figure such as Samad feels that you’re ‘in a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated’.
His twin sons, Magid and Millat, make their own later adjustments by becoming an apprentice eugenicist or a Muslim radical.
The novel is a subtle, astonishingly varied account of how immigrants feel—at different times, outsiders and insiders— whereas the stage show is a much less complicated Kilburn pastoral.
Are novels better read than seen? I’m not arguing that adaptations should be banned or boycotted—i’m simply suggesting that you have to be careful which book you choose and that any stage version of a novel has to offer us a fresh perspective.
As my wise young friend said, you have to add something to the original, which The Watsons triumphantly does by taking a work of Austen and asking whether literary characters are the author’s playthings or whether they have an independent life of their own.
‘The Watsons’, until December 1 (01243 781312); ‘White Teeth’, until December 22 (020–7328 1000)