The Art Of Taking Page To Stage

Are novels better read than seen? Two adaptations bring mixed results

- Michael Billington

I ONCE 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.