The tales she could tell you
The playwright Helen Edmundson tells Brian Logan how adaptations are the key to theatrical success
She is the playwright who turned Jamila Gavin’s Dickensian children’s novel Coram Boy into a smash hit at the National Theatre. She is also the in-house adapter for Shared Experience, which specialises in novels-on-stage. She rewrote The Mill on the Floss and, improbably enough, Tolstoy’s War and Peace for a National Theatre production in 1996.
None of which can have prepared Edmundson, 40, for her latest project, a new spin on Euripides’ Orestes. It’s the first time she has adapted an existing theatre script rather than a novel, “which is something I would never have thought of doing”. Edmundson differentiates between “adapting” and writing “a new version” of an old play. “What I don’t understand,” she says, “is if someone were to ask me, ‘Can you do a new version of The Three Sisters?’ — meaning, ‘Can you just rewrite the words slightly?’ ” Whether it be a novel or an old play, Edmundson is interested only in so far as she can write it in her own voice and approach it in her own way.
In the case of Orestes, she was liberated to do so by her belief (cover your ears, classicists) that Euripides’ original is “quite clunky. It’s not really one thing or another.” The play tells the story of how Agamemnon’s son and daughter wreak murderous revenge after their dad is slaughtered in the bath by his adulterous wife, Clytemnestra. “All those playwrights were dealing with myths,” says Edmundson. “Euripides’ version of the story is different from the Aeschylus version. So I just think, this is my take on the myth.”
She has, Edmundson admits, “played fast and loose” with the original text (“I don’t think there’s a single line in Euripides which is in my play”) and with Greek tragedy convention — she has excised the character of Orestes’ best pal, Pylades, laid off the Chorus and nixed Euripides’ improbable ending, in which Apollo fills the deus ex machina role, descending to earth to sort out everyone’s problems in the final reel. What remains is “the idea of using religion to justify violence. What happens when people put aside their own moral feelings or moral responsibilities in order to pursue what they believe to be a religious principle. That seems to me to be very relevant.”
Orestes may represent a departure from Edmundson’s literary adap- tations, but it’s also consistent with them. According to Edmundson, she’s forever being approached with suggestions for adaptations, and “they tend to have very passionate and expressive female characters, big stories, high drama. That’s what people associate me with, and that’s great. I like theatre that hits you emotionally and in a visceral way.”
Her style has also been defined by the exigencies of adapting sprawling literary epics for the stage. “If I’m doing an adaptation,” she says, “and I have to have the Battle of Borodino in the middle of it, or somebody has to die in a flood, that pushes me to be more daring and more theatrical.” For Edmundson’s first adaptation, Anna Karenina in 1992, Nancy Meckler told her to “think about how I would do it if I were doing an opera or a ballet. To free myself from naturalism and go somewhere beyond that.” She hasn’t looked back since, she adds.
There are those, however, who turn their noses up at literary adaptations. Who believe that the novel (an interior, psychological medium) and the theatre (an external, dramatic medium) are incompatible, and that a staged novel can never be more than a compromised version of its source. Edmundson gives this school of theatrical thought predictably short shrift. “These days we make very strong distinctions between adaptations and original work. But they’re all plays, and they all have to tell the audience a story with a particular voice behind it. Shakespeare plundered other people’s stories shamelessly. And people didn’t say, ‘That’s not a play, it’s an adaptation’.”
What Edmundson does admit is that there’s a financial imperative behind adaptations. She writes original plays, too: The Clearing at the Bush Theatre in London won the John Whiting Award in 1993, and in 2002 Mother Teresa is Dead was produced at the Royal Court. But it’s hard to make a living out of new plays — whereas audiences flock to familiar titles. “The adaptations earn me the space and security to be able to write new plays,” she says, although she adds: “I put as much of myself into an adaptation as I do into my original work, and find it just as fulfilling. I don’t really delineate between them.”
The key to successfully adapting for the stage, says Edmundson, is “to make brave decisions and not be slavishly loyal to the source”. With War and Peace, for example, she downgraded the major character of Prince Andrei. “In a novel,” she says, “there may be many different themes. But I have to choose characters to feature or not feature solely in relation to how they relate to the theme I have chosen to explore.” Edmundson remembers meeting Jamila Gavin (the first living novelist she’d adapted) before writingCoram Boy. “If I had been worrying all the time about what she was going to think, it would have failed. I had to go on my own journey with the story. Re-invent it, re-imagine it, reshape the way the story was told.”
The result was an emotionally overpowering production, accompanied by the music of Handel, which was compared favourably to the greatest literary adaptation of them all, the RSC’s 1980 Nicholas Nickleby. Try persuading Coram Boy’s audiences that this wasn’t real theatre. “I just don’t think it matters where the story comes from,” says Edmundson. “As long as the audience are taken on a journey, as long as it’s exciting for them, and especially if the play works like a great piece of music works, by bypassing the intellect and hitting the audience in the stomach.” October 21, 2006
