Speaking of adapting
impossible to adapt texts to the stage.
Would you like to try it with a collection of short stories by James
Joyce of all authors? Not me thanks! (And, sacrilege I know, I'm not exactly a
humongous fan of Joyce to begin with. I
respect his body of work, but aside from Portrait
of the Artist, I don't actually like
it very much. Well, I seem to like the
bits of Ulysses that everyone else hates
and hate the bits that everyone else loves . I'm contrarian like that.) So, how was an
adaptation going to put together multiple stories into a coherent stage play? Generally a play tends to require a plot an
audience can follow and invest in. It
doesn't necessarily have to follow the unities, but a collection of short
stories doesn't really suffice as a single play.
And yet . . .
Clearly, I was a bit
apprehensive about this one. I'd
recently seen a student production of just one of the short stories into a
short play, and I'd been singularly unimpressed. Just that one short story, with its single
defined . . . um . . . plot, had been interminable. And Oh. I was really afraid that they'd be
too precious with The Text of Allfather Joyce and end up doing what I think of
as a "Let's read an audiobook on stage" sort of adaptation, where you can't lose the
bloody narration even though the action on stage should really be able to take
care of a good deal of that (since that's the point
of showing rather than telling).
Because Joyce of course is all
about the words, so you just plunk as
many of the words as you can into the mouths of the actors and they narrate
themselves while acting. (This, by the way, is something I really respect Neil
Bartlett for avoiding in his effort to adapt Dorian
Gray, even if I was ultimately disappointed in the result.) It's a peeve. It drives me nuts. And it's pretty much what the Corn Exchange did. And yet . . .
Really, this should
have been a prime example of " Adaptation: You Are Doing it
Wrong!" And yet the sheer
excellence of the ensemble, their vivacious, varied, complex and passionate
performances, won me over completely. A
production that could have easily been overburdened by that precious conceit of
having actors narrate what they're doing
while doing it was instead a glorious riot of characters, of people's lives
weaving in and out of each others. Of
Dubliners. The characters you still pass
in the street, described, performed, and illuminated by the skill and
physicality of the acting, the giddy comedy and deep pathos of the
performances.
There was another
thing the Corn Exchange had going for them here, and that was the audience and
place. I honestly doubt this particular
"adaptation" would work
anywhere near as well anyplace else.
However, here, they were presenting The
Dubliners to the Dubliners, and part of the magic of the production was
the realization that all around me, through the litany of street names being
narrated/walked, those around me were remembering/narrating their own journeys
down those same streets . . . even if some of the names have been changed a
bit. There's a sense of "I know
this place." "I know these people." A communal recognition that even I, a
foreigner not yet here ten years, felt a bit of. It was fostered by the feeling of close-knit
ensemble that the cast presented, but even already crossing the barrier of
time, I don't think that sense could be fully replicated out of place.
A last Kudos to the
visual design. It was a detailed yet
relatively simple, beautifully flexible set and lighting design, and it was
extremely effective, managing to capture place and tradition, modernism and
flux.
