Afterword
David Edgar
When I was asked to adapt Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George for the stage I hadn’t read the book or any of the reviews, and was thus its perfect reader.
The experience Barnes designed for such a person is this. From the title, you get that the book tells the stories of two men. It’s quickly clear that the narrative proceeds in alternating, unnumbered chapters, headed by the two men’s first names. Their stories are told in a way which emphasises the contrast between them: one a boy with a vivid imagination, the other growing up in a household where making things up was not encouraged. One boy is fascinated by the world outside, the other scared of it. One man moves away from his Edinburgh home, trains as a doctor, and becomes an author. The other one stays at home in rural Staffordshire, studies Law and opens a solicitor’s practice in Birmingham. One is an increasingly committed spiritualist, the other the son of an Anglican vicar. And while one is increasingly in command of his life, the other finds himself caught up in circumstances over which he has no control.
I’m not sure when I checked out the back jacket, but whenever it was, I would have found tantalising but incomplete evidence for the story’s provenance. The novel had been produced with ‘intense research’ but also ‘vivid imagination’ (a phrase which appeared twice, to underline the point). Yes, Arthur was to become a writer and ‘one of the most famous men of his age’, but that doesn’t mean he has to have existed (this is a novel, right?). Julian Barnes ‘brings to life’ a ‘long-forgotten case’ which seems fairly conclusive (but Middlemarch is described as if it really existed). The longest critical endorsement – from the fiction writer P.D. James – praises Barnes as ‘a major novelist’ constructing ‘a compelling narrative’: ‘This novel’ (novel, see?) ‘is Barnes at his best’.
Well, you would have to have lived on Mars not to have got who Arthur is by page 61 (on which a character initially called Sheridan mutates via Sherringford into Sherlock). You’ve also realised that the solicitor is half-Indian (his surname is first used on page 35). There is good evidence that Arthur Conan Doyle has not been imaginatively catapulted into a fictional case (as, in reverse, Sherlock Holmes is sometimes called upon to catch Jack the Ripper), when the front cover of the real George Edalji’s actual book on railway law is reproduced in facsimile on page 92 (but, then, they can do wonders with Photoshop nowadays). Clearly, the question remains as to whether these two contrasting strands are going to cross. Perhaps sadly, the back cover reveals that they will, but not when.
Having established the reality of his protagonists, Barnes begins to ring subtle but telling changes on his structure. What is in fact Chapter Thirty-One is headed ‘George & Arthur’, but is about neither of them: it describes an incident/crime of which George will be accused, and which will ultimately take him to Arthur (in a manner recognisable by students of Arthur’s most famous creation). The next-but-one chapter is headed by a different, surnamed person, a police officer, marking the fact that (unlike Arthur, who heads all ‘his’ chapters as of right), George is losing control of his story to others. Having tugged the chapter headings to and fro between him and the police for a bit, George wrests his back, dropping the counterpoint for ninety pages as – in George chapter after George chapter – he is named as a member of a mysterious ‘Great Wyrley Gang’, suspected of a heinous crime, arrested and tried. Then we return to Arthur, for an uninterrupted, forty-three-page chapter describing a series of essentially private, domestic dramas, which we are nonetheless invited to compare (in their intensity and impact) with the cataclysmic happenings which turn George’s world upside down.
The two men meet on page 294. In proportion to the length of the novel, this is equivalent to Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra meeting at the end of Act Three. There are dramas which delay the first meeting of their chief protagonists: in both Nora Ephron’s romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle and Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, they don’t meet till the last scene. There are plays and novels whose whole point is that the various plot strands end up having nothing literal to do with each other (in which the reader is invited to work out their thematic connection). But Arthur & George is a detective story. Holding the meeting of the sleuth and his client back this long confirms that Barnes has a keen dramatic sense. But, in this case, he had a dramatic idea that’s unworkable in the dramatic medium. It is clear long before page 294 that, in a two-and-a-half-hour stage adaptation, much of pages 1–293, particularly the story of the crime of which George Edalji was accused, will need to be told in flashback. In order to adapt Julian Barnes’s novel, I realised, I was going to have to blow his whole storytelling strategy the moment the house lights dimmed.
Inevitably, this raised a question in my mind. How different would my adaptation be to an original play based on the same factual material? Facing similar questions when I was asked to base a play about Albert Speer on Gitta Sereny’s biography (at the National Theatre in 2000), it was clear both that hers was the most detailed and authoritative study of Hitler’s architect, and that it contained at least one crucial episode – Speer’s admission of knowledge of the Holocaust – which involved Sereny herself. However, there was never any question that my research would extend beyond Sereny’s book, and that some of my conclusions would be different.
Although Barnes did considerable research, the issue here wasn’t the facts but the fiction. A conversation revealed how much was imagined. For instance, the domestic crisis which Arthur confronts during George Edalji’s arrest and trial concerns a nine-year, secret and unconsummated relationship with a young woman called Jean Leckie, conducted as his wife Touie fought and lost a battle with consumption. As most of the letters are destroyed, Julian was obliged (and pleased) to invent many of the key scenes in their relationship, including their first meeting.
Further, he invents a crucial Arthur/George scene. Julian was first drawn to the story by a passing reference in Douglas Johnson’s book about the Dreyfus Affair, which pointed out that the falsely imprisoned Jewish officer proved to be a dry, aloof and above all ungrateful victim. George, too, failed to live up to Arthur’s expectations; though, as Arthur was essentially mounting a chivalric mission, slaying metaphorical dragons and winning damsels, it’s hard to see how George could have. Clearly there needed to be a moment at which we see George in revolt against his rescuer. In life, the two men only met once during the course of Doyle’s work on the case. In terms of Julian’s take on the story, his invented second meeting is what the French call a scène à faire and we call an obligatory scene.
In that and many other cases, the novelist had already done much of dramatist’s work. But, inevitably, much basic carpentry is needed to move any book from page to stage. I’ve adapted two novels, two memoirs and one biography. Each one taught me something new about the process.
Working on Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby for the RSC in the early eighties made me aware of the different rhythm of stage storytelling (the ear working slower than the eye: you need fewer words to achieve the same effect, particularly – frankly – with Dickens). Stage dialogue also tends to be more jagged than novel dialogue: long speeches are longer, short contrasting drop lines crisper, antiphonal dialogue less gracefully balanced, lines are more often interrupted, unfinished or broken. Further, the stage allows the writer much stricter control over the pace of the storytelling. Playwrights use set-ups and pay-offs as meaning-bearing devices much more than novelists because they can guarantee that something planted at 7.45 will pay off at 9.30, night after night. With a novel, you don’t know if the pay-off will be read in the same sitting as the set-up, or days (or even weeks) later.
Most pay-offs are twists (think of last shots of The Usual Suspects or Citizen Kane), and twists rely on contrast. Adapting Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and aware of the many film adaptations that give Dr Jekyll a fiancée, I wanted to underline the strangely empty, bleak, bachelor London in which Stevenson set his novella (in which there are no named female characters at all). In the book you just show it (backed up by lengthy, evocative but undramatisable description). In the theatre, you communicate meaning by contrasting what you want to draw attention to with something different. So I gave Jekyll a widowed sister with two children, living in a warm, colourful house in Dorset, pointing up the monochrome and monosexual character of his London life, and providing an image of the alternative life he could have led.
Like Nickleby, Arthur & George is a long novel and the compression required to stage it is considerable. There are many losses, including the gentle, Austenian wit of Barnes’s own narrative voice: Doyle’s wife Touie possessing ‘an open, generous nature, a lovely head of curls, and a small income of her own’, and a vision of Heaven as ‘a superior version of Southsea’. However, the certainty that a fuse laid at the beginning of the play will ignite two hours later allowed me to borrow a device from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and provide a complementary, feminine perspective on Arthur and George’s stories. In the novel, Jean Leckie never meets George’s invalid, housebound sister Maud. Barnes hints that Maud’s infirmity might be exaggerated. I decided to get her out of the house, and to invent a conversation with Jean which provided an alternative and perhaps more humanly perceptive narrative frame (although taking much of the content from the novel), rhyming with George’s recounting of the circumstances of his case to Arthur. Where and why the Jean/Maud conversation takes place is not revealed till the end.
Both these devices are essentially about pointing up what is already there with a different vocabulary. But, for me, adapting Barnes’s novel raised more profound questions of the different kinds of meaning which novels and plays can express.
In multi-plotted works, both the theatre and the novel invite – even require – writers to relate their different plots to a common theme. You know Hamlet is about a man avenging his father because this is a requirement made of three men (Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras); you know that Three Sisters is about lost dreams because that’s what they all share. As he worked on the novel, Julian realised that the connecting membrane between the legal, romantic and religious strands in his story was the distinction between thinking something, believing it, knowing it and proving it. This distinction – expressed in the use of those four words in all the different sections of the story – unlocks the novel. But although those words and those distinctions are present in the adaptation, I realised that this linguistic distinction is too delicate – perhaps too abstract – as the spine of a play.
For me, the richest conceptual link between George and Arthur’s stories proved to be one that opens and closes the novel and pops up pretty regularly in the interim: the idea of seeing (a process of which thinking, believing, knowing and proving are subsiduaries). George is unable to see the truth of what happens to him; Arthur doesn’t acknowledge why he has taken up his case. Unlike believing and knowing, seeing is something you can see people doing.
At a slightly more abstract, plotting level, seeing is something which people can decide not to do. In Mother Courage, Brecht wrote a play which relies on the central character’s lack of understanding: the audience sees what Courage won’t see (that the war kills its own), because she refuses to. Even so, Brecht has to provide her a brief moment of insight, which can encourage audiences to misread the play as a celebration rather than a condemnation of its central character. In the novel, George refuses to see what Arthur sees as the wider social implications of George’s case, at the same time as his narrower vision allows him to see the problems and limitations of Arthur’s campaign on his behalf. I have made both Arthur and George understand a little more than they do in the novel, not because theatre audiences need taking by the hand, but because – once again – the medium works by contrast; in this case, within a character. You see the error because you see the character developing into a person who can correct it.
Both novel and play end with the same question, but not with the same scene. Early on in his process, Julian read about a meeting, held at the Albert Hall after Conan Doyle’s death, twenty-five years after the main events of the story. The meeting – which ends with a medium summoning up a manifestation of the great man – was clearly a wonderful opportunity for a great set-piece. It was perfectly feasible that the man Arthur set out to help would have gone there, and – as the hushed crowd murmured ‘He is here’ – have confronted the very distinction between something thought, believed, known or proved. In the novel, the scene is a hugely effective summation of its theme. No one ever suggested cutting it, and finishing with the last actual meeting of the two men. I even tried to work it into my adaptation. It was clear to me and everyone who read it that if I didn’t cut it, someone else would.
Why? It’s not so much that the novel can accommodate repetition, express the same thing in several ways, and indulge in multiple endings, echoes, codas and epilogues. It’s that plays can’t. Even Peter Pan – whose ending relates what happened to Peter and Wendy in the years after their adventures in Neverland – can seem indulgently meandering. Theatre loves open endings because they can be completed by the audience. It hates multiple endings because – whether they appear to or not – they leave the audience with nothing to do.
Having something to do was a vital condition of my agreeing to adapt Arthur & George. There were two other pressing inducements. One was being flattered that a novelist I’d always admired seemed keen to consign his most successful book to my hands. The other was to do with the central social issue it addresses. The phenomenon which George refuses to acknowledge looks remarkably like the institutional police racism identified by Sir William Macpherson in his report on the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence. Julian originally planned to write a double-timescale novel, setting the Edalji case against the contemporary case of Errol and Jason McGowan, two black men in the same family who were found hanged in Telford in 1999, a case which the police tried to dismiss as a double suicide. But the point of writing in two timescales is to reveal things about each story which would not be clear without the other. Julian realised that the truth of the Edalji case was sufficiently clear of itself.
Finally, it’s always good for there to be a bit of an omen. In the dark hours of my work on Nicholas Nickleby, I was sustained by the knowledge that I was conceived two doors away from the house in which Dickens wrote it (had my parents followed the Beckham family rule, I’d have been called ‘Doughty’), and that the fates meant this as a sign. By a similar coincidence, a threatening letter from the infamous ‘Great Wyrley Gang’ lists a station porter of the name of Edgar among its members, a name which (in the novel) was changed to Lee. There was also an A. Edgar on the roll of George’s school, three places up the form list from Doyle (and Barnes’s) chief suspect as the real perpetrator of the crime.
My grandfather’s family lived in Stafford – where George Edalji was tried – in the period of the novel. None of his brothers were old enough to have had a son at school with George, but his cousins might have been. Who knows?