If chance there is, it is how the commissions to do these adaptations/versions of Goldmsith, Chekhov, W. H. Smith & A Gentleman and Saltykov-Shchedrin came about.
I had wanted for a long time to do a version of a Greek play, and my wish was to be fulfilled, I thought, when the Abbey Theatre came knocking and asked me would I have a look at Antigone. Of course I would. It was an invitation, one that relieved me of the business of selecting a particular play, the Abbey would commission a literal translation and, all being well with my part, I had a management and theatre that would put the thing on. Then the caveat: ‘Set it in Belfast.’ I could see the theatre’s point: the play’s potential could be worked to overtly represent and relate to the contemporary situation that was happening in Northern Ireland. But it wasn’t for me.
I discovered that the word ‘contemporary’, or indeed ‘ancient’, did not come into the matter of how I read, recognised, was excited by, loved and was deeply affected by Greek drama; and Greek drama couldn’t be local to anywhere – not even to Greece! It was about humankind, alright, in action and at war, looking for order; but I couldn’t get away from the abstract: that it was more to do with self-conscious mankind in holy, pure, eternal, existential quest of itself.
So, regrets to the Abbey and to say, honestly, that I did not have the skill to fulfil the requirement. Well, came the reply, would I like to do a stage version of The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith? Flattering: I was considered to be an allrounder.
I knew of Goldsmith’s book from childhood, but I had never read it.
It is delightful. It is a book that makes one happy. The Primrose family: Dr Primrose the vicar – pastor, father, husband, with humanity, humour, wit, moral dignity, innocently not as wise as he thinks he is, but superior to the shrewdest wisdom; Deborah, his loving wife, with her harmless vanities; and six children: all a familiar family gallery; generous, credulous, deluded. And the rogueries waiting outside this bright family circle.
For the best part of a year, prior to this, I was working on an original play and it was giving me a very hard time. I phoned the Abbey, said I’d love to do an adaptation of the book, and added, ‘Now if you like.’
Doing the adaptation was not easy, but compared to the writing world I’d been inhabiting it was a honeymoon.
The adaptation of The Vicar of Wakefield was presented by the Abbey Theatre in their Christmas slot and it was very successful. The success was due to the fine, stylish direction of Hugh Hunt, to the designers and actors. I wondered about the script. (A honeymoon is not the time for sobriety of judgement.)
I returned to the original work that I had suspended to do the adaptation and it was like going back to conquer a disease. (The work was The Sanctuary Lamp, a play that now leaves me happy enough.)
The Vicar, though, continued on my mind, that I hadn’t done my best justice by it and twenty years later, like a man wanting to pay conscience money, I revisited the Primrose family.
The revised adaptation (1995) is much shorter than my original effort, the Vicar’s patience, like Job’s, isn’t so limitless, the eccentric character, Mr Burchill, who is really Sir William Thornhill in disguise, becomes more clearly a fallible deus ex machina, and so on with other emendations. To distinguish the revised adaptation from the earlier one, I gave it a new title, She Stoops to Folly; and though it has been performed under that title and though that title is true to the play’s sub-plot, Olivia’s story, I feel now that it is a bit too clever of me. Now, in 2010, I revert to calling it The Vicar of Wakefield; it is the best title. She Stoops to Folly, if wished, may be used as a sub-title.
*
Actors Jane Brennan and Alison McKenna, founders of a new theatre company called b*spoke, assembled a group of actors to read a play with a view towards producing it. It fell out that my living room became the venue for the reading and it fell out that I comprised the audience of one. The piece, a melodrama, an American Temperance play, was The Drunkard by W.H. Smith & A Gentleman.
A discussion followed the reading, every contra immediately followed by a pro. It, the play, would be expensive, it required a large cast, but ‘something’ could be done about that, like ‘doubling up’, like ‘the usual’. Technical demands would make it difficult to stage and, again, expensive, but the same could be said about ‘almost anything’. Minor characters were hogging the piece, their orchestrations threatening the melody, but look at the acting opportunities for the leads, for big playing. Really, objectively, all that was wrong was that the play didn’t have a prologue, and it was essential that it have a prologue, and if, as someone said, the play was all over the place, couldn’t someone be found to remedy these trifles? What did the audience think? I said, can you not find something better to do with your time than the play you have just read?
Several photocopied scripts of The Drunkard by W.H. Smith & A Gentleman were left lying about the place, I observed over the next few days, as were a few fledgling attempts at what were purporting to be a prologue, one of which I picked up in idle curiosity, began to doodle with it, which is how I became involved and the commission came about.
W. H. Smith has nothing to do with our famous bookseller. His real name was William Henry Sedley, who added Smith to become Sedley-Smith, to lessen his parent’s embarrassment, it is said, at his going on the stage; he later dropped the Sedley part entirely, or at least for the purpose of writing The Drunkard. The identity of A Gentleman has been attributed to half-a-dozen others, none of whom disclaimed the honour, including one Phineas Taylor Barnum of circus fame. Barnum, too, is said to have been something of a temperance reformer.
To become match fit I suppose, I read whatever there was on my shelves of Victorian drama. Later in the process I looked up what plays I could find about drinking, drinkers, inns and bar rooms. The script contained in this volume is indebted to Douglas Jerrold’s melodrama of 1828, Fifteen Years of a Drunkard’s Life.
I worked from the original script, the same as was read by the b*spoke assembly of actors. I assume it is the original script. It is dated 1844, it gives the original cast and the venue is down as Boston Museum.
There is a comic character called Miss Spindle in the original script who isn’t very funny any more; she is of minor importance and of little interest, yet she has possibly more lines than anyone else in the play. (Curiously, Miss Spindle is down in the original cast as having been played by ‘Mrs ——— ’, while the other eighteen specified characters, male and female, are credited with their names in full, as well as their titles. For instance, Edward Middleton, the leading character, was played by Mr W.H. Smith. Perhaps ‘Mrs ——— ’ was a speciality actress of popular favour and repute with audiences, an improvisator whose embellishments on stage, ad libs and asides, were recorded and printed; though she, for some reason or other, was not one to have her name included with the others.) In the version given in this volume Miss Spindle becomes Widdy Spindle, who appears in one scene only and with a widow’s mite of lines.
I moved the setting to this side of the Atlantic, altered characters’ names, dropped characters, introduced songs and new material and, as well as the prologue that was said to be essential, I wrote an epilogue.
*
Did I know The Cherry Orchard was the greatest play of the twentieth century? I said I believed Three Sisters was given that credit. No, Three Sisters was arguably the best; The Cherry Orchard was the best.
That exchange, with an Abbey personage did not prevent my eventually receiving an invitation to do a version of The Cherry Orchard, but, arguably, it endangered it and, arguably, it delayed the matter considerably, because when the invitation did come it was four years later, and the literal translation given to me, that the Abbey had commissioned, was dog-eared and dated 1998, the year of the exchange with the Abbey personage on the order of precedence of Chekhov’s masterpieces.
I needed second opinions and I asked for a second literal translation. The version of The Cherry Orchard contained in this book derives from two literal translations: the 1998 one, which was done by Chris Heaney, and the second one done by Patrick Miles. I needed advice. Patrick Miles was also engaged as my consultant.
The objective of a literal translation – to render in another language the exact contextual meaning of the original – differs from the purpose of a version. A version, as I see it, is more subjective, more interpretatively open, which does not mean that nonchalance, broadness of approach are allowed to whoever is doing the version; but it is speculative in its consideration of the ‘spirit’ of the original and seeks to translate that ‘spirit’ into a language and movement that have their own dynamic and vibrancy and, hopefully, music. And in the case of Chekhov: who could faithfully inhabit that sensibility and exceptional delicacy? And a version, of itself, does not want to look like the back of a tapestry.
*
1998. I had a meeting with the theatre director Anthony Page in London. The meeting done, en route to the front door through a sort of ante-room that had a lot of books, without stopping he reached to a shelf, withdrew a book from it and gave it to me. No reason given for the gesture. I’d never heard of the book nor of its author: The Golovylov Family by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin.
The book, a novel, first issued in 1880, has classic status in Russia; its author was a commanding literary figure (more famous as a satirist than as a novelist) in a time that included Tolstoy, Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev.
There are seven or eight translations into English of the book. I acquired four of them including the one given to me by Anthony Page, which was the one I worked from, which I thought the best. (It is an Everyman’s Library publication, translated by Natalie Duddington, the edition dated 1934.) I used the other versions in my possession for cross-reference purposes. And, again, I had the invaluable help of the translator Patrick Miles.
The book is a very compelling read that chronicles the degeneration of a provincial family of minor gentry who are landowners.
Its stage potential, I thought, obvious. The process, though, of adapting it was going to be a long one and difficult. Several times while working on it I tried to recall what it was that made the book so compelling in the first place; whatever it was, wasn’t to be recaptured. The book hasn’t much by way of plot and development and all the characters are dead at the end, except one – and she is mortally ill. Several times I regretted ever having clapped eyes on it. (I have read that The Golovlyov Family can be read as a series of obituaries. I have also read that it is the bleakest or blackest of Russian novels, which is quite a badge when you consider the field.)
Porphyry, also known as Iudushka (little Judas), dominates the book; as such the one to follow one would, and should, think. He is a married man whose wife is dead, he has two sons, one of whom commits suicide, the other, convicted of embezzlement, perishes on his way to Siberia: all down to Porphyry’s meanness of character; he is a civil servant of no distinction; he is a consummate hypocrite – but an unconscious one – his hypocrisy innate. (When he first appeared in print he was considered to be a Russian Tartuffe. The author said, no, he isn’t, and, in a later edition of the book, Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote that Tartuffe knew what he was doing and why, he was a conscious hypocrite; in France, hypocrisy could be regarded as a ‘social habit’, he wrote, it could be considered as forming a part of ‘good manners, so to speak’. Whereas Porphyry was a hypocrite ‘of a purely Russian sort . . .’ of the kind that live their lives as naturally ‘as nettles grow by a fence’.)
Porphyry dominates the book and in early drafts of the play I made attempts to uphold his precedence, without success. I couldn’t make it work. (I’d been down that hypocrites’ road before – notably with a character called Tom in The Wake, ‘who believes utterly everything he himself says’ – and maybe I didn’t want to go there again so pronouncedly.) Also I had trouble with his final end, as the book gave it, where he is transformed from monster to penitent. Despite the commentaries that I read, supporting and explaining this sudden conversion, I couldn’t believe it. And a play, I knew, wouldn’t accept such reversal of character. (In a contrary commentary to the supporting ones the opinion was offered that, as Saltykov-Shchedrin and Dostoyevsky were known to be enemies, the conferring at last of redemption on Porphyry was a satire on Dostoyevsky’s bestowing deliverance on his characters!) In The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant he is an unmarried man, an ex-seminarian, a civil servant, a hypocrite and, to make it easy, is called Peter; he is prominent, but his is not the principal role.
I turned to Arina, the character second in importance in the book. I think she was waiting for me. She gave me the title. She is the autocratic matriarch of the family. She is the active one, she is a doer. She has a directness and an earthiness. I recognised her type. She is not gentry, I felt, but marries into it; of severe, hardened, tough, peasant stock. Her acquisitive nature, ruthless energy and unyielding defiance bring great material rewards; yet also emasculate the others. She has a weak husband, three no-good sons, and a daughter who has died, leaving in her care two grand-daughters.
Going into old age she begins to question herself, wonder what she has given her life for. For what, for whom? For something that doesn’t exist? She resigns her control, loses her authority and suffers the consequences.
She dies half way through the book. Elected to lead, the play needs her to stay the distance, and she does – to a final defiant apologia. She lives to see the others dead, except one – one of her grand-daughters, who survives it all.
Tom Murphy