Peter Brook, in his seminal work on theatre The Empty Space, argued that plays must first and foremost function dramatically, as plays, on the stage. It sounds obvious, but it does highlight one of the greatest pitfalls for theatre adaptations: like poems that are tainted with the unfortunate lilt of translationese, it is all too easy for the work to fall into a kind of limbo between two forms (as with Bryony Lavery’s adaptation of Angela Carter’s outrageously bad novel The Magic Toyshop, for example).
Why adapt in the first place? Arthur Miller writhed at the very thought, awkwardly protesting his virgin originality in the preface to his adaptation of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People. Others have been less coy, Hitchcock and Shakespeare notably. It seems to me that adaptation in any form is legitimate if source material is used as inspiration, a spark from which a new work with its own integrity results.
Kafka’s A Country Doctor, a short story which I adapted for the stage over the summer for my end of year project on the Creative Writing Mst., is a vivid, almost hallucinatory tale of a doctor’s search for a horse, and subsequent suffering in a cruel winter landscape where the people are as inhospitable as the climate. Odd and uncanny, there is a great well of conflict and darkness in the story, and in practical terms there is plenty of physical action that can readily be turned into essential movement on stage, while the almost complete absence of dialogue offers great freedom.
On the other hand, at only around six pages long the story is short, and though richly symbolist it defies easy interpretation. With its rural setting, a confusing world of darkness, snow and smoke, the mood is intensely dream-like and, told from the first-person perspective of the doctor, rather introspective.
I broke they story down into segments of action, removed those elements that were not dramatisable, and tied up the trailing ending, and then added dialogue. The original spoke to me in many ways, and I was at the outset tempted to use only sounds for the characters rather than words, but in the end the world of the story created itself through rhythm, syntax and language register. I hope the adaptation has found existence in its own right.
