From Page to Stage: Adapting Novels for Theatre
A talk by Irish theatre-training legend Betty Ann Norton
Betty Ann Norton founded the Betty Ann Norton Theatre School in 1960 and passed away in June 2020. This talk was presented at the 6th Summer School on Children’s Literature in the Irish Writer’s Centre many years ago, but is still just as useful today for anyone wanting to adapt stories or books for the stage. While this talk is from the perspective of working with groups of children or teenagers, it is equally applicable to working with groups of adults.
Why adapt a children’s book or part of the book for performance by young people?
You might be thinking surely there are already enough ready-made plays and texts extant?
The answer is no, there are not. There are not many plays in the repertoire that are suitable for a first production by children or young people, i.e. something in modern English with a large cast. So usually by choice or necessity, you have to create or adapt your own material. If I were not aware of this from my own experience, I would be convinced by the number of letters and phone calls I receive at the theatre school, asking me to suggest a play for X young students.
My answer is invariably the same: write your own play or adapt a story or novel using improvisational techniques if necessary (taking due care to get permission if within copyright).
The focus here is slightly different. I believe the “page to stage” technique is a sound method of encouraging even the most reluctant readers to go to the source and read the whole text. By dramatising the text, we help them to develop the one attribute which will make them committed readers for life:
the ability to visualise.
Making images is a natural, mental process that occurs each night in our dreams. Visualisation is similar to dreaming but it involves making a deliberate attempt with the conscious mind. Children and young people have vivid imaginations (despite the encroachment of TV — I am not anti-TV, but we require balance) and find it easy to create mental pictures.
Start with reading a selection from a text to a group of young students. Pose a question such as “what would you do in this situation?” and ask them to act out the solution. Then ask them to read the real solution and you are into the core of “page to stage”.
Preparation
At first, a novel of so many hundred pages may appear unwieldy. Where do you start? What do you include, or omit? How can you incorporate long, descriptive passages of people? Places? Events? Do you even try? Will dialogue have to be condensed? (YES) Characters in a novel may dither on for pages. On stage, it must be more succinct. How can you deal with this?
Start by reading the book, re-read the book, read it again and again. You are looking for a distillation: the essential spirit of the book. You look closely and choose the angle from which you want your team and audience to view the events. The story needs to be teased out to maintain interest, but not too convoluted. An audience should not be expected to take notes.
Characters may have to be dropped, their plot lines may be used in reported speech or given to other characters. You must establish the status and the relationship of the characters early on, whereas a book has time on its side.
This type of preparation, while much more time consuming, is more exciting than picking up a regular script because, as you adapt it, it becomes more and more your unique perception of the book, and chunks of narrative and character description are distilled into precise images.
A Collaborative Process
When I say “you” and “your”, I do not refer to authoritarian adaptation and direction by the leader or tutor of a group. I think the whole focus should be on team-work. You would have to consider the ages and experience of the young people concerned, of course, in discovering the book together.
One way to help build a consensus about the play or book is to improvise around the story of the book, even scenes that do not take place but help to fill in the background.
This is a collective, creative process but the director must ultimately be the arbiter and editor.
Groundwork
At this stage, you will need to get some research done. Depending on the subject of the book you will need either some factual information, or historical details, or technical background. Getting a firm framework of this kind of detail helps everyone to believe in the reality of the play.
Set
Make out a floor plan. Decide the exact locations you require. Can two be combined? For example, we had difficulty with having both a drawing room and a dining room. We did need both, but space was limited so we overlapped the two, setting up a table and striking it when necessary.
Characters
You need to know as much as possible about the characters.
You should consider some “hot seat” exercises: take a character from the book and set up an interview. The idea was inspired by Dr. Anthony Clare’s “In the Psychiatrist’s Chair”. Ask the character routine questions such as their name, age, occupation, and hobbies. Then ask about their family background, early childhood, life history, hopes and fears for the future. How does the subject get on with other people in their life? How do they feel about other characters and how do they think the other characters feel about them? What turning points have there been in their life?
Once they are in character, the person has to react automatically:
What is your earliest memory?
What sort of child were you when you were very young?
Did you feel your parents liked your brothers/sisters better?
Have you ever had a serious illness?
What was your happiest moment?
What do you think the future holds?
What makes you sad?
Relationships
Characters do not exist in isolation, so look at each character in turn, and their relationships with other characters. In particular, how do these develop?
Shape
As the plot begins to fall into place and you select the scenes you wish to present, note the shape of the play. You need a beginning that draws the audience in, and a satisfactory ending that is not anticlimactic. The turning points must be well-placed. Each character must be introduced to the audience. When the audience have answered all the questions that need to be answered, they should have been stimulated to read the book in order to find the answers to the remainder of the questions. Some scenes will need developing, others will need cutting.
Outline Script
At this point, you might like to write down an outline script giving scenes, key lines, plot points, and action for the cast. How much you continue scripting is a matter of choice. Sometimes, if the cast have been improvising with great spontaneity, the existence of a script may make them recite the lines in a wooden fashion. Some dialogue will be taken directly from the book.
One point: it is more difficult to rehearse an improvised scene with an actor absent. Usually somebody would read in the lines, but if you are working with improvisation, this cannot be done and the results can be chaotic.
Rehearsals
The important thing when rehearsing an adaptation is to let the play run, with as many scenes as possible, so that it develops a life of its own.
Use costumes and props as soon as possible as they will cause problems of timing etc. if introduced too late.
As rehearsals go on, a play can lose its freshness; you may need to maintain the moods and emotions of the play to ensure spontaneity and a feeling that everything is happening for the first time.
Finally, if your presentation is “in-house” and merely to explore a text, techniques are not so important. But, if you are presenting the end product, you should consider alternative of calm, bland scenes with high drama. Do not be tempted to choose all episodes played with all the stops pulled out. You need scenes of varying levels. Also, make sure all your young actors know where the climax of the scene is. When adjudicating, I find they do not.
Tip: Make a graph and mark it from 1 to 10. Plot out the shape of each scene. Title each scene. Less experienced actors are inclined to see the climax or peek of a scene from their character’s angle only. The individual actor is subservient to the whole in theatre. Nothing requires more team-work except mountain climbing.
When you have completed your adaptation and various scenes, make sure to rehearse beginnings and endings or it may become a series of individual scenes. You need flow. You can have some dovetail scenes, leave beats or pauses after others, overlap with some, let some occur simultaneously. There is scope for artistry here.
Case Study: Adaptation of “No Peace for Amelia” by Siobhán Parkinson
As my team have been working on “No Peace for Amelia” by Siobhán Parkinson, I will relate to that book as we proceed.
Characterisation
We enjoyed the exploration of the rich characterisation. I had thought of Mary Anne as having a rural background and a lilting rural accent but the cast would not buy that. The Dublin people were instrumental in the rising and they said “Lawney” as in “Lawney mac” was a Dublin expression. I had to agree.
I won some rounds though. Katy (Amelia) wanted to wear her hair up, as in the book Amelia describes her struggle with the hair pins. I managed to dissuade her. Theatrically, I said her hair would be better worn down to create a contrast with the two girls of her own age who were playing her mother and grandmother. They would wear their hair up. If, on the other hand, these actors had been adults, then it would have been justified for Katy to have her hair up. She agreed. She then wondered if she sat all the time in Scene 1 it would look as though she treated Mary Anne as inferior, while in the novel she helps Mary Anne cut the tea brack and prepare the tea. Of necessity, we had omitted this portion of the scene. Rather than have her hopping up and down we decided on a warmer rapport between the two.
I do feel that young people have a tendency to read the book with far more attention to the finest detail than they would have done had they merely read it as a story. When I wished to place Grandma at the family breakfast table I was told firmly that Grandma always had breakfast in bed. All the young actors were determined to fill out their roles. They wanted the audience to care what happened to them and that each of them should be unique and different. They were after three dimensional characters, not flat as in the pages of the book.
Regarding character, I do believe it is possible to go even deeper than the novel. Our understanding of what happens between characters is brought alive by the real people involved.
In performance, you have all the elements of theatre in addition to the text.
Firstly, actors. Casting is very important. We see why casting directors are so important in the film world. If you can get the presence — body language and voice — required, then that is a bonus. Spend some time on this, do not be guided solely by physical appearance.
Aesthetics
Presentation will usually be simple rather than elaborate in this type of theatre. Nevertheless, setting, costumes, props and lighting add another dimension.
In “Amelia” we use mime techniques on the whole regarding set, doors, staircases etc. As we have multiple sets of some 6 or 7 locations, some of which exist simultaneously, and the action must flow seamlessly from one locale to another. Yet, the few props we do use are meaningful — the picnic tablecloth brightly coloured William Morris style and the snowy white formal breakfast table. Yet, we use no China, no cutlery or food. You might wonder about mixing styles in this manner. I think it is essential in this form of theatre, almost as though you are still holding the book, and the half-formed images are just popping out of the pages. I suppose it is very like blending antiques with modern furniture. It can be very effective.
With regard to the multiple locations on stage, they are not rigidly enforced. In formal theatre, you could mix and match them with lighting. Without the benefit of lighting, we allow one area to spill into another when we require the space, and the simple furniture is moved about by the actors in a motivated and non-emphatic manner so areas are extended or reduced according to our requirements.
Themes
There are usually multiple themes in a novel, and as I said earlier, an audience should not have to make notes. Amelia is no exception.
Spoiler alert: the following contains spoilers for the book “No Peace for Amelia”
The themes include:
- The Irish Easter rebellion linked to Patrick and his sister Mary Anne (he participates in the rising and is wounded), and she works as a cook for the Pymms, a Quaker family living in Ranelagh.
- The Pymms’ daughter Amelia has a young man Frederick Goodbody who enlists as a soldier in the British Army. This links us to the horror of trench warfare in the first world war in France, as depicted in Frederick’s brief letter — description of the gas attacks, and to more effect by his friends coming to give Amelia a final keepsake of Frederick after his death, a button from his tunic.
- We see British rule in Ireland through the eyes of Sara Pymm, Amelia’s grandmother, and through the eyes of 8-year old Edmund, her little brother.
- The concern of parents for their teenage children is depicted in the anxieties of Amelia’s parents, Roberta and Charles Pymm.
- We have the social stratas of society presented with the middle class picnic-ing on Bray Head, while the poor dodge bullets in Dublin’s streets. With delicate irony, we learn that Frederick was gassed in France on that same Easter Monday and the overall themes of war, whether civil or world war, and the antithesis of pacifism.
We needed to weave all of those strands together and flesh out the characters, but not equally, as we needed major roles and cameo roles — vignettes. We needed some major and some minor scenes for contrast.
It was with regret, as it always is, that we decided to omit much of the Patrick, Amelia and Mary Anne story, but you do have to be ruthless.
As always, we had to blend past and present and telescope hours and days. On stage, you do not have the device of a new chapter, and in a play of 30/40 minutes, pauses would break the continuity. Nowadays, we usually settle for just one major interval, even in a full evening of theatre.
Characteristics of Page to Stage Theatre
In our adaptation, we made use of most of the methods that you would employ in the “page to stage” theatre:
- Recorded voices of off-stage characters. In the end, we actually brought the characters on-stage to appear downstage right and left. This was for reading of some letters, 1 from Patrick to Mary Anne, and 1 from Frederick to Amelia. These were telescoped to appear in one letter scene. This thrusted the action forward very effectively.
- A narrator, but with a difference. Usually I would say never use a narrator, but we introduced the character of an older Amelia at 23 years of age for a prologue and epilogue. Usually a character’s soliloquy or thought-track is more effective. A narrator can break up the action and hinder the flow.
- Music: not very much, but “it’s a long way to Tipperary” by a male choir as the boat carrying Frederick and the other young soldiers sailed out of Dublin docks.
- Background figures. In dockland: a beggar, a drunk, people ground down by poverty and oppression used for social reason and to validate Mr. Pymms fears for his daughter’s safety and his anger at her for going to the docks to say goodbye to Frederick.
- A series of stills or freezes: still pictures which dissolve into another picture in slow motion. This was another device to thrust the action forward, as it showed alternatively the graceful picnic on Bray Head and the horror at the GPO. We also wanted the audience to remember that day when it was revealed that Frederick had died on that afternoon and we encompassed those plot lines with a stillness when spoken by Amelia to make them significant to the audience. You could also have used gesture and pause, but we chose stillness.
- Symbolism: the use of the button to link the three events: Bray, the GPO, and the death in France. The older Amelia subsequently wore the button on a chain around her neck. We also used the Iris blue shawl. As a symbol, it is linked with the pressed blue iris Amelia sent to Frederick in her letters, and his friend tells us how he looked at it until it fell into shreds. Although the shawl was a gift from Patrick (who would have been unaware of the iris in the letter), to replace the shawl Amelia had used to bind his injuries, Frederick and Patrick are linked although they never knew each other, we felt a blue shawl was an essential prop. These symbols are subliminal to the audience (and not all members of the audience will be able to visualise either) but it gives the actors a sense of depth and meaning, and the audience can feel the vibrations of these thoughts.
Incompleteness
In “page to stage” something should be left for the reader to explore and verify, and we deliberately left the story incomplete, especially the Patrick, Mary Anne and Amelia episodes. Amelia’s feeling about love and war and heroes and the type of woman her mother really was, all remain to be explored. The older Amelia in the epilogue invites the would-be readers to “read her memoirs” for the full story.
Dialogue
Most of the dialogue we used came straight from the novel whenever there was first person dialogue, as we found Siobhán Parkinson’s lines were so right for the characters and natural and spontaneous. We edited them of course. Lines should sound as though spoken by a particular character. As you grow accustomed to reading play texts in the printed form, it should no longer be necessary to look to see who is speaking, as you know one character would speak such a line and another character would express themselves differently. Even though we agreed to improvise lines (we only had five rehearsals), the actors found the dialogue from the book “coming to them” because it was so right. Where there was use of the third person, it was more difficult. Mary Anne’s famous letter scene was written in this manner. However, Míde, who plays Mary Anne was deeply into her role, so I asked her to write her own soliloquy from the original, which I thought was very well done.
Closing Remark
I hope you will enjoy working “from page to stage” and as the work develops you will visualise all the events of the book as they would appear in a play or film. Many playwrights do work in this manner and I am sure many novelists may also do so. For example, Alan Ayckbourn will instruct actors to perform actions in a particular order, i.e. “you cross in front of the coffee table to open the door, not behind it” and the actor may say “that’s a long way around, should I not go upstage” and Alan Ayckbourn says “well, that is what he did”. He sees the character perform the movement before he includes it in the play. He visualises.
