Theatre
A Single Man (Greenwich)
Book values
Christopher Edwards
The challenge of adapting a novel for the stage are varied. With Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby you could say the prob- lems were more to do with focus and excision than interpretation. Dickens's novels with their teeming characters, social comment, drama and melodrama (to name some of their elements) are inherently dramatic. The essential challenge is one of translating the narrative energy to the stage. Other novelists have been success- fully adapted too. Indeed, Mike Alfreds's Shared Experience company turned to Waugh (after working on Dickens) and Samuel Richardson precisely because they could not find in contemporary drama the requisite narrative appeal and moral com- plexity they believed was crucial to theatre.
Even in a novel without a strong narra- tive line the theatre offers all its distinctive exegetical resources to project vivid images of, say, subtexts or the unconscious im- pulses of characters. But when the book in question lacks both narrative drive and any subterranean pool of feeling, it would be a surprise to see it working on stage. This adaption of Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man holds no such surprises.
Isherwood's main character and narra- tor, George, is a 58-year-old homosexual Englishman teaching English in California in 1962. (The resemblance between George and Isherwood is unmistakable.) He is mourning, the loss of his young lover Jim who has been killed in a car crash. The novel itself takes the form of a meditation on George's life, his loss of Jim and his homosexuality.
The writing is consciously dispassionate and written in the third person. This enables us both to view the creature George as if he were the subject of a case history, and to follow him through the action of the story. Michael Michaelian, the adaptor, retains this distancing device, with unfortunate consequences. For, de- spite Alec McCowen's excellent perform- ance, the production is devoid of any real spark of dramatic tension.
We follow George through his daytime routine: getting up, talking to the fertile Mrs Strunk next door about her ghastly children, going to the campus to teach, to the gym, to the hospital to visit a sick friend, etc. The revolving set trundles dutifully about offering props for George's episodic tale. McCowen manages to en- liven parts of his flat monologue with a knowing and plucky resignation. Indeed the main strength of the book is its simple and honest determination not to be done down by middle age, despair or prejudice. But even the issue of sexual disapproval fails to inject any note of drama or moral danger. When George describes the 'new tolerance' of the age (as practised by Mrs Strunk) as an attempt to 'annihilate by blandness' the production fails to provide any particular dramatic context for his sententious observations.
There is one notably funny scene where George gets drunk with a maudlin old expatriate divorcee, Charlotte (Rosemary Martin). She tries to bring George round to the idea of moving in with her, and they talk about going back to dear old England. For once you have a strong sense of character, time and place. The result is affecting as well as amusing.
However, that is about it as far as moments of drama are concerned. When other apparently key situations do start to look promising the level of dialogue is woefully poor and corny. George meets a student of his called Kenny in a bar. They swim in the ocean and George takes him home. It is a moment of truth, precisely because Kenny fails to understand the potential of the (chaste) encounter. But we only know because we are told by George.
The scene cannot stand by itself. McCowen has to tap all his considerable powers of narration to invest this concluding episode with the oracular significance it is meant to carry. Apart from the pleasure of McCowen's company it is hard to see why anyone might prefer to listen to this thinly dramatised reading of Isherwood's novel rather than sitting down with it themselves.
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