Adaptations

Edinburgh International Festival and tour, 1984

Adapted and directed by Elsom from Samuel Beckett’s novel for the comic actor Max Wall, Malone Dies was staged at the Edinburgh International Festival in 1984 and subsequently toured. The challenge of bringing Beckett’s monologue, the second volume of the great trilogy that ends with The Unnamable to the stage was met with a production that used Wall’s extraordinary physical and comic gifts to find the dark comedy buried in Beckett’s apparently desolate prose. The result was acclaimed as one of the outstanding achievements of that year’s Festival.

Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 2006; Bulandra Theatre, Bucharest, 2007

John’s adaptation of Ibsen’s masterpiece was staged at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006 and at the Bulandra Theatre, one of Eastern Europe’s most celebrated companies in Bucharest the following year. Rather than domesticating Ibsen into period naturalism, the adaptation presses on the play’s contemporary resonances: the claustrophobia of social expectation, the destructive force of thwarted intelligence, the violence that follows when a person is denied the life they were capable of living.