Novel Drama

Abstract

The twenty-first century stage is filled with “novel drama”: plays based on novels that make their origins with the novel the basis of their style. Most page-to-stage adaptations borrow the stories of their source texts without attempting to replicate or engage with their form. Novel dramas, in contrast, fuel themselves by dramatizing both the form of the novel and the process of authoring a novel. They often feature third-person narration in the style of the novel, along with other formal devices associated with the novel. The performers of novel dramas often literally construct the story world, by building scenery, providing sound effects, and carrying out other authorial tasks. Many novel dramas feature casts of characters and ranges of settings that are “novelistic” in scope. This study argues that novel drama is a genre that grows out of the anxious relationship of spectators to the novel. In the twenty-first century, many spectators are reluctant to read classic novels but ambivalent about their reluctance. Habituated to briefer, more immediately entertaining genres, they do not want to actually read War and Peace, but they crave the profundity and cultural capital that reading such works is supposed to afford. Novel drama responds to this situation by furnishing versions of classic novels that are much less demanding than their source texts, but which also—because novel dramas emulate the form of their source texts as well as their content—bring spectators closer to an understanding of their source texts than do standard adaptations. The rise of a form of drama that appeals to spectators by mediating their relationship to the novel reflects the fact that, in the current genre era, drama is in even more dire straits than the novel. Novel drama is illuminating about literary form, affirming the portability of formal devices across genres, and the need to study formal phenomena in multiple genres to adequately understand them. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby reveals how the embodiment of dramatic characters impacts their construction as major or minor. Bedlam Theater Company’s adaptation of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility reveals the ability of dramas to use blocking and choreography to replicate formal effects associated with the novel, including focalization and the depiction of interiority. Matthew López’s play The Inheritance, inspired by Forster’s Howards End, reveals the affordances that third-person narration acquires in drama, and the ease with which the barrier separating third-person narrators from their characters can be trespassed in drama. Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, a musical based on a section of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, reveals how, contrary to popular belief, compatibility between genres can make it harder for an adaptation to highlight features of its source text. The musical also reveals an inverse effect: by featuring content that evokes the genre of its source text, an adaptation can send easily discernible signals about how it is engaging with its source text.