Pick a long-dead author, don't be in awe of the original, and carry a big machete. Tom Swift shares his tips on how to adapt and survive

Anyone who has seen the movie Adaptation will probably have the impression that the process of recreating a work of literature in a different medium is a guaranteed way of inducing black depression and serious coronary problems. It doesn't have to be that way.

Due mainly to naïve over-confidence and an unavoidable deadline (opening night) my own experience of adapting Voltaire's Candide for The Performance Corporation was a much less existential experience. So if you've been meaning to "re-imagine" the Iliad as a one-man street theatre piece but have been putting it off for years, I'd like to humbly propose a sure-fire five-point plan for adaptation without the palpitations. Here's how I took on Voltaire and won.

1. Choose a dead author

When I say dead, I actually mean dead and buried at least 70 years. Initially, Jo Mangan (my co-adaptor) and I intended to bring the Hermann Hesse novel Narcissus and Goldmund shuddering to life on stage. However, we faced one pretty insurmountable problem. The difficulty was not the fact that this riveting tale of two introspective medieval monks gives the Gobi a run for its money in the aridity stakes. The problem was that while the venerable author is indeed deceased, he's not dead long enough. Hesse's will states that none of his opus is to be dramatised in any way and his estate refused point blank to have any truck with our project. For that we thank them.

That was when Plan B kicked in. We decided to revive a long-held plan to adapt Voltaire's 18th-century satirical novel Candide - the tale of a gauche young philosopher who, despite getting exiled, robbed, conscripted and then burnt at the stake, believes that "everything is for the best". Not a bad philosophy for an adaptor.

2. Dance on his grave

So you're clutching that well-thumbed "budget classics" edition of your author's original when you're hit by an overwhelming fear that you are about to desecrate a masterpiece. If you've followed step 1 then there's nothing to fret about. They're dead, so just do whatever you want. What I really mean is don't be in awe of the original work. It's easy to get cold feet when trying to reinvent a novel in a different medium.

Candide is certainly a surreal masterpiece of political satire but that didn't stop us turning our hero's court martial scene into a daytime TV quiz show or transforming his confrontation with the formidable Don Fernando D'Ibarra y Figueora y Mascarenes y Lampourdos y Souza into a Flamenco-fuelled "dance-off".

After all, these additions could hardly be more surreal than the original which features the daughter of Pope Urban X (a woman who sports half a backside), a gaggle of monkey-loving maidens and a Persian king with a penchant for S and M.

3. Show some respect

While it is important not to be in awe of the original work, it's also vital that the adaptor respect what the author was trying to say. I'm no Voltaire academic, but the targets of his satire (religion, war, fanaticism, human hypocrisy) are made pretty plain from the outset. I think we remained true to his scathing observations about human nature and managed to translate some of the surreal comedy and passionate humanism of the novel to the stage.

Certain segments of the novel are so painfully relevant today that we decided not to change them at all. One example of this was Candide's encounter with an African slave who'd had his arms and legs chopped off by his masters in a South American sugar mill. "This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe," he tells Candide. If Voltaire's critique of world trade remains relevant more than 200 years after it was written, why change it?

4. Pack a machete

We adopted a slash-and-burn approach to elements of the original that didn't fit into the dramatic framework. Voltaire's Candide isn't quite a novel in the modern sense of the word. It's more a rambling political satire wrapped up in a ripping good yarn. The first book of Candide fizzles out rather non-dramatically with the hero sinking into a life of boredom as a farm labourer.

The second book (written several years later and possibly not by Voltaire himself) follows Candide's further travels around the world and while it is certainly entertaining, it doesn't add much to part one. Consequently we decided to ditch book two almost in its entirety and constructed our own conclusion to the story based on what we believed might have been Voltaire's intention. We also ruthlessly cut out whole passages of the novel despite their obvious appeal. Candide's sexploits with a Georgian harem got the axe, as did his encounter with the comically world-weary Signor Pococurante in Venice.

5. Remember Orwell

In his essay 'Politics and the English language', the writer George Orwell compiled a list of never-to-be-broken rules for the construction of good English prose. His final rule advises that all the previous regulations should be broken if and when necessary. Obviously, the same applies here.

Voltaire's Candide runs till November 8th at The Black Box, Galway before transferring to The Space at The Helix from November 10th to 15th and The Civic, Tallaght from 17th to 22nd.

Tom Swift is a freelance journalist and associate writer with The Performance Corporation