It happens all the time in the movie business. The title reads: "Written by Dick Pen and Jane Ink". And you fondly imagine Dick and Jane as writing partners, cooking up the scenes over steaming pots of coffee, batting snappy one-liners back and forth across a smoke-filled office.
And once in a while, it actually happens that way. Comden and Green, say, or the Epstein brothers. More often though, Dick and Jane have never met. They've never even spoken on the phone. Dick has written the first few drafts of the screenplay, and various producers and development people have said things like, "The character arc is unclear" and, "What if he was 48 and she was 22?" and, "The third act doesn't work" - and eventually either Dick Pen gets fed up and walks out or the producers get fed up and fire him and they send the script to Jane Ink. And Jane's job is to identify the problems as she sees them (the lead character is too passive; what if she was 48 and he was 22?; the third act doesn't work) and then write a draft which solves them.
And later, it's still "in development", that is to say, nothing happens (as it does a lot in the film business), or the movie gets made and some smart Aleck tells you that actually Robert Towne wrote the big forgiveness speech for the father and William Goldman got the third act to work; and the third act still doesn't work and who cares who wrote some stupid movie anyway?
This does not happen all the time in the theatre business. In the theatre business, there is something called The Classical Repertoire. If you work in the movie business, The Classical Repertoire is a bunch of old plays whose plots can be robbed because not alone are the guys who wrote them dead, they don't even have agents.
If you work in the theatre business but do not depend upon it to pay your bills, The Classical Repertoire represents all that is sacred and sublime in dramatic literature, a canon of plays waiting, like symphonies, for skilled interpreters to give them definitive performances. If the theatre business is your principal source of income . . . symptoms: nausea, vomiting, temporary insanity, blindness and death . . . sorry, that's drinking wood alcohol . . . Where was I? Oh yes. If you make your living almost entirely from the theatre, GOOD LUCK!
Oh God. We'll try this one last time, shall we? If you rely on the theatre to feed, clothe and shelter yourself and your family, and you've found yourself involved with a "straight" production of, say, one of the Shakespeare plays that (whisper it) Don't Actually Work (Timon, Titus, some of the "comedies"), or a pointless revival of a Restoration Gem That Isn't Funny Any More, you may have a more ambivalent attitude to some of the jewels in the theatre's glittering crown. There are diamonds, and then there's paste, and very often, the third act doesn't work.
A few years ago, Lynne Parker asked me to take a look at Love and a Bottle, the first play by Derry-born late-Restoration playwright George Farquhar, with a view to adapting it. At least, we started off calling it an adaptation, but what I soon realised needed to be done was what Jane Ink did to Dick Pen - the play would have to be completely rewritten.
I was admittedly a little uneasy about the dubious precedents for what I proposed. The sentimental Augustans and Victorians who gave King Lear a happy ending did not make you feel you were working in a glorious tradition. But two things were clear: the play had Many Good Things in it, and it was completely unstageable in its present form.
All restoration plays are about sex and money; Farquhar's Love And A Bottle combined them in the form of George Roebuck, an impecunious Irish rake cutting a sexual swathe through London society. My first step was to take this piece of transparent wish-fulfilment on the part of its 20-year-old creator and make it the fantasy projection of tyro playwright George Lyrick, (follow those Christian names), an incidental figure in the original.
This gave me a play-within-a-play device (although one critic concluded that Farquhar had anticipated Pirandello by a good 200 years) that kept the structure from getting too unwieldy. I changed certain characters completely, cut and rewrote extensively and transformed the conventional comic ending into an anarchic confrontation in which Roebuck outJuans Don Juan, and drives Lyrick, his creator, to despair. All the while, I tried to stay true to the spirit of Farquhar's intentions, believing that that spirit would be best honoured by getting the play to work. Happily, that time, for most people, it seemed to.
When Ben Barnes asked me to think about a version of Moliere's Tartuffe, my first thought was that I certainly wouldn't be doing what I did with Love and a Bottle. After all, Tartuffe had been getting along perfectly well for more than 300 years without any help from me. The play is undoubtedly one of the finest jewels in the classical repertoire's glittering crown, and my job, as I understood it, would be to enable it to shine.
That word "enable" is crucial. Any time you tackle a classic, you're trying to find a way to enable the play to take place. When you're dealing with a work in translation, the first decisions to be made are about language and period.
Moliere's verse is generally rendered into rhymed iambic pentameter. This can work brilliantly, but I find an entire evening of rhyming couplets a little unsettling, so I decided to let all the characters speak in unrhymed blank verse - except for Tartuffe. Tartuffe's control over the head of the household into which he has insinuated himself is never quite explained, but it seemed to me that if his linguistic gifts were sufficiently flamboyant, it would go some way towards accounting for his mesmeric power.
Tartuffe is a comedy about religious hypocrisy, domestic fanaticism, sexual dysfunction, moral blindness and the corrupting power of the state. Somehow, Ireland in the early 1970s sprang to mind. The point was not to make Tartuffe "say something" about Ireland, but, by translating the action to a time that seemed appropriate, to enable Moliere's play to be seen afresh. This distinction is crucial: setting Macbeth in Italy in the 1930s, say, is a good plan if the play is thereby illuminated; if, however, the director's intention is to share with us his thoughts about the rise of fascism, it's just a waste of everyone's time.
Once this choice had been made, others inevitably followed: carriages became cars and kings turned into Taoisigh. What was extraordinary to me was how little of substance had to be altered. The Royal Court Theatre used to say they treated classics like new plays and new plays like classics. Working on Tartuffe felt like working on a new play. It made me realise that Moliere is truly our contemporary - and that his third acts always work.
Tartuffe by Moliere in a new version by Declan Hughes opens at the Abbey on Wednesday and runs until February 3rd. No performances on December 25th and 26th and January 1st