Before the Films: The Stage, the Opera House and the Wireless

We tend to think of adaptation as something the cinema does to a book. It is much older than that, and for most of the nineteenth century it was faster, cruder and far more profitable. A novel that caught on was on a stage within months, usually without the author's permission and always without a share of the takings.

By the time a film company got interested, a famous story had often been through two or three other trades already. Knowing that changes how the book reads: what feels like a scene you have seen before may have been staged, sung and broadcast for a century before any camera arrived.

The stage got there first

Frankenstein reached the London stage in 1823, five years after publication, as Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley went to see it and was entertained rather than offended. The play made two decisions the novel never did: it gave the creature no speech at all, and it gave the laboratory a scene. Both stuck. Nearly everything the twentieth century thought it knew about Frankenstein came from that stage tradition and not from the book, where the creature is appallingly articulate and the making of him takes a paragraph.

Dickens had it worse. His novels appeared in monthly parts, and enterprising theatres dramatised the early instalments while the later ones were still being written — inventing endings, which the public then expected. He complained bitterly and could do nothing: the law protected the printed page, not the story.

The Phantom of the Opera and Quo Vadis both had vigorous stage lives before the cameras came, and the same is true of the sensation novels: a plot with a secret, a locked room and a confrontation is a play already, and everyone knew it.

What the opera house wanted

Opera took a narrower interest. It wanted a story that could be reduced to a handful of unbearable situations, and it took two of this library's books and made them world-famous in forms their authors would barely recognise.

Bizet's Carmen of 1875 comes from Mérimée's novella of 1845 — a short, cold, brutally efficient piece of prose told at second hand by a traveller. The opera keeps the ending and warms everything else. Most people who can hum the Habanera have no idea there is a book, and the book is the better shock.

Manon Lescaut did even better: an eighteenth-century French novel that became an opera twice, for Massenet in 1884 and for Puccini in 1893. And The Turn of the Screw found its way into Britten's opera of 1954, which is a rare case of an adaptation preserving the thing that makes the original difficult — the question of whether anything supernatural is happening at all.

The wireless years

Then, for about thirty years, the loudspeaker was the main way an adult met a classic novel. American radio in the 1930s and 1940s ran weekly hours of adapted fiction; the BBC did the same with a different accent and less advertising. An hour of radio holds perhaps a quarter of a novel, so what survived was the plot and the dialogue, and what went was everything the narrator had been doing.

Radio suited some of these books extraordinarily well. A ghost story is better heard than seen, because a listener builds the room and will always build it worse than any set designer would dare. A detective story is nearly all voices already.

What all of it means for the reader

Every one of these trades takes the same thing from a novel: the situations. None of them can take the sentences, and the sentences are what the author actually wrote. That is not an argument against adaptations, several of which are better than several of the books. It is an argument for knowing which one you are holding.

If you know the creature is mute, or that Carmen is a warm woman with a big voice, you have met the stage and not the page. The page is stranger, shorter and much less consoling — and it is still here, at the length its author chose.