Forgive me for usurping this, but no one has started one yet.
For Halloween I finally obtained and read Dracula – The Ultimate, Illustrated Edition of the World’s Most Famous Vampire Play, edited and annotated by David J. Skal, who had previously published Hollywood Gothic and The Monster Show and would go on to V is for Vampire. This book came out 'way back in 1993, but I only heard about it much later, and wanted to read it. I’d already read the Hamilton Deane/John Balderstone play that ran on Broadway (where I saw it in the 1977 revival, but with Raul Julia replacing Frank Langella) and later formed the basis for both the 1931 and the 1979 movies. But this volume contains Hamilton Deane’s original play that ran in the British provinces, then in London, before Horace Liveright had Balderston rewrite the whole thing. It’s interesting the way Balderston so completely redid the whole thing, replacing Deane’s clumsier dialogue (“Me. Deane cannot write dialogue. He does not begin to understand what dramatic dialoghue is, and sometimes he gets an unintended comic effect by sheer pomposity of speech,” ran an early review in The Morning Post ), but retaining what were apparently effective scenes.
I came away with many interesting thoughts, but right now I’d like to share just one – Bram Stoker had hoped that Dracula might be staged by the theater company he worked for, with noted actor Henry Irving in the lead role. (Irving would have none of this – the play was never produced.) Certainly, Stoker, whop worked for the theater for 17 years, knew how drama worked. They even had a dramatic reading of his work (evidently t secure the copyright protection for Dracula as a dramatic work), so he knew how it sounded. Yet Dracula is simply one of the most difficult works to put on stage. There are too damned many characters for an audience to keep straight (and for a typical company to stock). There are too many male parts and not enough female parts. The action takes place over ludicrously long distances – it makes sense that there are scenes in Transylvania and Britain, but why in hell do scenes take place in Whitby and London? The relationships between many characters are fuzzy at best (what the hell does Renfield, stuck in a sanatorium far from anything else, have to do with Dracula?) As a result, virtually every stage production or film adaptation takes significant liberties, shifting locales, combining characters, eliminating characters, or even changing the sex of characters (Deane’s script makes what was originally one of Lucy’s suitors, Quincey Morris, into a woman, without changing the name or the nationality – although she’s no longer a suitor).
If Stoker wanted it to be turned into a play, why did he write it that way? I’ve seen other adaptations that took liberties, but never a work adapted so many times with so many liberties.
Pepper Mill saw that Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End was being shown on SYFY this December, and realized she’d never read it. “You’ve got that one, right?” she asked me. She proceeded to literally dig it out (It’s behind boxes of her sister’s comic books, not to mention two protective layers of other books. “It was behind a lot of Jack Chalkers,” she told me. “I might not have put everything back the way it was.”
Now that she’s had a chance to read it, she tells me that she has to keep reminding herself of when it was written, because otherwise she’d cite Clarke for gross male chauvinism. It’s been a while since I read it, but I’d probably agree. Certainly I see the same in the Dracula plays – In the book, Quincy Morris is one of the Band of Fearless Vampire Killers who goes out after Dracula. In the play, female Quincey Morris is told to stay behind, as she’s a woman. And she agrees (even though, being a Texan cowgirl, she’s got a couple of guns.) In my universe, female Quincy Morris would be in the front ranks.
I’m halfway through the audiobook of Clive Cussler and Craig Dirgo’s The Golden Buddha, one of the Oregon Files books – the first of the series, in fact. I’m botheredc that the titular Golden Buddha is described as having a fat belly, as if it’s a Buddha statue in some American Chinese restaurant. Buddha statues of the period described were cemphatically not fat, jolly men, but lean meditative figures. Even if the described figure is not intended to look like the Thai Golden Buddha ( Golden Buddha (statue) - Wikipedia ), it’s of the same vintage.
In the second Oregon Files story, Iridium is described as dangerously radioactive, and the Black Stone is incorrectly described. Maybe these errors — which should have been easily corrected with use of common reference works – were the work of Dirgo, because after these two he disappeared from the series (as did one of the prominent characters he wrote about), and Cussler, despite the absurdity of his books and plots, doesn’t normally make blunders this obvious. Dirgo was replaced by Jack deBrul, who himself stopped writing these two books ago.
