‘throwing on an elaborate dressing-gown of silk-embroidered cashmere wool, passed into the onyx-paved bathroom’
This is one in a whole paragraph of descriptions, which must be shortened into images to be portrayed onstage. The adapter must also cut as much as possible of what they deem to be unnecessary to the meaning created in order to make the play short enough to still be of interest to an audience, but long enough to attend to the issues at hand. The dialogue and speech, being a key element in the theatrical mode, must be altered to suit the themes of any attempt at adaptation of PDG.
Wilde’s use of dialogue makes an attempt at adaptation relatively easy, in one sense – he uses dialogue often to portray the happenings between the characters.
‘"So you think that it is only God who sees the soul, Basil? Draw that curtain back, and you will see mine."
The voice that spoke was cold and cruel. "You are mad, Dorian, or playing a part," muttered Hallward, frowning.
"You won't? Then I must do it myself," said the young man’
This dialogue easily portrays what happened prior to the murder of Basil, without the need for too many changes. However, often the use of small talk in the novels is irrelevant and unnecessary to the actual plot.
‘"Never marry a woman with straw-coloured hair, Dorian," he said after a few puffs.
"Why, Harry?"
"Because they are so sentimental."
"But I like sentimental people."’
A playwright adapting these areas of the novel would need to either rewrite or remove these scenes altogether. Although several such scenes are important to the development of character, there are other, possibly better theatrical devices for character development which could be used in a more relevant way. The challenge to theatre-makers is to discard all irrelevant/unnecessary material and re-write the rest to make it appropriate for the stage. This includes transferring as much as possible to dialogue, and making any necessary descriptions into stage directions. Any notes on important costume, set design, or other aspects of the theatre not necessarily written into the script must be kept and handed to the relevant backstage staff. This allows an adapted script to be published for use by other theatre-makers without making it too specific to the single project. The use of dialogue would also be affected by the expectations and tastes of the intended audience. When an audience sees a play of the classical nature (such as the work of Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, etc.), they expect it to be coherent, involving a linear narrative with understandable dialogue, usually with little or no coarse language. This affects the way the dialogue and language used in the play will be translated and adapted. The language used in any adaptation of PDG will be affected by the ideology, context and expectations of the intended audience, and thus would present a challenge to any theatre director.
A major difficulty in the adaptation of any novel into a play is that of characterization, and how to interestingly develop a character. Novelistic styles of characterization are so vastly different to those used on the stage that one would have to virtually rewrite sections of the text in order to make sure that the characters are developed in a way that is beneficial to both the original and the adaptation. In PDG, Dorian Gray is described as
“wonderfully handsome, with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth's passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world.”
These four sentences are the description of an instant’s glance in the novel. However, this is not so easily portrayed in a play. It is essential to keep the essence of Dorian, the basic characteristics that form the basis for the story, yet it is also important to be able to portray that through speech and action onstage, with only occasional help from audio-visual techniques such as voice-over, data projection, etc. It is the over-use of these aspects that will lose the focus of the audience, and therefore not meet the expectation they hold of seeing a play that they will focus on and draw meaning from. The ideological framework of the play will also limit the characterization process. The ideology of Oscar Wilde’s time was somewhat different to current ideologies, and therefore different meanings were created through PDG. On the one hand, it would seem that the hints at homosexuality were necessarily hints as openness of sexuality was not socially acceptable. However, now, although homosexuality is much more acceptable than it was, it becomes obvious that the hints must remain as simply hints in any adaptation of the text, due to the sense of secrecy and mystery that is a part of the audience's meta-physical reaction to the novel. Therefore, a director must find a way of visually hinting at homosexuality, without directly stating it. Characterization is a difficult problem in the adaptation of PDG into a play, but, like most challenges, can be overcome with hard work and loyalty to the original text.
The adaptation of a novel into a play is an immensely long, complex and involved task, with many challenges to be overcome. In the adaptation of Wilde’s PDG, these challenges include, but are not limited to techniques of characterization, dialogue and speech, timing/pace, differences between novelistic and theatrical modes, and the ideology of both PDG and the play. All of these contribute to the method of adaptation, and therefore the presentation of the artist’s interpretation of that text.
