Judging by the spectacular advance sales and largely warm reviews for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, JK Rowling (who oversaw the sequel and takes a storyline credit) has cracked the theatre on her first go. She’s not the first great British storyteller to be drawn to the stage, but the theatrical experiences of the creators of Frankenstein, Oliver Twist and Miss Havisham, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot were very different – mostly involving more aggravation than applause.
When Mary Shelley returned to London from Italy in 1823, five years after Frankenstein had been published anonymously, she imagined that drama was her destiny. This ambition was brutally crushed by her father, William Godwin. Writing plays was sheer “laziness” on her part, he scolded “my dear Mary” (then aged 26) after reading her debut effort, and her characters were mere “abstractions”. It was never performed, and she subsequently turned to other genres instead.
As for adapting her own novel, she was too late to even do that first because several stage versions of Frankenstein had by then already appeared on the London stage. Not one writer had asked permission or paid any royalties because pirate playwrights could rip book authors off with impunity. However, having her work plundered did have one positive aspect, as she herself noted after seeing Presumption: or, the fate of Frankenstein at the Lyceum: a new edition of the novel capitalised on the stage versions by naming her as its author for the first time, and “lo & behold! I found myself famous!” she wrote, a poet’s widow and single mother thrilled to be associated with fiction’s scariest monster for the first time.
For Charles Dickens, in the following decade, the commercial theatre was a similar source of frustration. Although he was an energetic organiser of am-dram and eventually toured a one-man-show of readings from his novels, his work was also appropriated and wrecked by hacks – and with no upside as he was famous already. Serial publication added an extra turn of the screw to this exploitation, since it enabled plagiarised plays to be rushed out before the eventual book - so, gallingly, the first complete appearance of a given novel was on stage, not in print. Dickens even reacted to a mid-serialisation stage production of Nicholas Nickleby (which of course could only have a wild, wrong stab at the novel’s ending) by adding a chapter in which Nicholas meets and, as author’s proxy, denounces a “literary gentleman” who claims to have made novelists famous by transforming 242 novels into instant plays.
Half a century later, Arthur Conan Doyle was just as besotted with the theatre as Dickens. Seeing an audience respond warmly to a play, Conan Doyle wrote, “gives a thrill of satisfaction such as the most successful novelist can never feel”. He took this love affair further, as writer and impresario, by staging professional productions intended to enjoy long runs.
There were more duds than hits, though – Shaw called one Doyle collaboration with JM Barrie “the most unblushing piece of tomfoolery that two respectable citizens could conceivably indulge in public”. Perversely, he largely eschewed the easy option of putting Sherlock Holmes (whom he viewed scornfully, and tried to kill off) on stage, although when he grumpily agreed to this audiences lapped it up. Later, he would say yes to early cinema versions, apparently feeling the limited medium (dealing, he said, in “mere plot and action”) and the limited character were ideally suited to one another.
Like both Dickens and Doyle, Bram Stoker had a significant involvement in the theatre world. On the face of it, working for the great actor Henry Irving equipped the author of Dracula perfectly for adapting it himself. However, Irving (the model for aspects of the vampire count) declined to perform in Stoker’s adaptation of his 1897 novel, which received just a single performance at the Lyceum theatre, where the Irishman was Irving’s business manager.
Dracula only became a money-spinner long after Stoker’s death in 1912; once his widow had fought draining copyright battles (eventually winning a Pyrrhic victory) against the 20s German stage and screen adaptation Nosferatu, she authorised the Broadway version that became Tod Browning’s 1931 film Dracula, with Bela Lugosi.
The following decade saw the emergence, in diametric contrast to Stoker’s stymied play and Doyle’s diffidence about Holmes spin-offs, of Agatha Christie as a giant of the stage, and the radio, and the cinema. When “Agatha became the phenomenon ‘Agatha Christie’”, writes her biographer Laura Thompson, it was not the books but “the adaptations that did the trick” in enabling that “leap into fame”, beginning with her 1943 dramatisation of And Then There Were None, which became a West End and Broadway hit and eventually, also a film.
Christie remained box office gold throughout the 40s and 50s, adapting her own books as well as producing made-for-theatre thrillers such as The Mousetrap. While her whodunnits went out of fashion as new productions following the rise of kitchen-sink drama, revivals continued to sustain regional theatres and her Poirot and Marple mysteries were given a second lease of life by television. Before Rowling (for whom, in contrast, films came before plays), Christie was the only one of these supreme storytellers to benefit financially from and exercise control over dramatic treatments of her work.
