In his foreword to the new theatre tie-in edition of The Woman in White, Trevor Nunn talks about how he adapted the book for the stage.
Trevor Nunn is the celebrated director of countless plays and musical productions. He has been Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Artistic Director at the National Theatre.
The musical theatre has always borrowed its plots and characters from other forms of fiction, such as plays, television programmes, films and, most often, novels. Figaro, Giovanni, Butterfly, Carmen . . . all adaptations, West Side Story, Oliver!, Oklahoma!, A Little Night Music . . . adaptations all; and all taking immense liberties with the originals on which they were based. Fundamentally, all theatre is storytelling, as the greatest of writers, Shakespeare, knew more certainly than his contemporaries; but Shakespeare borrowed and adapted all his plots. The genius was not only in how he adapted other people’s stories to the stage, but what he chose to adapt in the first place.
Having had quite a lot to do with the process of adapting Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables to the musical stage, I know what worked on that memorable occasion, and what it was in that vast, epic, near biblical moral outpouring that resisted conversion into theatrical terms.
With The Woman in White, Hugo’s English contemporary Wilkie Collins created not only one of the world’s first international bestsellers, but also a genre – the spine-tingling murder mystery not finally solved until the concluding chapters. I seem always to have known of the book, though I didn’t actually read it until my university days, and only then when I felt it was a necessary adjunct to the study of Dickens, whose close friend Collins became.
I remember being immediately and immensely involved in its atmosphere of evil, subtextual, half glimpsed, but omnipresent; and amazed at its revolutionary structure – a story told by a number of narrators, their accounts overlapping but not exactly matching.
When Andrew Lloyd Webber suggested we renew our long-time collaboration by making a musical theatre adaptation of this Collins masterpiece, I confess I didn’t pause to consider any difficulties. The positives were overwhelmingly apparent. Here we had a very strong narrative-thrust to magnetize a theatre audience into an urgent need to know ‘what happens next . . .’ It’s an overworked but accurate syllogism of the music theatre that the key to success lies so often in the construction and momentum of ‘the book’ and that many a wonderful score has languished and failed because the ‘play’ element of the musical has failed to engage.
In addition, the Collins material has a superbly defined cast of foreground characters, from the complexly drawn sisters to the ambiguous Woman in White herself; from the artist of sensitivity and decency Walter Hartright, embodying all the Victorian virtues, to the neurotically hypochondriac Fairlie; from the smoothly sophisticated Glyde to, one of the great creations of the nineteenth-century novel, the orotund and operatic Count Fosco. A composer must look for material that both suggests an idiom and encourages distinctive voices, providing a diversity of human and musical expression. In this work, we discover the requirement for idyllic romance, youthful heartbreak, spectral forebodings, overt violence, comedic eccentricity, educated wit and a consistently increasing tension.
However, the problems in the novel (over which I so enthusiastically leaped) do actually exist. In truth, Collins’s Rashômon-like structure, with several narrators, does not happily lend itself to theatrical storytelling; his reliance early in the book on the nineteenth-century devotion to ‘coincidence’ is similarly unhelpful in a necessarily condensed treatment, and his minutely detailed forensic exposure of both crime and criminals, which dominates the last third of the book, is precisely the opposite of the theatre’s unchanging need for ideas to be converted into action. So the advertisements for this new work, which Andrew Lloyd Webber has written in collaboration with Charlotte Jones and David Zippel, underline that the presentation of The Woman in White is ‘freely adapted’ from Collins.
The story still arrives in Cumberland, moves to Hampshire and from thence to London as described in the book; but although Collins acknowledges a village community near Limmeridge House, he scarcely pauses to delineate a population, and his treatment of the poverty endured in London by the endangered heroic trio omits the social detail that is to be found in Dickens or Mayhew. A composer needs that background world, that social context, from which to create choral opportunities and thereby make the musical experience not a chamber piece but one that uses the fullest range of musical resources.
With a project such as this, one dreams of achieving two-way traffic: those who are already devotees of the novel being prepared to discover how a parallel work can be created using the raw materials of the great original; and those who first discover the fascination of The Woman in White through the musical adaptation being emboldened to try the novel, and become a new Wilkie Collins readership. I hope those travelling in either direction will find the journey as exhilarating as I have.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In this extract from his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Woman in White, Matthew Sweet discusses Wilkie Collins and the rise of the 'sensation novel'.
Matthew Sweet has been a columnist for The Big Issue and a director's assistant at the RSC. He holds a doctorate from Oxford University, and has edited an edition of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White for Penguin Classics. He is also television critic for the Independent on Sunday.
The Woman in White is generally regarded as the first sensation novel, an enormously influential branch of Victorian fiction which fused the apprehensive thrills of Gothic literature with the psychological realism of the domestic novel. Using a high-impact style of narrative that put its characters through a series of extreme mental experiences, Collins and his imitators (writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, Ellen Wood and Rhoda Broughton) brought the terrors of the Gothic novel down from mouldering Italian castles and into the back parlours and drawing-rooms of a recognizably modern, middle-class Victorian England. Their dark plots – which usually hinged on murder, madness, bigamy or all three – were hatched in contemporary country manors and on brand-new suburban housing developments. They described an England full of murky possibilities, in which – for instance – a respected baronet might incarcerate his wife in a private lunatic asylum for financial gain; a seemingly-virtuous young lady might attempt to kill her husband by pushing him down a well; a newly wed woman might celebrate her honeymoon by offering her spouse a glass of poisoned lemonade. In fact, just the sort of sensational crimes that captivated the readers of popular penny newspapers. Behind the closed doors of undistinguished British households, the genre suggested, all manner of criminality, misery and insanity might be concealed. As Henry James commented, ‘To Mr Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.’
Collins had a different phrase, ‘the secret theatre of home’, on whose stage sinister family dramas were played out. In his fictions, the domestic sphere is rarely a reassuring environment – it is characterized by the threat of violence, criminality, or the attack of physical and mental illness. His novels are rich with troubling households. The Woman in White assembles a dubious aristocrat, an obese Italian count with a passion for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison, an effeminate hypochondriac and a moustached lady. Poor Miss Finch (1872) gathers together under one roof the French widow of a South American revolutionary, a blind heroine, a brutish German oculist and a pair of identical twins, one of whom has turned himself blue by drinking silver nitrate. The Law and the Lady (1875) offers a disconcerting relationship between a cross-dressed female servant and her legless master (who, when not leaping about on his hands, is careering around in his wheelchair claiming to be Napoleon and Shakespeare). For the protagonists of The Woman in White, home is a place where you fall ill, and risk being murdered or driven insane. Collins and his fellow sensationists re-mapped the ‘knowable communities’ within which writers such as George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant plotted their fictions as territories that were unknowable, or at least dangerous to know. Their readers found this both alarming and exhilarating.
The rise of the sensation novel was intimately connected with the development of Victorian consumer culture, a shift in social and economic behaviour that brought about the near-industrialization of pleasure. More novels were published than ever before. The appetite for gadgetry and consumer goods generated by the Great Exhibition of 1851 continued to grow. Public shows became bigger, more grandiose affairs backed up by publicity campaigns in the national press. The sensation novel found willing readers in a Victorian public hungry for large-scale spectacular entertainments. While novels such as The Woman in White, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Wood’s East Lynne (1861) did smart business at the circulating libraries, audiences flocked to have their nerves pleasurably jangled by sensational public spectacles.
New technologies of entertainment – zoetropes, panoramas, dioramas, neoramas, nausoramas, physioramas – offered the paying public new visual sensations and the realization that their subjectivities could be manipulated to disorientating and satisfying effect. The French acrobat Blondin made death-defying tightrope walks – crossing the wire blindfolded, in armour, in a sack or wheeling a stove upon which he cooked an omelette which was then eaten by a member of the crowd. Freak shows – entertainments that now seem indefensible, but in their day were attended by people as respectable as you or I – enjoyed remarkable success throughout the 1850s and 60s, with bizarre personalities such as Julia Pastrana the Bear Woman (first exhibited 1857) and the Sensational Talking Fish (1859) dispensing thrills for a shilling to the paying public, under the guise of scientific edification. (For an extra fee, your favourite freak could also visit you in your own home.) The so-called ‘sensation dramas’ of Dion Boucicault – grandiose melodramas written around elaborate stage technology – wowed Londoners, including Queen Victoria, who went twice to watch the near-drowning of the heroine of The Colleen Bawn (1861) in a torrent of artificial waves. Penny newspapers, made possible by the repeal of the Newspaper Stamp Tax in 1856, encroached upon the circulation figures of The Times by filling their pages with accounts of sensational crimes. And while the grown-ups pored over the details of the latest garroting or poisoning case, or (thanks to the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857) the juicy details of other people’s marital catastrophes, their children devoured penny dreadfuls – hack-written sensation stories which related the adventures of bloodthirsty highwaymen, detectives and pirates.
The Woman in White was consumed as breathlessly as these other products of Victorian sensation culture. The progress of the plot became a dinner-table topic and bets were struck on the outcome of this or that situation. Collins received letters from single men demanding to know the identity of the original for his heroine Marian Halcombe, and if she would accept their hand in marriage. A merchandising industry geared up to cash in on the popularity of the novel. Loyal fans could spray themselves with Woman in White perfume, wrap up in Woman in White cloaks and bonnets, and dance to various Woman in White waltzes and quadrilles. The future Prime Minister William Gladstone cancelled a theatre engagement in order to continue reading it. The poet Edward Fitzgerald read it at least five times, and considered naming his herring-lugger Marian Halcombe, ‘after the brave girl in the story’. Thackeray spent a whole day absorbed in the novel. Prince Albert was a great admirer, and sent a copy to the royal family’s most trusted adviser, Baron Stockmar. The Duc d’Aumale admired Emil Forgues’s translation La Femme En Blanc so much that he wrote to Collins ‘in raptures’.
During its serialization, crowds besieged the All the Year Round offices on the day a new number was issued. The management of the Surrey Theatre rushed a pirated stage adaptation into production, much to the author’s displeasure. Walter was revived as a popular name for babies by parents enamoured of the admirable qualities of the book’s hero, Walter Hartright. The principal villain had his admirers, too. Fosco became a favourite moniker for cats and – a few years later – Oscar Wilde’s undergraduate nickname. The novel has never been out of print.
The plot of The Woman in White deals in madness and nervous excitement, and the novel was read with the same manic urgency. It offered jittery pleasures, somatic shocks – effects which worked upon the bodies of its readers. It aimed to sensationalize them – to make them catch their breath, their hearts beat faster, their eyes move more feverishly over the page. It aimed to inspire what Wilkie Collins’s friend Edmund Yates called ‘the ‘‘creepy’’ effect, as of pounded ice dropped down the back’.
Its structure was startlingly innovative, and worked to heighten such effects: instead of events being mediated through the ironic voice of an omniscient narrator, Collins allowed his characters to speak for themselves like witnesses at a criminal trial. Without the comfortable distancing device of an authorial voice – a cool ironist like Jane Austen, a tub-thumping showman like Charles Dickens or an earnest philosopher like Thomas Hardy – readers were excitingly proximate to the sensations suffered by the protagonists. During the course of The Woman in White, its narrators are attacked, drugged, tricked and terrified. Their subjective accounts of these harrowing experiences position the reader in the same disadvantaged position. Narrators like Marian Halcombe and Walter Hartright collapse into silence, leaving the reader with a page of blank text, a line of asterisks, a question unanswered until the next volume or serial number. Unpoliced by any narrator, they are also free to lie to us. Count Fosco’s testimony contains obvious untruths. Might Walter’s account of himself also contain deliberate errors, elisions or self-justifying fictions? How do we know that their narratives are not misleadingly partial, or if they have been tampered with by a third party? The formalist critic Tzvetan Todorov defined the ‘suspense novel’ as one in which the narrator abandons his or her objectivity and is ‘integrated into the universe of the other characters’.
However, in the sensation narrative, the immunity of the reader is also dismantled. The novelist and critic Margaret Oliphant, who was a firm enemy of the sensation genre, wrote in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine of the famous encounter between Anne Catherick and Walter Hartright on the moonlit London road: ‘the shock is as sudden, as startling, as unexpected and incomprehensible to us as it is to the hero of this tale’. This shock, she argued, produces a ‘mysterious thrill’ that ‘few readers will be able to resist’. These moments of dislocation and disorientation were staged within sensation fiction, and passed to its readers, like an electric charge.
However, the term ‘sensation fiction’ was rarely used by the novelists whose work was regarded as part of the genre. It was a pejorative term promulgated in the journalism of conservative literary critics, who argued that the hysterical tempo of such narratives would infect the body of British literature with a morbid quality which was perceived to be an import from French fiction. For instance, one editorial writer in the Daily Telegraph invoked The Woman in White in a piece that condemned the corruption of French culture: ‘there is hardly a French novel without one portion of its contents being given over to adultery, another to an orgie, and the third to a duel’. In an unwitting paraphrase of Count Fosco’s characterization of England as ‘the land of domestic happiness’, this writer remarked: ‘Mr. Wilkie Collins and his colleagues, male and female, depict a world which we think too well of English society to believe in.’ For such commentators, The Woman in White libelled English household culture and threatened to corrupt native literary tastes. Oliphant wrote in Blackwood’s: ‘The violent stimulant of serial publication – of weekly publication, with its necessity for frequent and rapid recurrence of piquant situation and startling incident – is the thing of all others most likely to develop the germ, and bring it to fuller and darker bearing. What Mr. Wilkie Collins has done with delicate care and laborious reticence, his followers will attempt without any such discretion.’ Collins was philosophical about such criticisms: ‘The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel-reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.’
Although the debate over sensation fiction’s propriety rumbled on throughout the 1860s – and intensified once Lady Audley’s Secret hit the railway bookstands – it is easy to take the huffings and puffings of these critics too seriously. Accounts of sensation fiction have tended to dwell on these acts of censure as much as the novels themselves, recycling the same disapproving comments by writers such as Oliphant and Henry Longueville Mansel, a clergyman who castigated Collins and Braddon for ‘preaching to the nerves’. The pleasure of sensation narrative was queasy and neurotic, but it was one that was pursued by large numbers of Victorian readers who probably regarded the health warnings of such reviewers as part of the fun. Gleeful and ironic assessments of the depravity and hysteria that sensation fiction was held to engender in its consumers are probably a better guide to contemporary responses to the genre.
Although sensation fiction explored a range of concerns about criminality, madness and the tyrannies or inadequacies of the law, these were explorations in which most Victorian readers clearly took pleasure. Writing in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s periodical Temple Bar in 1863, George Augustus Sala compared the chaos of that year’s Lord Mayor’s Parade with ‘the phantasmagoric vision of a raving maniac with superadded delirium tremens, who has been supping on raw pork chops with Mr. Home the medium, and reading Hoffmann’s Tales and The Woman in White to the accompaniment of cavendish tobacco and strong green tea’. Allusions like this mock the po-faced disapproval with which sensation novels were routinely treated in stuffy journals such as Blackwood’s and the Christian Remembrancer. Similarly, you didn’t have to dislike sensation fiction as much as Oliphant to appreciate the irony of Punch’s mock-prospectus for a new journal entitled ‘The Sensation Times’:
'This Journal will be devoted to the following subjects; namely Harrowing the Mind, making the Flesh Creep, Causing the Hair to Stand on end, Giving Shocks to the Nervous System, Destroying Conventional Moralities, and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of Life ... A Sensation Novel itself, in which atrocities hitherto undreamed of, even by the most fashionable fictionists of Paris, will form a feature in the new journal, and a large sum, under the name of a subscription, has been handed to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, in order to ensure its non-interference with the forthcoming tale.'
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