Viddy well, on my brothers, ultra-violence and real horrorshow have come to the Royal Shakespeare Company in London. Alex and his three droogs have been to chocking an old veck, razrezing his books, pulling off his outer plat-ties, and taking a malenky bit of cutter ever since the curtain rose on the RSC stage adaptation of Anthony Burgess' controversial novel, A Clockwork Orange.
Written in 1962, A Clockwork Orange has had a checkered history. It was Stanley Kubrick's classic film, made in 1971 that brought Burgess' original story to a wide public. Suddenly youth gangs had adopted the black bowler hats worn by the main character, Alex, and his three droogs. Soon they were mimicking the "nadsat" language Burgess had invented - a bizarre cross between Russian and English. And soon, too, the swelling wave of random youth violence in the early seventies was blamed on Burgess and Kubrick.
Both denied responsibility for the violent deeds of the young, but when public criticism mounted and Kubrick allegedly received death threats directed at his family, the film was withdrawn from British cinemas. Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange remains banned to this day in Great Britain. And yet, in February 1990, London's Royal Shakespeare Company took the infamous story of Alex and his droogs and resurrected it on the stage.
Permission to produce a stage adaptation of Burgess' novel had been repeatedly refused ever since sixties. Fearing that someone might go ahead and stage it despite his own wishes, Burgess actually wrote a stage version of A Clockwork Orange several years ago. It lay unnoticed at the Barbican until Ron Daniels, a director at the RSC, decided that A Clockwork Orange would be his next project.
Editorial Task
Amazingly, Burgess gave Daniels carte blanche to work on the script, with the proviso that he was not to add anything, but to remain faithful to the original text. Daniels describes his task as “essentially to edit the novel back into a dramatic form, and Anthony then gave it his blessing." It appears that with Burgess' approval of the script, the collaboration between the two men ended, and
Daniels tackled the task of translating script onto stage alone.
The publicity in Great Britain both before and after the RSC production has been virtually unprecedented. Innumerable publications have run feature articles on A Clockwork Orange. Those in search of exclusive interviews with Burgess have had to track him down in Monaco, where he now lives. U2 members Bono and The Edge were interviewed by fax - London to Japan - by one listings magazine. A Clockwork Orange 2004, the stage version, was even billed by one paper as "The Most Violent Play in London" before the curtain even rose on the Barbican Theatre stage. But the big question is, did the production live up to everyone's expectations, or was the publicity misplaced, overexcited hype? The morning after the first night the manor theater critics panned the show - as did author Burgess, who was quoted as saying that the overall production was simply not frightening enough.
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