How literal should literary adaptations be?

What does it mean to be faithful to a text? Whenever a beloved novel is adapted for the stage (or another medium for that matter) comparisons are inevitably drawn to the source material. How true is it to the original? Deviate too much and you risk alienating the novel’s fanbase, but tinker too little and you risk creating something theatrically flat, a clumsy transposition that satisfies no one.

It’s an incredibly delicate balancing act, as was made plain recently. The Royal Shakespeare Company production of Maggie O’Farrell’s 1.5 million-selling 2020 novel Hamnet was a huge hit for the company, with a West End run announced before it even opened in Stratford-upon-Avon. However, when it opened in London many of the reviews highlighted the somewhat pedestrian way it approached storytelling. Yes, it captured the key narrative elements of O’Farrell’s novel about the death of Shakespeare’s young son, but many critics agree it lost some of the spark and wonder of the novel.

In part this was down to how the story was structured for the stage. “I’m sure there are extremely pragmatic reasons for playwright Lolita Chakrabarti’s abandonment of the book’s non-linear structure and more experimental flourishes. But in doing so ’Hamnet’ loses pathos and intrigue,” wrote Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out.

Holly O’Mahoney writing in The Stage, was blunter, complaining that “whole chapters are skipped, characters cut and plot points reduced in order to make the story fit into a stage-approved timeframe”.

Clive Davis in the Times said it even plainer. “Watching this play is akin to a frantic bout of speed-reading,” he says. The main complaint seems to be that while it hits all the story beats, it goes no deeper, it is functional rather than transporting. It lacks O’Farrell’s style, something which was a key part of the book’s appeal.

Many critics seem to feel that in crafting a more straightforward linear narrative from O’Farrell’s highly sensory evocation of the world of Shakespeare’s wife Agnes and her family, Chakrabarti has sacrificed some of the book’s magic, but I wonder if she’d gone in a different direction, tried something bolder, whether she’d also have faced pushback. It’s a fine line, particularly when a novel is as popular as Hamnet, with which so many readers forged a connection.

Deviate too much and you risk alienating the novel’s fanbase, but tinker too little and you risk creating something theatrically flat, a clumsy transposition that satisfies no one

It was interesting to compare this response to "Hamnet" with that to the new adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s 1999 novel Sputnik Sweetheart, which opened at the Arcola Theatre in London this month. The novel has been brought to the stage by playwright Bryony Lavery and director Melly Still, who previous collaborated on a stage adaptation of Alice Sebold’s bestseller The Lovely Bones.

Both writer and director have form when it comes to adaptation. Lavery has tackled Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust, for the Bridge Theatre, and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock; Still directed a lavish version of Jamila Gavin’s Coram Boy, which proved a massive hit for the National Theatre.

"Sputnik Sweetheart" sounds like it was something of a passion project for the pair. “The novel appeals to me for the same reason every novel I adapt appeals to me, I get to work [subliminally] with another writer! Helping a novelist move her or his work into a new media is a splendid chess game,” says Lavery of the adaptation process.

The slipperiness of Murakami’s novel, an unrequited love triangle full of unfulfilled desires, seems to have appealed to them both. Still describes the novel as a puzzle and, in translating it to the stage, “a tantalising tension between finding a concrete resolution and sitting with uncertainty”.

“Theatre isn’t always about providing answers. Sometimes it is about presenting clear road signs which the audience follow to delightful possibility,” says Lavery.

Many critics commented on the beauty of the staging. Nick Curtis, writing in the Evening Standard, called it a “strange but beguiling event”. But while "Sputnik Sweetheart" was generally more warmly received, many critics expressed a degree of frustration that striking as the show was in many ways, it lacked something. “It captures the look, feel and sound of a Murakami novel,” says Arifa Akbar, writing in the Guardian. “This is, in the end, the sticking point. The production has the same head-scratching sense of an elusive story and emotionally distant world, whose meaning cannot quite be grasped.” Dave Fargnoli, writing in The Stage, referred to it as “overly-faithful”.

Judging by the reviews, it sounds as if it has been almost too good at capturing the feeling of reading Murakami, but that his enigmatic style lands differently on the page than on the stage.

Adapting a novel for the stage is never just about transposing the story to another medium. Theatre is experiential and the best adaptations, to my mind, acknowledge this, capitalising on theatre’s potential to evoke the essence of the text rather than sticking rigidly to the material as written, but this is no easy thing, especially when fans feel a bond with the novel.