A dangerous occupation

In 1976, as the National Theatre moved into its spanking new bunker, with three theatres to fill instead of one, it began to commission new plays and, particularly, translations. I was invited to make a new translation of Marivaux's Les Fausses Confidences. I knew the play slightly, liked it, re-read it, pondered, and then decided it was untranslatable.

Subsequent versions of Marivaux (in particular by Neil Bartlett) have proved this not to be the case; so what I must have felt was that it was untranslatable by me. After some thought, I counter-proposed an adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos's 18th century epistolary novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. After a decent interval, the reply came back: no, on mature consideration, it was generally felt that the novel, in which the central characters never even meet, was unadaptable.

So we settled, very happily for me, on a compromise far removed from the cool, unruffled waters of pre-Revolutionary France: a translation of a marvellously humane, social-realist drama by a Hungarian-born, German-speaking writer, hitherto unperformed in English: Odon von Horvath's Tales from the Vienna Woods, a play, I was cordially warned by numerous experts in the field, that was almost certainly untranslatable.

So how to make sense of this question of what may or may not be adaptable? What was it that frightened me off Marivaux? Well, to put it simply, the distinctive gossamer wit (known in the French theatre as "marivaudage"), the strange, anchorless world of master and servant, the sense, as with Watteau or Fragonard, of some parallel universe with its own Harlequin or Columbine language, touching real life only tangentially: all these daunting qualities I found difficult to envisage in an English context.

Horvath, on the other hand, presented equally alarming difficulties. The petit-bourgeois milieu was hard to reconstruct in all its textured local detail; the characters were people who, as the author unhelpfully remarked, would normally speak dialect but were trying their best not to; and, moreover, the Viennese dialect was not (as British dialects generally are) a class indicator, since everyone in Vienna from Emperor to street-sweeper would use it. In short, the problems presented by Horvath were no less intimidating than the complexities of Marivaux; so why reject the one and embrace the other?

Unlike Olympic high-diving, when it comes to adaptability, the degree of difficulty is not a factor. Even the forbidding-Everest of Proust has been successfully scaled by different routes by Harold Pinter and Raul Ruiz. In an era now more remote and difficult to evoke than the Crusades, when the BBC had the stomach for such adventures, I got quite far along with the idea of adapting A La Recherche du Temps Perdu into six independent but interlocking films of varying lengths, until the director general Alasdair Milne, who had been encouraging the idea, was abruptly replaced.

This certainly allowed me to devote two years or more of my life to other matters, but I remain convinced that the tumultuous complexity of Proust's prose, that unique and convincing argument by the most intellectually rigorous of writers that the intellect is so much less important or reliable than the primacy of feeling and instinct, is readily adaptable to the language of film.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses, as the National Theatre had been quick to notice, presented its own particular set of conundrums: the fact, for example, that the novel is composed of letters, so cunningly that the receipt, interception or sending of these actually forms part of the plot; so that if you decide, as I inevitably did, to allow the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil to meet, the story works out somewhat differently.

Or again, for an audience familiar with Lolita or Last Tango in Paris, how to recreate the original erotic charge and frisson of danger those first startled readers of Liaisons must have felt? Or, even more fundamentally, in a stage version of a novel with very little dialogue, what style to adopt? Some kind of 18th century pastiche (might be amusing), something entirely contemporary (might be more immediate), or, as I eventually decided, some blending of a modern vocabulary and an 18th century syntax?

This, I realised in 1984, as I grappled with a huge chart on which the characters were shunted around geographically (so that they could meet), or tried to find some theatrical equivalent for Laclos's almost, but not quite, symmetrical distribution of letters into mathematical groups, was perhaps what the National Theatre had meant by unadaptable.