George Eliot Birthday Luncheon: The Toast to The Immortal Memory

I\u27m sure you all know more about George Eliot than I do, so I thought I\u27d talk for a few minutes about the difficulties and joys of adapting her work, and especially Adarn Bede for the stage. I\u27d been asked to adapt Adarn Bede for the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond, Surrey, then a tiny room-theatre above a pub. I didn\u27t know much about George Eliot then. I didn\u27t know that just around the corner from the pub theatre was the beautiful house in Park Shot where she had begun to write Adarn Bede and where the sound of George Lewes\u27s scratching pen had irritated her as they worked together. I didn\u27t know that it was in the unchanged beauty of Richmond Park, where Carry (my wife) and I often walk together that George Eliot also walked with Lewes. I certainly didn\u27t know how much I would come to appreciate her heart and mind. It\u27s daunting to compress a five-hundred-page novel into a twelve-foot square space for one evening\u27s entertainment. But I\u27d always been attracted by the challenge of huge themes in small spaces. As an actor, I\u27d been in a production of King Lear in that tiny room! An adaptation, of course, can never be a substitute for reading the book - it\u27s hopefully a different kind of work. I knew I must concentrate on the dramatic elements of the story, all the conflicts and relationships between the characters. From the start the question had to be not \u27what can we do with this?\u27 but \u27what can we do without?\u27 But my aim was to bring the imagination of George Eliot as directly and simply as possible to the imagination of a live audience, through the medium of the actors