How do you go about adapting a book
like L’Étranger for the stage?
I think first of all you really acquaint
yourself with it, you read it many times
you live it very intensely, and then you
follow it's very clear inner trajectory.
There's something about the stage which
is different from a novel, the novel is
an internal experience, you read it
inwardly privately as it were, but the
stage is an external experience, you
watch it on stage, you share it with other people.
There's certain great
conventions of the stage - the way in
which a play must be patterned to
deliver its greatest power.
And I wanted to follow that very clearly with this
play. It lent itself to it but you had to
shape it, you had to keep to the leanness
of it. I had to think both bare and
lyrical, both dramatic and authentic.
