Playwrights · 2 of 4
Write-up: the hardest scene to adapt and why
Hardest Scene to adapt
Written by Menglong
The Hardest Scene to Adapt:
Marco's speech in Scene 5. Antony gets a corpse to stand over and a crowd big enough to burn a city. We have fifteen stall owners and a Jalil who is alive, offstage, at a police station. So the forum became a press conference. The mob is six people who are unhappy about their sales figures. The irony gave us more trouble. "Brutus is an honourable man" works because Shakespeare can repeat it seven times until it turns on itself. Try that in a twenty minute school production and people start checking their phones. We used the line twice, changed the second one to "capable", and shifted the weight onto Marco's questions. We also couldn't agree on how much of it Marco means. Antony is in control the whole way through. We let Marco be genuinely angry about Jalil instead, because the fully calculating version made the ending feel cheap and none of us enjoyed watching it. He curses everyone at the end of Scene 4. We left that in because we think he means it. Changes: broke the rule of three, desymmetrised the forum/mob pair, cut "was worse" and "curdle", and replaced the closing one-liner with something that states a decision rather than performing one.
Scene 5
Our Version of the funeral orations, Carefully written by Menglong