"What's It Going To Be Then, Eh?": The Stage Odyssey of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange

"What's It Going To Be Then, Eh?": The Stage Odyssey of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange WILLIAM HUTCHINGS Since its publication in 1962, A Clockwork Orange has remained Anthony Burgess's best-known and most controversial work, distinguished not only by his stylistic virtuosity in creating the polyglot, pun-riddled teenage slang in which the novel is written but also by the vividness of the violence-wracked dystopian society within which Alex, the book's narrator and protagonist, thrives. Yet even within the tradition of disaffected adolescent narratorl protagonist/anti-heroes - ranging from Huckleberry Finn to Holden Caulfield to Smith in Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness 0/the Long-Distance Runner - Alex is decidedly an extreme and appalling case: the leader of a teenage gang, he is a thief, a mugger, a convicted murderer and rapist, who frankly and unrepentently describes even his most heinous deeds and dares to assert the essential humanity that he shares with the readers, whom he addresses repeatedly as "my brothers." Rife with theological implications about the Christian doctrine of free will, filled with anti-authoritarian and anti-behaviorist satire, and prophetically accurate about the urban violence that would ever-increasingly characterize subsequent decades, Burgess's novel is among the most prescient works of the pnstmodern era - and one of its most outrageous. With its clear agons, its moral conundrums, and the added advantage of its numerous and notorious scenes of sex and violence - which would parricularly help to assure its box-office appeal - A Clockwork Orange was soon recognized as eminently adaptable for the screen and/or for the stage. Controversy has accompanied every version of the work that has been presented, and the various strategies used in the course of its transformations from page to screen to stage raise issues that are germane to all studies of such adaptations. Anthony Burgess has long been dissatisfied with the truncated text of A WILLIAM HUTCHINGS Clockwork Orange that was published in the United States, which omitted the novel's final chapter and added an unauthorized and unnecessary glossary; the untruncated text remained unavailable in the United States until 1987. Stanley Kubrick's much-acclaimed 1971 film (with which Burgess was also highly displeased) was based on the American edition of the novel; Burgess did not write the screenplay, which was also separately published in 1971. Several years earlier, however, a quite different film of the novel had been planned, for which he was to prepare the script, as he recently disclosed: ... In ... 1965 ... the rock-group known as the Rolling Stones expressed an interest in the buying of the property and acting participation in a film version which I myself should write. There was not much money in the project, because the pennissive age in which crude sex and cruder violence could be frankly presented had not yet begun. ... The film ... was not made. I Surely, Mick Jagger's portrayal of Alex with the other band members as the droogs must rank alongside the Beatles's unproduced film of Up Against It (from the script written by Joe Orton) as one of the most intriguing unmade films of the 1960s. The first known stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange was created by John Godber, produced at the Edinburgh Festival in 1980, and revived in "pub theatre" productions in 1982 and 1984; since Godber's unauthorized version has not been published, however, details of his adaptation must be gleaned from reviews. His most startling innovation is the use of a wheelchair -bound narrator, identified as Alex II, who observes the action from atop a black-box set of walls and raked floors, while another actor, playing Alex I, reenacts events from his earlier, violent life - though these were, in reviewer Christopher Hudson's view, "mimed too discreetly to be threatening ." At the end of the play, Alex II leaves his wheelchair, becoming an even more menacing presence; as reviewer Barney Bardsley remarks, "he swishes his truncheon in idle remembrance of those bruising, battering days" - an indication that Godber's adaptation, like Kubrick's, presented the truncated "American" ending of the novel rather than Burgess's own. "My unease with this production, [which is) so...