Dirk (play)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message.
This article has been tagged since March 2007.

Dirk is a stage play adapted from the novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams.

[edit] History

The original adaptation was by James Goss and Arvind Ethan David while still at school in 1991. In this form it was less than an hour long and "amusing but utterly incomprehensible".

The same team expanded the script and, with the assistance of producer Matt Wreford, staged a student production from 30th May to 3rd June 1995 at the Old Fire Station Theatre in Oxford.

The production made use of computer animation to display some of the difficult scenes and concepts and was generally regarded as a success. SFX magazine said "As fine a piece of science fiction theatre as you are likely to find anywhere."

Douglas Adams attended the last night and was delighted with the production.

It was revived again in 1997 but this time at the Oxford Playhouse, running from 5th - 8th November. Again Douglas Adams was in the audience and this was said to have got him thinking about a movie of Dirk Gently.

There was a further staging at Imperial College London on December 8th - 11th, 1999.

After Adams's death in 2001, a smaller scale production was staged as a tribute at the Unicorn Theatre, Abingdon by the Old Gaol Theatre Company, running from the 5th - 8th December. The director was a friend of the Adams family and the last night was attended by Douglas's sister, Sue and James Thrift, Douglas's half-brother. This production used none of the computer effects of previous ones and relied heavily on the audience's familiarity with the story. In a neat touch, a sofa, which forms a significant plot item in the book, was wedged in the staircase into the theatre so patrons had to climb over it to get to their seats.

Also in 2001, Dirk went international, with a production by the Vagabond Theatre company running in Perth, Western Australia from 14th - 30th June.

The first American production ran from 29th September to 12th December 2006 at the Road Theatre Company, North Hollywood, California.

[edit] Differences from the book

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

In converting a very complex book into a play lasting 1-2 hours (depending on version) it was inevitable that some elements would have to be left out.

The biggest casualty and the greatest disappointment for many fans is that the Electric Monk is left out completely. Apart from the difficulty of having a character on a horse in a stageplay, a large amount of the book concerning the monk is purely descriptive with little dialogue so he had to go. This in itself has knock-on effects for other characters and a further major change is that Michael Wenton-Weakes now becomes the murderer of Gordon Way.

The book appears to take place in an alternate universe whereas the play is in our universe and the paradoxes regarding Bach and Coleridge do not exist.

Another problem exists in the scene where Dirk and Richard are walking along the bank of the Grand Union Canal and Richard is supposed to dive in the canal when he hears the words "My old maiden Aunt who lived in Winnipeg". It would be rather difficult to have a canal on stage so this replaced by Richard dancing the Bossa-Nova and many people remember this as the one of the funniest parts of the play.