John Gardner's masterpiece novella Grendel was adapted for the stage by Paul Mullin in 1997, and premiered in Seattle at the Book-It Theatre Company under the direction of Susanna Wilson, with James Lapan starring as the title character. Though the Book-It Space was entirely too small to properly accommodate the vastness of the piece (not to mention the broadsword fights), the production was well received. The Seattle Times called it, ”...a bountiful display for the ears and mind... a shocking work... uncommonly, wonderfully vivid”. The Stranger, one of Seattle’s alternative weeklys, said it was, “”... a wildly impassioned lament about human aggression.... One of the most original and thoughtfully conceived productions of the year.”
A subsequent 2001 production at Circle X Theatre Company in Los Angeles enjoyed a much more ample performance space at the Open Fist Theatre, but the production lacked some of Seattle’s freshman verve. Nevertheless, the LA Weekly, honored it with their annual award for Best Adaptation.
The Mullin adaptation is as true-to-the-source as possible. The playwright says he typed the entire novel into the computer at his day job and then proceeded pare away at the prose until he had something stageable. Thus, nothing but Gardner’s words are spoken in the script, though the stage-directions do suggest some rather radical interpretations: the Dragon played by a pipe-smoking professor for example, and the monster appearing at one point in the guise of Gardner himself, chain-smoking behind an Underwood with a bottle of whiskey beside him, typing his own demise as he lives it.
As Mullin says in his Seattle production program notes: “What makes John Gardner’s Grendel different is that the narrative voice isn’t merely a means of delivering the story; in a very profound way, it is the story.
GRENDEL: So it goes with me, age by age. Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls between myself and all I see.
I’d even venture further to say that as much as the voice is the story, Grendel is, to a compelling degree, Gardner; or perhaps more accurately, some version of Gardner that he has chosen, or half-chosen, to share with us. One need only read the author’s outrageous
lit-crit rampage,
On Moral Fiction, to see him surging from the
comforting darkness of righteous indignation to slay his
literary enemies, one by one. One need only glance at his famous
dust-cover photo, scowling and shaggy-headed, to half-imagine him as
poor old Hrothgar’s foe. It’s a testament to his genius that Gardner can invest himself in the monster, teach us to weep for Grendel, and yet still have us root in the end for his
nemesis/saviour,
Beowulf. Personally, I think it’s one of the greatest
jail break scenes in all of literature.
BEOWULF: Grendel, Grendel! You make the world by whispers, second by second. Are you blind to that? Whether you make it a grave or garden of roses is not the point. Feel the wall: is it not hard?... Hard, yes! Observe the hardness, write it down in careful runes. Now sing of walls! Sing!