(Hare’s article appeared in the Guardian, 1/23.)
Soon after becoming a playwright, I resolved to have nothing to do with adaptation. There were two reasons. First, I wasn’t any good at it. My early version of Pirandello’s The Rules of the Game, written when I was 23, and performed by Paul Scofield and Joan Plowright for the National Theatre, decisively proved that I knew nothing about Pirandello and still less about adaptation: it was inept. But I had also gone into it with a puritanical belief that dramatists should write their own plays, not hitch a free ride by adapting other people’s. Nothing in the world was harder than telling a new story. Reconfiguring old ones was going to be far less important work.