It's my opinion George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man was his best play: strong, believable characters (male and female) are surrounded by a wonderful, tension-filled, hilarious plot and finished with an ending both plausible and extremely satisfying.  So if it's so perfect, why bother with an adaptation?

Come to think of it, why ever bother with adaptations?  Because adaptations can bring modern audiences back to a crystal clear understanding of the playwright's original intent and thereby save them from the ravages of time.

For example, Arms and the Man was written in 1894 and set during the mid-nineteenth century Crimean War.  You'd have to be an excellent student of military history to get Shaw's jokes about Russian commanders and the Serbian troops.  I placed my adaptation during America's Revolutionary War, so we could all work from the same page.  Shaw's original begins as enemy soldiers are being routed through the street; the same occurred at the Battle of Yorktown - the decisive, grande finale of the American Revolution - a perfect fit. 

Shaw's protaganist has to be a "professional soldier" - it's key to the entire plot.  But Shaw's mercenary soldier was Swiss - which doesn't mean to us now what it did then.  When I discovered there were two troops of Scottish foot soldiers at the Battle of Yorktown, I found my inspiration. No one has trouble seeing a Highlander as a professional warrior.  That he'd be willing to fight for the British is a stretch, but you'll have to see the play to understand the fellow's thinking on the subject.

Then there's the purpose of the pretty, young household maid.  Shaw's maid was a strange combination of gold digger and victim of true love.  I used the American Revolution to keep the maid a bit of a mercenary but still capable of true love: she's free to imagine herself married to a man above her station, because she believes in her new America social barriers will mean nothing. 

Another reason for my adaptation: I don't believe writers should only write from what they know, but it certainly helps: my Highlander, Captain Hay, is named for my relative, Gilbert De LaHaye, a friend and comrade-in-arms to Robert The Bruce (as an aside, another important character, Henry James Hamilton Clodfelter - responsible for routing the British at Yorktown in my adaptation - is named after my Great-great-great-great-great-great-Grandfather George Clodfelter, who fought for American Independence. 

Which brings me to another reason anyone winds up writing an adaptation: pure, bare-knuckled inspiration.  The kind that knocks you flat the first time you meet it.

My point of impact occurred more than two years ago when my son's cello teacher, Betty Kellog, and her husband John Grauerholz asked me if I'd ever seen or read Arms and the Man.  John then lent me a videotape of his daughter playing the lead in a college production.  Ten seconds into the recording, my head was reeling with ideas.  When it was over, I started discussing the concept of an adaptation with my mother; it was she who suggested the Colonial era, God bless her.  

I started writing that night, and now the time has finally come to walk it to the stage.  Which leads me to the final reason for adaptations, plays, books -- why writers write anything at all, in fact.  It's very simple: we write for you.

See you at the theatre.

Contact Meredith Bean McMath

For more information on Gilbert Hay, visit http://www.clanhay.net/HISTORY/SirGilbert.php