i started rereading the book last night

obviously there are minor changes to do with effective staging and pointed dramatisation (she also has a dad in the original, who i imagine was dropped because he would be one adult too many, making the hinted dynamics between the adults either overbearing or flat) (or both)

more significantly i think: the play makes a lot more of the scenes with the adults — in the book marianne mainly switches between alone in her room awake, and in the dreamspace; this would either make for very dull dramaturgy or very demanding (and “experimental”) dramaturgy…

… but i wonder if it doesn’t also reflects a significant shift since the 50s in how kid-lit deals with the relationship between children and grown-ups (and indeed in middleclass parenting itself?): look back at swallows and amazons, and basically the quite-young children are ENTIRELY left to their own devices on the lakes (”better drowned than duffers; if not duffers won’t drown”); kid-lit as the seen-and-not-heard escaping into imagined adulthood back then largely meant a kind of adventurous self-sufficiency, with “grown-upness” as the ideal you’re aiming for… by the 70s, a new element had begun to creep in, which is that adults, with their own odd arcs of development perhaps, have to be engaged with more as present characters, perhaps fearful and flawed themselves, and there’s a more complex dialectic to how adventures are undertaken and solutions discovered (where adult-perspective and kid-perspective have somewhat to dialogue and debate and come to terms with one another)

anyway the play opts, as the waking alternative to the dreamspace, for a busier and more active social space (complete with mum, doctor and home-tutor sometimes simultaneously present, talking over marianne’s head) — which is dramaturgically much more charged, but also (possibly unconsciously) responds to several decades of an ideology of teen-perspective as TRUMPING mere crusty old grown-up knowledge of the world in its insight

(the formal politics of development here: in swallows and amazons, say, children are liminal on responsible adulthood; a present-day version of S&A would have to acknowledge that a 10-year-old is liminal on teen-dom, which has since the 50s become a FAR more explored and debated and contested zone of social motion…)