WILLIAM FAULKNER called the book “a real son of a bitch”. Readers can empathise. “The Sound and the Fury”, published in 1929 when the then 32-year-old author was poor and unknown, uses a kaleidoscope of narrators to chronicle the decline of a genteel Mississippi family. The novel starts from the perspective of Benjy Compson, the youngest son, whose view of events is a mess of memories, jumbled without order or insight. A young man with the “idiot” mind of a child, his stream-of-consciousness account bounces between the decades as it drops from one sentence to the next. The effect is disorienting. Performing it on stage seems like an act of hubris.
“The novel is a complete train wreck,” says John Collins, the artistic director of Elevator Repair Service (ERS), a theatre group. But turning unwieldy prose into living, breathing works of theatre is the kind of problem that has animated ERS for nearly 25 years. The company is best known for “Gatz”, an audacious, eight-hour production of the entire text of “The Great Gatsby”, which became a surprise hit in theatres around the world. Now armed with a broader audience, the company is resuscitating its 2008...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1HwHZkK
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