I had mixed feelings when it was announced that my home city of York was planning to stage the Mystery Plays this summer. (For the benefit of those unfamiliar with Mystery Plays, they are traditional performances, depicting epic biblical dramas for the benefit of the masses in the Middle Ages.) On the one hand I was very enthusiastic. I’m an ardent medievalist, fan of the theatre, and particularly intrigued by the Mystery Plays, as they often give fascinating hints as to attitudes to Satan and general devilment in the Middle Ages, beyond the obvious orthodox views presented by the Church. However, it quickly became apparent that the 2012 York production was heavily adapted to suit contemporary tastes. One look at the trailer (posted for your viewing pleasure below) convinced me to forgo a ticket and save my shekels for other artistic endeavours…

You see, as this was designed to coincide with celebrations to mark the 800th anniversary of York receiving its Royal Charter from King John in 1212, and was to be performed against the magnificent backdrop of the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey in the Museum Gardens, it didn’t seem too much to ask for the production to have an authentic medieval theme and feel. We want old school angels with pearly white wings and fire-breathing demons emerging from the hellmouth. But, as anybody whose watched the above trailer will know, instead they decided to fuck with it. So, it’s sort of set in 1951 (though where the rainbow collective of multi-coloured dervishes come in is anybody’s guess). According to Damian Cruden, the artistic director, ‘in order for the Plays to remain alive and have a future, there has to be recognition that they are stories of our time, and we can look back at the whole of the 20th century as being of our time.’

It’s the same old excuse wheeled out by people who fuck with time-honoured classics. The script is so classic its timeless, but nobody will want to see it unless we change it. Bullshit. If its timeless, perform it as it was intended. If you want something contemporary – or from 1951 for no particular fucking reason – find something set in 1951 or whenever. Don’t put half your cast in housecoats and hairnets and expect nobody to notice that the language is all centuries old. If the story’s universal, don’t fuck with it. If it’s not, and that really bothers you, find another. I’m probably jaded by studying English at school, where we were frequently taken to see Shakespeare productions by third rate theatre companies, who tried to obscure their incompetence by relocating their plays into a space ship or gangland Chicago in the 1920s.

The trouble is, of course, that if Shakespeare had intended the battle scenes in Macbeth to be fought with rayguns, or Richard III to be running a bootlegging business, he’d have put it in the script. But he didn’t, so your production is going to be suffused with a sort of threadbare surrealism that doesn’t enhance anybody’s understanding or enjoyment of the play. Of course, it isn’t just shitty repertory Shakespeare that falls victim to this compulsion to fuck with the settings of established classics. Many Hollywood Shakespeare adaptations play fast and loose with the Bard’s plays in order to make no obvious point, apart from showing an arrogant disrespect for the playwright they purport to revere. Recently, for example, a film version of The Tempest gave the central character of the wizard Prospero a sex change, naming her Prospera, and casting Helen Mirren in the role. “She had her whole life taken away from her because she was a woman” explained the director Julie Taymor. (Which is all well and good, but has fuck all to do with what Bill Shakespeare wrote.)

While, to be fair, this Tempest is far from disastrous, I’d maintain that with her sex change antics, Taymor hasn’t adapted the play – she’s just fucked with it for the sake of it. A good adaptation in my books is one where elements of the inspiration are woven into a new production, leading to something which can enhance the viewer’s appreciation of both the original and the adaptation. So, you can set The Tempest in space, so long as you do something creative, clever or – most importantly original – with it. Such as with the 1956 science fiction classic Forbidden Planet, which borrows much from The Tempest, but builds from it rather than simply fucking with it. Or the 1943 horror flick I Walked with a Zombie, which resulted from a deliberate collision between Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 Gothic romance novel Jane Eyre and Haitan voodoo. It shouldn’t work, but it does…

More dubious, perhaps is the recent ‘mash-up’ novel Jane Slayre which crossbreeds the Bronte original with additional vampire-slaying text. This is, of course, just one of the tsunami of classic literature/horror parody mash-up novels that have emerged in the wake of the succcess of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in 2009. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was, at the very least, original and a strong gimmick. It’s also difficult to imagine what you could do to a Jane Austen novel that wouldn’t improve it. These more recent entries into the mash-up genre however, are starting to smell of laziness and desperation. Worth picking up to smile wryly at the cover, but probably not worth treating with the respect due an actual book. Or indeed adaptation. After the original cute idea, now lazy writers and editors are just flailing around looking for other incongruous classics to fuck with, and I for one don’t feel like encouraging them.

One of the most intriguing examples of the thin line between adapting and fucking with your inspiration takes us into the realms of the vampire. While little read today, Dr John Polidori’s 1819 novella The Vampyre, inspired by his association with the scandalous playboy poet Lord Byron, can still lay claim to being among the most influential vampire tales ever written. Certainly our modern concept of the vampire as a seductive ladykiller has more to do with Polidori’s story than Dracula as conceived by Bram Stoker. Polidori’s Vampyre was widely adapted for the stage in the early 1800s, particularly in Paris, in what amounted to the first popular vampire craze. In 1820, the British dramatist James Planche decided to adapt it for the London stage in perhaps the first major vampire production staged in English. Ironically, Planche later became known for contributing to authenticity in costumes for drama, particularly Shakespeare.

According to Planche in 1823, ‘while a thousand pounds were frequently lavished upon a Christmas pantomime or an Easter spectacle, the plays of Shakespeare were put upon the stage with makeshift scenery, and, at the best, a new dress or two for the principal characters.’ He decided this would not do – playwrights should stop fucking with Shakespeare and present it in the costumes the Bard originally intended – a decision that helped make Planche into one of London’s leading dramatists. Three years before, however, he hadn’t felt the same about his production of the Vampyre. As the theatre had a large collection of Scottish costumes left over from a previous production, Planche opted to relocate the action to the highlands, dressing his lead vampire in appropriate tartan attire. The Vampyre was only a minor success, which may be just as well. Otherwise subsequent vampires might well have followed suit, trading in cloaks for kilts, and when the Count referred to the ‘sweet music’ made by the ‘children of the night’, it may well have been the mournful wail of the bagpipes…