Going to see the theatrical adaptation of a work of literature one has really loved always carries a portion of anxiety and emotional torture, perhaps comparable to what parents must feel sitting in the audience at their children’s Nativity plays, but worsened by the constant urge to elbow your neighbours at particularly poignant or funny moments to make sure they are getting it. This can be an exhilarating position to be in if the adaptation does justice to the original, but it can also be heartbreaking when you are forced to witness what you feel is the reckless, selfish destruction of a beautiful text, all the time remaining painfully aware of the risk of misinterpretation run by everyone who is experiencing the text for the first time through the play. Judith Adam’s adaption of Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means was, for me, an experience of the latter kind.

It should be made clear up front that Spark herself personally approved Adams’ version in a letter she sent her in 2006; it should also be granted that this is not, even in the general context of such delicate and ethereally complex works as Spark’s, the easiest novel to adapt; the Stellar Quines/Assembly production presented at the Edinburgh Festival is, in fact, the first time anyone has risked it. However, it remains a performance that will make all those who have read the original version squirm and wriggle in their seats.

Adams and/or her director, Muriel Romanes, have chosen to represent the events of the book in small, disarrayed episodes, performed in no particular order, and occasionally simultaneously in different areas of the stage delimited or partially hidden by opaque screens - so opaque, in fact, that it is often not easy to determine what is happening behind them. The first half of the play is especially deconstructed, introducing almost all the characters in the space of five minutes and then dispersing them around some actions that should instantaneously convey their personality to us. The Girls of Slender Means is set principally in a hostel for not-very-well-to-do girls who need to live in London away from their families, the May of Teck Club, and the action takes place in the last few months of World War II. For viewers of the play who don’t know the novel, this only becomes clear much later into the action. At first, what we witness is a sort of catwalk parade of the girls - which would not be such a shame if the delicacy and intelligence of Spark’s portrayals had been preserved. Unfortunately, it has not, and this is the play’s worst sin.

Where Spark had beautiful, amusing, tender glass figurines of women, at once perfectly unique and amazingly recognisable, Adams’ adaptation has wooden, two-dimensional stickers of poses, grimaces, and caricature. Melody Grove’s Joanna is a Goody Two-Shoes country girl who recites poetry the way you would imagine Julie Andrews would do in The Sound of Music, and never lets on the burning passion and ambiguous obsessions of the literary version; Candida Benson and Clare Lawrence-Moody as, respectively, Selina and Dorothy, the sexually liberated, top-of-the-beauty-hierarchy girls who exchange food rations for soap and clothing ones, are not nearly whimsical and airy-headed enough, nor particularly charming. Jamie Lee plays Nicholas Farringdon, one of Spark’s most amusing pisseurs de copie, as a sort of Oxbridge Socialist beau - thus taking away all the rich texture of the original version, so wickedly annoying and yet so easy to pity.

In the second part, after a couple of isolated song-and-dance numbers, the play pulls itself together and becomes slightly more organic, but the terrifying event that should be the climax of the plot is clumsily rushed, and left unexplained - which is quite unexplainable in itself - hence all the enlightenment it should bring on why everyone is what they are is lost. All the while, in the mouths of these plasticised characters, Spark’s irresistible comments (‘Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor’) are made to sound like kitchen-sink exchanges. Even admitting that the piece must be seen as Adams’ response to the novel rather than as a proper adaptation, it is still hard to find justification for such a massacre.

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