Chesterton has it in their fairly clearly.   This is narration from the play just before Gabriel’s sword fight with the Marquis:

First the fear of the Professor had been the fear of the tyrannical accidents of nightmare, then the fear of the Doctor had been the fear of the airless vacuum of science. The first was that any miracle might happen, the second that no miracle can ever happen. But now I was in the presence of the great fact of the fear of death.

I wanted to run with that concept a little further.  In the book, the scene where we find Dr. Bull takes place in his home, in the morning.  I chose to move it to his office at a research hospital, even though hospitals at the time were very different places than they are today.  That’s a cheat, but worth it I think.  Here is the narration from the play as the Professor and Gabriel walk toward Dr. Bull’s office:

We reached the bottom of a huge block of buildings and began in silence up the naked, numberless stone steps. My head spun as they seemed to go on forever– like the empty infinity of arithmetic: something unthinkable, yet necessary to thought; like the meaningless statements of astronomy about the distance of the fixed stars. I was ascending the house of reason, a thing more hideous than unreason itself.

The visual of the steps is incredible, and I was excited when I re-read this description in the book as I was building this scene.  Chesterton makes it very clear in his book Orthodoxy that he believes that reason is the root of insanity, not irrationality.  He believes that man needs a healthy does of “unreason” along with his reason in order to survive this world.  It’s the people who can’t comprehend or become comfortable with the contradictions in life that will eventually drive themselves mad.  The whole concept of God is wrapped up in philosophical catch-22′s.  Those who rely solely on cold reason and logic may never fully be able to grasp the concept.

Another motive of Chesterton’s in the book is that before we are reintroduced to each anarchist on the council, he makes sure that we’re reminded of the dangers of this person.  I adapted the description of Dr. Bull a little further, especially relevant today because of many people of faith who see scientists as the enemy, and consider science to be the antithesis of everything that faith and religion represents.

Professor:  I don’t know if you’ve read much about this “scientific revolution.” It’s a reprehensible, Godless vocation. This facility is world-renowned for carrying out some of the most unchristian acts of science and medicine known to man… each a repulsive affront on God’s creation. No doubt that Dr. Bull is the driving force behind this evil place.

I was originally tempted to “name names” of our most feared scientific subjects:  test tube babies, cloning, abortion, stem cell research.  Alas, I decided it would be too political to mention specifics, because my audience might imagine that I’m trying to take a position on these, which I am not.  The point is that science seems often like the enemy of faith, and the work of God, but when we look behind those “black spectacles,” we find an entirely different truth.

Ben Stanton and Ananda Dillon recording the Dr. Bull scenes.

Stephen Alan Carver, William Dennis Hunt, and Jacob Sidney

There I saw Rosamond, Gregory’s sister with the goldred hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, laughing with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.

Rosamond is mentioned twice in The Man Who Was Thursday book.  Once, right after Gabriel’s first debate with Lucien Gregory “the real anarchist” as he’s known.  She catches his eye, and later asks him his advice on her brother’s anarchism.  He says,

“Now, sometimes a man like your brother really finds a thing that he does mean. And it doesn’t matter if it’s only a half-truth, a quarter-truth, or tenth-truth; he will say it much more than he means– simply from the sheer force of meaning it.”

The second appearance is at the very end of the book, after everything has faded away into something else that we’re not quite sure what.  Gabriel’s vision of her is the final line of the book.  But Chesterton himself almost alludes to the idea that he wishes she could have appeared in more places in the story.

In the wild events which were to follow this girl had no official role to play. And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a motive in music through all the mad adventures afterward, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night.

Hence the idea that I would literally follow that vein– have Rosamond keep recurring like a motive in music.  So I added two more scenes in which she appears and speaks to Gabriel.  In the narrative, Gabriel rarely gets a moment to breathe and collect his thoughts.  As he’s lost in this world where anything can take off its mask and become something else, Rosamond is the one constant.  She has no agenda, she has no artifice, nor is she put off by Gabriel’s penchant for wit and melodrama.  She has a genuine interest in who Gabriel is and cares about what he is going through.  She also serves as a beacon, reminding him of what might be in store for him on the other side of this nightmare, should he ever wake up.

Adding words to Chesterton is one of the most harrowing and risky things I can do.  It’s much safer to cut things and streamline the story and dialog without changing the nature of it.   Adaptation is a special kind of art, and can be approached in many different ways, but the one thing I consistently believe is that the artist needs to find a way to personalize it to their own point of view.  There are certain things in Thursday that speak to me, and ideas that I latched on to while reading it.  These are the things I try to bring out in my radio adaptation.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the book is Chesterton’s voice when it comes to his description, which when adapting the story to radio, I knew would need to be translated into narration.

The book is told in the third person, though only from the perspective of Gabriel Syme. Adapting it to the first person, with Gabriel as the narrator was fairly simple. The difficult part was resisting the temptation to not include everything. There are so many great passages that Chesterton frames the story in terms of a larger battle between the forces of good and evil, with Gabriel as humanity’s chosen vessel to hold back the devil.

I’ve kept at least a part of  every thematic block of description, but had to shorten some of them drastically, in order to keep the action moving forward.  Most are intrinsic to the story, bringing out important themes, and others are just way too clever to lose.

Some highlights from our last session:  “having been first forced to fight for two factions that didn’t exist.”  Describing the Colonel, you don’t realize until you’re reading it aloud the repeated “F” sound.   It sounded great, though.  There are also a few repeated word gems, for example “we six tireless, though exasperated travellers broke through black thickets and ploughed through ploughed fields till each of us was turned into a figure too outrageous to be mistaken for a tramp.”

Chesterton nearly always includes two adjectives in each sentence that he’s describing something.  A favorite from yesterday:  “The next morning the five of us bewildered but hilarious people took the boat for Dover.”  Hilarious is a great way to describe the way the detectives feel once they realize how duped they’ve been.

Next we’re moving on to the scenes between Gabriel and Professor de Worms.

This audio play adaptation of the book remains faithful to the original that everyone fell in love with.  Of course there are liberties taken, and I’ve inserted a couple of surprises that I think the fans will like.  Oh, and the ending will be just as surreal, so no Hollywood-ization there.

We’re only a few couple sessions in, so there’s a lot of work to go.

Here’s the link to the article.

This is the humble beginnings of a long journey of recordings.  We’re borrowing a quiet classroom at our local church, doctoring it up with a little sound absorption to dampen reflections, and giving ourselves room to move around.  In this scene Lucien Gregory introduces Gabriel to the underground lair of the London anarchists movement.  We’re using a Zoom 4-track recorder, which records a stereo matrix of the room sound, as well as two shotgun microphones that follow the actors movements.

Reading G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday was kind of like that for me… the most actual and rousing moment of my experience reading fiction.  On one hand a detective mystery, on the other, a metaphysical thriller with a heartbeat of philosophy.  This is a line from the character Lucien Gregory before he introduces Gabriel Syme into the underworld of anarchy.

It’s London, turn of the century.  Bombs go off in the street, destroying coffee shops and the innocent lives that happened to be there.  Who is behind these random acts of violence, this deep pain handed out indiscriminately?  Is it people, embodied by the anarchist movement?  Or is it something bigger than ourselves– perhaps the universe itself.  These are big questions to be grappled with, and vital even today.

I’m a filmmaker based in Southern California, and I’ve made it my goal to bring this story to life.  Someday there may be a full-fledged feature film, but I can’t accomplish that right now.  What I can do is produce a radio play featuring the best acting talent and dress it up with music and sound effects to put the listener inside the story.

I held out for awhile, but eventually we became a two iPod family, and haven’t looked back.  In Los Angeles we spend a lot of time in our cars, and the wonderful podcasts and audiobooks we’ve found keep transportation interesting.  There’s a built-in distribution network, and a high demand for quality work.  This project will be released as a four part podcast, for free, online.

There isn’t any money to do this, and it’ll take the majority of 2010, but slowly and surely we’ll get this done.  This is the website home for it, and this is the first post, so welcome.