"What's It Going To Be Then, Eh?": The Stage Odyssey of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange

Abstract

Since its publication in 1962, A Clockwork Orange has remained Anthony Burgess's best-known and most controversial work, distinguished not only by his stylistic virtuosity in creating the polyglot, pun-riddled teenage slang in which the novel is written but also by the vividness of the violence-wracked dystopian society within which Alex , the book's narrator and protagonist, thrives. Yet even within the tradition of disaffected adolescent narratorl protagonist/anti-heroes — ranging from Huckleberry Finn to Holden Caulfield to Smith in Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner —- Alex is decidedly an extreme and appalling case: the leader of a teenage gang, he is a thief, a mugger, a convicted murderer and rapist, who frankly and unrepentently describes even his most heinous deeds and dares to assert the essential humanity that he shares with the readers, whom he addresses repeatedly as "my brothers." Rife with theological implications about the Christian doctrine of free will, filled with anti-authoritarian and anti-behaviorist satire, and prophetically accurate about the urban violence that would ever-increasingly characterize subsequent decades, Burgess's novel is among the most prescient works of the pnstmodern era — and one of its most outrageous. With its clear agons, its moral conundrums, and the added advantage of its numerous and notorious scenes of sex and violence - which would parricularly help to assure its box-office appeal — A Clockwork Orange was soon recognized as eminently adaptable for the screen and/or for the stage. Controversy has accompanied every version of the work that has been presented, and the various strategies used in the course of its transformations from page to screen to stage raise issues that are germane to all studies of such adaptations.