In the preface to the published playscript of The Secret Agent, Matthew Hurt, the playwright who adapted Joseph Conrad's 1903 novel for the stage, asserts “his moral rights” to the work. What about Conrad's moral rights? is my question to Hurt and the five “devisers and performers” who have had their merry way with The Secret Agent.
As presented at The Traverse Theatre as part of the 2013 Fringe Festival, Conrad's dark, sardonically comic novel about an agent provocateur and his bomb-wielding anarchist comrades had been turned into a kind of mock-vaudeville show. Director Joseph Alford has added songs, slapstick, humor, video imaging and physical theater to the mix, with Conrad's text serving only as a springboard for the performers' self-indulgent antics.
Theatre O, the company behind this production, specializes in “inspirational, devised inter-disciplinary theater done with a spirit of playfulness." Among its previous productions are Astronaut and Delirium, both of which have found favor with audiences both in the UK and Europe. The Secret Agent may follow in those shows' footsteps and be equally well received but this reviewer can only wish that Theatre O would stick to devising original works instead of deconstructing literary classics.
The Secret Agent is a prescient novel about the madness of terrorism, the police state and its hold on life. It is also a powerful human document about the loss of love and honor in our time. Unfortunately, most of those qualities are lost in the Traverse's production. The less-than-inspired highjinks – mostly improvised, of course – trivialize and demean the source material. The thumping you hear during the show is poor Joseph Conrad pounding away in moral protest on the lid of his coffin.
