Theater Reviews + Features | Pittsburgh City Paper: In Ray Bradbury's 1951 novel Fahrenheit 451, the government in a dystopic future has outlawed books — the better to curtail independent thinking — and city firemen are charged with burning libraries, rather than putting out fires. Sixty years later, you have to wonder how much relevance such a story retains: What with the Internet, Kindles, iPads, et al., pretty soon most people won't know what a book looked like.
4 comments:
It's a shame that this play wasn't very good, because I remember reading the book back in high school, and loving it. I'm a big fan of dystopian novels, and the theme of books being banned and people living in an electronic and drugged up world seems all to relevant to today's world. There's a lot of potential here, and against what I generally say, this book should have been changed around some to make a play out of it. Of course the plot and themes should have stayed the same, but some of the moments in the book are long dialogue scenes between two people (which can drag the energy down onstage), so I think that scenes of the book burnings and creating theatrical moments out of the dystopian nature of the story could have made the play more theatrical. Hopefully someone will adapt this play in the future again because it'd be a shame if this adaptation dragged down such a fantastic theme and story that's so relevant to today.
I agree with Kelly. I read this book when I was in middle school, and I still remember loving it, and think about it often. The author of this article brings up a good point about this book's (and play's) relevance to our modern day life. However, I believe that our technology-driven world makes for a really interesting setting for this play, and could say a lot about the subject that Bradbury originally was trying to get across. It really is a shame that the play didn't get great reviews, as it is a story worth being told. Hopefully this play will continue to be adapted into a form that is more "theatrical." This article also made me question what we should and should not be adapting into plays. Perhaps this play seemed like a "lecture" because it is not meant to be told in a theatrical setting. This is definitely something to question, as much of the work we see today is an adaption of something, whether it be a book, a movie, or something else.
I remember reading this book a few years ago and felt similarly to a lot of the points being made in this article: that sort of future seems quite plausible with the physical book becoming less and less necessary nowadays, but that I constantly felt like I was being lectured. I personally refuse to buy a kindle or anything of that sort because of this feeling that books will soon be all gone, but I also feel quite silly and superstitious believing in such a horrible future. I think there are ways to do this as a play without it seeming so much like a lecture, but I think the artistic team would have to take a lot of liberties with the text and maybe stray from being one hundred percent true to Bradbury's story.
May I point out that the idea that the erasure of the physical book in favor of electronic things like the nook and the kindle is not the point that Fahrenheit 451 was trying to make at all. The point of the book is that censorship is bad, particularly when we censure ourselves out of fear of offending others. The point of e-readers is rather the opposite, to preserve books by putting them into a more portable form. In the end, it doesn't matter whether you're burning physical books, or giving viruses to e-readers, what matters is the destroyed data and lost stories, not what form said stories took.
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