Humour and interesting ideas, based on good book the premise rather than the plot)
Disadvantages:
Very hard to stage, too absurd?, not really an adaptation but a new story
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
I was reading Luke Rhinehart's classic cult fiction novel, The Dice Man, on the recommendation of a couple of friends, but that's a separate review. When I looked it up on Amazon, however, I noticed a couple of spin-offs - a sequel (The Search for the Dice Man), The Book of the Die (a kind of Bible of dice-living), and this play - The Dice House. One of the aforementioned friends had actually said she'd been involved in a production of such too, so I thought I'd check it out. If nothing else, it was only 92 pages - compared to the 540 or so of the original book.
I'd been expecting the play to be some sort of adaptation, but I was completely wrong. Although it's based around the same core concept - a psychiatrist who rolls dice to decide on courses of action - the play is otherwise completely different from the book, not even involving any of the same characters. It's as if Peter Jackson had decided to make a trilogy of films about a ring of power, but without even reading Tolkien first!
In this case, however, that's not a criticism. To adapt the book for stage would've been practically impossible (it being largely a first person monologue, and involving rape scenes and the like). Instead Peter Lucas has just used the concept of dice-living as his own starting point for something original, and equally absurd. There's even a foreword from Luke Rhinehart congratulating him on this, which I take as a good sign. (Another consequence is I think it's pretty much irrelevant whether you've read Rhinehart's book - though if you enjoyed the idea behind that, you may well like this too).
The premise, in this case, is that a Dr Ratner has set up a Centre for research into Randomised Living. Here he institutionalises a bunch of mental patients into 'dice therapy'. The idea is that they don't make decisions for themselves, but merely draw up a list of options, and roll dice to decide which course to follow. Consequently action is deliberately random, and patternless, rather than constrained by a single 'personality' - "only by allowing all parts of yourself equal expression can you destroy the sham of your single personality and liberate yourself from the chains of ego" (p24/Act 1 scene 2)
The action kicks off with Dr Drabble, another psychiatrist, annoyed his wife Polly has taken up dice-living, and left him to join Ratner's centre. Drabble enlists one of his patients, Matthew, to kidnap his wife - threatening him with being sectioned if he refuses to help, and reflecting on the irony that someone would have to be insane to choose being sectioned over assisting a kidnap.
Such little ironies are only part of the humour. Generally the play's much funnier and not as dark as the book. Whereas Rhinehart (in the book) is led to rape, adultery and more, here it's the absurdity of dice-living that's emphasised; how rolling the die can frustrate one's obvious desires - e.g. when Ratner pronounces he'll put a stop to the abduction, before rolling a die and then announcing that actually he'll sit calmly by and watch.
The absurd humour has more than a touch of Alan Ayckbourn about it - helped by the fact it's set in a mental hospital, and truly enlivened by patients, such as Mr Smith, who has paranoid delusions the whole world is conspiring against him, and Victor (what he's done with Ratner's car is too near the end to reveal, but probably the funniest moment of the whole play - it certainly had me laughing out loud).
Since I only read the play, I can't comment too much on how it might be performed. It struck me some stage directions where either rather vague, hard to perform, or both - for example, Mr Smith is stalked by a probably hallucinogenic Knight, who emerges from strange places (like a grandfather clock) only to briefly torment him and vanish again.
Like most plays, because it's designed for the stage, it's a relatively brief read - it took me just a morning - though I don't know what 92 pages equates to in lines. The version pictured on Ciao is from Oberon Modern Plays, priced £7.99 on Amazon. I actually read an older Faber and Faber edition, which no longer seems available. It's a lot of money for such a short book - in common with most playscripts (presumably because of limited demand) - more than the original, much longer, book in fact. It's funny, but probably not worth paying that much for, since you're unlikely to want to read it many times again. I recommend you follow my example, and read it in a library, or if you can, see it performed.
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