Today I watched a stage adaption of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. It was at the Southwark Playhouse, and produced by So It Goes Theatre.
Having listened to the audiobook last year, it's hard to even conceive of how it could be adapted for stage. So many time jumps, so many different characters in different places all at once. But they do manage to pull it off! With great use of dual projectors, minimal costumes, and a variety of pretty good accents, the cast manage to cover the vast majority of what the book does. This feeling of being thrown back and forth in Pilgrim's mind is enhanced by the actors-in-common, it adds to the sense of disorientation and unstuck-in-timeness.
Throughout the play there are lots of clever tricks with the projector's visuals, creating podiums, aeroplane windows, tralfamadorian geodesic domes, but no particular tricks with any props. That is until the ending, where piles of papers stamped with "So It Goes" are dumped out of suitcases and thrown about the stage, representing the immense scale of the atrocity at Dresden. It's a brilliant conclusion to an extremely smart and rigorously adapted version of Slaughterhouse-Five. I would recommend it, but the run's now finished.