Adaptations
The best known adaptation of the novel to other forms is the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick, starring Malcolm McDowell as Alex. A 1965 film by Andy Warhol entitled Vinyl was an adaptation of Burgess' novel.
After Kubrick's film was released, Burgess wrote an A Clockwork Orange stage play. In it, Dr. Branom defects from the psychiatric clinic when he grasps that the aversion therapy has destroyed Alex's ability to enjoy music. The play restores the novel's original ending.
In 1988, a German adaptation of A Clockwork Orange at the intimate theatre of Bad Godesberg featured a musical score by the German punk rock band Die Toten Hosen which, combined with orchestral clips of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and "other dirty melodies" (so stated by the subtitle), was released on the album Ein kleines bisschen Horrorschau. The track Hier kommt Alex became one of the band's signature songs.
In February 1990, another musical version was produced at the Barbican Theatre in London by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Titled A Clockwork Orange: 2004, it received mostly negative reviews, with John Peter of The Sunday Times of London calling it "only an intellectual Rocky Horror Show," and John Gross of The Sunday Telegraph calling it "a clockwork lemon." Even Burgess himself, who wrote the script based on his novel, was disappointed. According to The Evening Standard, he called the score, written by Bono and The Edge of the rock group U2, "neo-wallpaper." Burgess had originally worked alongside the director of the production, Ron Daniels, and envisioned a musical score that was entirely classical. Unhappy with the decision to abandon that score, he heavily criticised the band's experimental mix of hip hop, liturgical and gothic music. Lise Hand of The Irish Independent reported The Edge as saying that Burgess' original conception was "a score written by a novelist rather than a songwriter." Calling it "meaningless glitz," Jane Edwardes of 20/20 Magazine said that watching this production was "like being invited to an expensive French Restaurant - and being served with a Big Mac."
In 1994, Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater put on a production of A Clockwork Orange directed by Terry Kinney. The American premiere of novelist Anthony Burgess' own adaptation of his "A Clockwork Orange" starred K. Todd Freeman as Alex. In 2001, UNI Theatre (Mississauga, Ontario) presented the Canadian premiere of the play under the direction of Terry Costa.
In 2002, Godlight Theatre Company presented the New York Premiere adaptation of A Clockwork Orange at Manhattan Theatre Source. The production went on to play at the SoHo Playhouse (2002), Ensemble Studio Theatre (2004), 59E59 Theaters (2005) and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (2005). While at Edinburgh, the production received rave reviews from the press while playing to sold-out audiences. The production was directed by Godlight's Artistic Director, Joe Tantalo.
In 2003, Los Angeles director Brad Mays and the ARK Theatre Company staged a multi-media adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, which was named "Pick Of The Week" by the LA Weekly and nominated for three of the 2004 LA Weekly Theater Awards: Direction, Revival Production (of a 20th-century work), and Leading Female Performance. Vanessa Claire Smith won Best Actress for her gender-bending portrayal of Alex, the music-loving teenage sociopath. This production utilised three separate video streams outputted to seven onstage video monitors - six 19-inch and one 40-inch. In order to preserve the first-person narrative of the book, a pre-recorded video stream of Alex, "your humble narrator," was projected onto the 40-inch monitor, thereby freeing the onstage character during passages which would have been awkward or impossible to sustain in the breaking of the fourth wall.
Read more about this topic: A Clockwork Orange