What’s worst is that, in Discworld videos, Pratchett’s authorial voice is absent. How believable is that? If special effects made it seem believable, would the result still be a Pratchett story? Think of it: Discworld is a flat, round Frisbee-like thing flying through space on the backs of four elephants standing on the back of a humongous turtle. Even so, there wouldn’t be the let’s-pretend ambiance that exists with a stage play.Īctually, now that I think of it, making a Discworld movie more realistic with special effects might undercut the unbelievability that is at the heart of Pratchett’s plots. I imagine the translation might work a bit better if there were particularly good special effects. What’s worse is that all of the video versions I’ve seen have had very low production values. This is significant for the translation of a Discworld novel since Pratchett, in no way, is attempting to depict anything real in terms of plot - although the actions of the characters are all rooted in Pratchett’s deep (and very realistic) understanding of human nature. We’re looking at them through a window, as it were, rather than sharing the same room with them. In a stage play, we see people pretending to be other people, but, in a video version, the people on screen seem like the people in a documentary. The problem with television or movie versions is that, by their nature, they seem realistic, even if told from a fantasy point of view.
These are people here in front of another set of people, the one group pretending to be someone else and the other suspending disbelief to pretend that the characters of the story are actually there in front of them.
Unlike a television show or a movie, a play doesn’t purport to be realistic. Also important, I think, was that it was on stage with real human beings moving through the story. What worked with the Lifeline presentation was, first of all, that it was a top-notch production with a great amount of talent and gusto. I’ve written before about the difficulty of translating Terry Pratchett’s funny, witty, silly, insightful, wacky and clear-eyed novels into other art media.Ī year and a half ago, I saw a wonderfully entertaining version of Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment at Lifeline Theatre here in Chicago, but I’ve been underwhelmed by television and feature-length movie versions of several of his books.
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