How to adapt Umineko as a Stage Play

07th Discussion
#1

First things first: I’m totally crazy. In a way, I just love doing ludicrously ambitious things and go way over the top while doing that. When I was in High School, it was really only the weird decisions of the teacher in charge that ruined our play in theatre course, but our basic idea to not only play Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, but also Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris and then put the entire Troyan War in between it was so insane, it was totally my taste.

Ever since I played in abovementioned insanity, I’m playing with the thought that once I’ve properly settled in as a teacher, I want to join or lead a theatre club just for the sake of doing absurdly ambitious plays like this and doing it right. Up until now I’ve only played with the thought of adapting “A Song of Ice and Fire”, each book into one play. Just to show that stupid overrated edgefest “Game of Thrones” the finger by showing that you can adapt the core themes of the story with a non-existant budget and not end up with polar opposites as characters. I’m still fairly certain that distilling those books into stage plays is totally feasable and that I’m gonna make that happen someday.

But today… I’ve spent my way back home from work musing about even more ludicrous possibilities. I love writing. I love theatre. I love Umineko. And I love shoving Umineko down other people’s throats. So why not combine all of these things by adapting Umineko as a stage play?

There are even a few advantages that Umineko has:

  • the music for scene transitions and for emphasizing certain developments kinda falls into your lap
  • even if you scratch cosplay (and I naturally intend to avoid cosplay, especially when it comes to the demon characters - I will not go down as the teacher who made his students wear suspender belts, obviously!), at least the human characters can easily get coded by taking clues from their VN appearance
  • the small size of the setting with just a limited number of backgrounds

Of course there are several main disadvantages that make Umineko damn hard to adapt into any media that is not written down:

  • truth battles
  • magic scenes in general and specific cases of unreliable narration
  • the size of the cast
  • the ludicrous size of the story itself

Some of those I can at least limit by using simple things I have already used in my draft of the A Song of Ice and Fire adaptation. Fantasy scenes can be alluded to by shadow play and flashing spotlights, just let characters narrate what happens. The size of cast can be dealt with by letting your pupils play several roles at once. Heck, in that Iphigenia example above each of us played three roles. This is surprisingly easy.

This leaves two issues remaining: Truth Battles and how to cut down the story.

For truth battles… I’m honestly thinking that the simplest way to deal with that is putting a beamer with a prepared animation in front of the stage and just project the words onto a black screen behind the characters whenever they are spoken. Might look silly, but at the moment I don’t have any better idea.

Now for the cuts in the story. As I said above, I would have cut up “A Song of Ice and Fire” into one play per book, which means 7 plays (if GRRM ever finishes, that is) and I’d have to play a reminder of what had happened previously in front of each play for those who haven’t seen the ones that came before it (which will be quite a few, since the people coming to High School theatre are mostly the parents of the actors and the actors will likely change in between the plays). For Umineko, using the same tactic would mean 8 plays. Thing is, since barely anyone in the audience will see all of them, I’m afraid that the effort will be wasted no matter what I do. Adapting detective stories into stage plays seems quite common here and putting our project up as a deconstruction of that would certainly peak some interest, but Umineko is too damn large for a faithful adaptation to let everyone keep all the clues to solve it on their own. Every play would have to be able to stand on its own, without much interlocking with the previous or the follwing plays.

There is only one other way I see right now to salvage the size issue: Completely dropping the main story of Umineko and instead make it a spin-off kind of thing. Just making it a straight-forward murder mystery like episode 1, expand the tea party into a proper logic duel and call it a day. Therefore the atmosphere and narrative devices of Umineko can be used, I have more leeway to write an original story around it, but I don’t need to adapt the entire thing. But… I don’t think that’s what I want to do. Like I said, I’m crazy. I want to adapt freaking Umineko! Anything else would be just giving up!

What do you think, everyone? Any hurdles or solutions I have forgotten?

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#2

I would not try to make some grand 8 play epic, but bring it down to just one that really follows the dectective story that works well with plays. Do The End of the Golden Witch, with a few changes to slim it down and make it stand alone. It stars The Detective, and has a lot of funny lines. Start it off with the kinzo death and explain from there on. Witch scenes should kinda feel the same as Puck off midsummer dream~

I feel like writing a play too now.

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#3

  1. Word precision is a problem as the audience will not follow if the truths aren’t heard fully or correctly

  2. Alot of this was only really possible because it was a book. Just remember that anime

  3. Not really an issue as long as you limit the number present at a scene at at time

  4. The biggest issue to fit into a small play

Encouraging crazy sounds crazy. Better off with one good play IMO then unintentionally reproducing the anime

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#4

You could write an entirely new forgery. That’s probably the easiest way to be reasonably sized, and also makes it a fresh ordeal for veteran fans (while not spoiling things for fresh fans) I’d look and see what other mystery plays have done that are fair whodunnits.

I think a good way to handle colored texts might just be coloring the lights on whoever’s speaking, and then providing all of the truths during an intermission before the reveal. A projector while they are speaking may indeed be too much, and possibly a bit distracting.

The simpler and shorter the mystery is, the easier it will be for the audience to follow in this format. They can’t go back and reread things or even rewatch them, so it’s a lot more difficult to make it fair.
The game might need to be shorter than normal: less killings, or at least a condensed twilight where there are less puzzles (e.g. huge groups of people killed in one room).

I do think Umineko’s atmosphere is definitely really good for stage format, it’s probably the best medium for making things feel truly otherworldly and utilizing meta concepts. I feel like there’s some really neat opportunities to exploit the fourth wall, especially for characters like Zepar & Furfur or the Voyager Witches.

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#5

Mmh… good point, but while I do love Erika, I’m not sure she is necessary to get the essence of Umineko… she is a bit too much of an attention hog, but I’ll keep episode 5 in mind.

That’s a good suggestion! I can see that totally work! And it would fit right in with the magic scenes, though admittedly, when I now wrote an outline of how I would tackle it, I realized that the magic scenes aren’t as necessary as I thought they would be. The purgatory meta-commentaries are far more important.

… call me stubborn, but I don’t want to deconstruct ‘some’ detective mystery play, I want to adapt Umineko. And I don’t care much about spoiling things or entertaining people who already know Umineko, given that I have never met anyone who has read it or would be willing to read it. So I would want to tell the essence of Umineko in one go. Yesterday I just began to write a scene-by-scene summary of how I would distill the entire thing into one play by merging episodes 3, 6 and 8, but that proved quite easier than expected in some places, but harder than expected in others, that’s why I am not finished as of yet. But I can try to give you all a summary of what I am thinking could work.

Of course, since I’m trying to boil down the essence and core themes of Umineko, it will contain a ton of spoilers! Be warned!

When the Seagulls Cry as a Stage Play
  • The way I approach it, I start out with the framing device of Ange meeting (Ikuko) Tohya in order to find out the truth. This way I can drop hints what it’s going to be about and the audience will think that what they are seeing in the play is what Ange is asked to read aloud
  • then comes the typical arrival at the island, though I’m starting in the rose garden where the cousins bump into Kanon as happened in episode 1. During the scenes in the cousin’s room, in the rose garden and at the beach, the characters occasionally freeze to allow Battler to address the audience and explain a few things about these six years he was absent. I also like to add Kanon and Jessica having their conversation from in front of the cousin’s room in episode 6, because it is a nice short-cut to introduce their relationship
  • this is necessary, because after the first twilight, when Battler is despairing about the impossibility of it during one of those meta-segments, Beatrice walks in and challenges him to the first truth battle. As in episode 1 tea party, Battler assumes that she is just an anthropomorphic personification of the culprit and that he needs to deny her in order to find the real culprit.
  • then I am unsure. Introducing Erika as a detective villain may be tempting, but I think going with episode 3 and introduce Eva-Beatrice would play off far better with Ange being the reader. During the play, Battler is supposed to side with Beato against Evatrice like he did in episode 3, causing Ange to have a dialogue with Tohya expressing her confusion about him siding with the actual killer against the personification of the theory of a different killer. For bonus points, I want to tweak the murders in a way that Eva is not killing anyone in this arc, but is actually framed, so the logic duels are getting more and more about Battler and Beato denying that Eva is the killer. This way I can even go as far as introducing the relationship of Ange and Eva in the real world and her own theories about her being the culprit this way
  • I also want to twist Beato’s actions to mend things with Battler a bit. She does revive Shannon and Kanon like in episode 3, but that leads all three couples to crash into the meta-level, where a shortened version of the love trial takes place, so that the audience gets insight into the motive of the entire murder spree. It is also the moment in which Battler realizes the truth of what had happened, but of course he doesn’t tell the audience.
  • after that Eva-Beatrice arrives to claim to have killed both of the cousins, leading to Battler and Beato to fight them together similarly as in Episode 3. In the end, Battler who here knows how to unravel the web of Red Truth, refuses to disclose Yasu to strike her down, Beato does it for him, as in episode 3, leading to the destruction of Eva-Beatrice and everyone arriving in the golden land.
  • when Battler intends to acknowledge Beatrice there, Ange from the framing device crashes the party and demands to know what the hell is going on. Battler may have proven that Eva was not the killer, but that still means that Beato is it and she wants him to strike her down so that he can get back to her.
  • after some back and forth, Beato agrees, but Battler still wants to protect the catbox. When they have a final truth battle, the atmosphere is supposed to be somewhat similar to the end of episode 4, but Battler uses cryptical arguments like Willard in the VN version of episode 7. Illusions to illusions. When Beato finally asks who she is, Battler responds that of course she is Beatrice, his golden witch. Upon that, Ange flies into a rage and demands the whole truth. When Battler points out the party they were having and recommends her to keep those pictures as her truth, Ange calls the whole story a fake lie. I suppose for a lack of Bernkastel, it makes sense for (Ikuko) Tohya to then disclose the book of one truth, since she only cares about having an ending anyway.
  • I’d like to think that the book is then defended by Eva-Beatrice, who explains that it would be far better to just keep blaming her and that Ange won’t be able to go back once she had read it, but of course Ange says that she doesn’t need to be pampered, even by her, now that she realized that Eva must have been framing herself all these years.
  • of course she reads the Book of One Truth. I’m not exactly sure how to adapt that. Reenacting the episode 7 tea party this late in the play seems absurd, so the best would be to just use a screen or a beamer to fade in pictures of Rudolf and Kyrie murdering everyone. The focus in any case should be on Ange’s horrified reaction.
  • Afterwards, I’d like to have those tearfelt conversation about the truth, about all the mistakes and about nobody coming back that made the episode 8 manga so terrific, when Battler, Beatrice and her family talk about their regrets and say their goodbyes to Ange.
  • the end would then be Ange saying her farewells to Ikuko and leaving, announcing to start over and look up ahead.
  • I’m still not sure whether I want as a final stinger the lone Ikuko speaking to someone offstage, chiding him that he should have met with her, only for the real Tohya played by Battler’s actor rolling onto the stage, expressing his guilt and his fears and promising that given time, he will reveal himself to her.
    The End.

What do you think? Is that going to work or am I now banned for daring to cut together such a Frankenstein monster of a story? Any suggestion for improving it?

#6

An actual adaptation is impossible unless it’s gonna take like, two weeks to present with every episode taking 5-10 hours per adaptation for 2 days each.

A somewhat smaller thing connected to the Umineko universe might be a more interesting, and decidedly more plausible, idea.

Possible Umineko spoilers:

I’m thinking in terms of a minuscule gameboard. We get some introductions to several characters, perhaps it’ll just take place around the guesthouse scene in EP1 where the cousins just catch up, there’s just one murder to solve, for which Beatrice challenges Battler. This, of course, wouldn’t be able to explain the layers beneath the actual Umineko story at all. It’d be a small murder mystery and an ad for the game at best, a comical parody at worst.

#7

What you could try doing is condensing twilights into one, not all of them of course, but a couple of ones.
For example, you could try making the first and second twilight happen at the same time in one of the games or in multiple ones. It might only save a little time at first, but if you do it enough times, you’ll definitely have more room for other stuff you want to put in. And it’ll give you an opportunity to mix in some more mystery. Closed rooms for simultaneous murders can be a tough nut to crack. So you’ll get the chance to be creative and have a go at writing a little mystery of your own.

If you think about doing this in all of the games, then perhaps you might want to adjust the epitaph. Of course, you can leave it as it is if you wish.
You can leave : “On the first twilight, offer the six chosen by the key as sacrifices.
On the second twilight, those who remain shall tear apart the two who are close.” and just say both twilights happened at the same time, or you can change it a bit to have them happen at the same time in the epitaph as well. Of course doing this means you’ll also have to adjust the puzzle to open the door to the golden land, but that probably won’t be much of a problem.
Either way, it works out, so you’ll just have to pick the one that you like.

You’ll have to shift a lot of dialogue around if you do this, but if used a bunch of times, you’ll have more time to fit in the rest of the story.

#8

No comments at all to my own suggested cutting together of everything into one play? Was that idea that bad?

#9

I’ll take the bait. Yes, you have >99% chance that the heart of the story is gone, but the guts are exposed.

#10

How so? The way I’m imagining it, the identity of Beatrice is still hidden and needs to be figured out by the audience… though admittedly, because there is no episode 7 flashback sequence, many aspects of her are gone. So yes, maybe it lacks a bit in the heart department, but certainly there are no exposed guts when Ange becomes the central character instead.

#11

You’ll have to give enough to show the how dunnit if its going to work as a mystery, otherwise it’d be a farce. However one play presumably between 1-2 hrs long including the introduction, murders and resolution will unlikely be able to give any explanation of Beatrice’s heart that isn’t a superficial soliloquy or monologue. Basically the same comment that Will has at the beginning of 7.

#12

The howdunnit should be easy since I stick close to episode 3. The entire closed-room chain is easily deduced once it’s pointed out who was in the first and the last room. All the other murders then quickly fall apart once you realize that you don’t have to look at an Alibi trick done by Eva, but that there is actually another murderer freely walking around the island who had faked his death earlier. In the original episode 7, Willard didn’t even bother explaining any more than the first and the last twilight anyway.

You are talking more about the whydunnit, right?

Well… there I have only The discussions of Shannon and Kanon early on, Battler being mocked about his promise and then the love trial that should make it clear that all of this is interconnected. Admittedly, aside some speculation about Kinzo’s mistress and her child (and maybe even Rosa revealing the death of said mistress) I’ll cut out most of the incest and hidden family head stuff. In two hours I can’t do much more than vaguely hint at that.

#13

To be honest I think you should just make make a simple mystery play like the purple mini game for pure fun value and not risk missing the heart of Umineko