[In the following essay, O'Mealy presents an analysis of the screen adaptation of The Madness of George III as an example of Hollywood's tendency to downplay and simplify the political and constitutional issues explored in the original play.]

When the film version of Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III appeared as The Madness of King George, the story circulated that the American backers had insisted on the title change because they feared the sequel-saturated Americans, not having seen the previous two Georges, would be confused.¹ This joke sounded plausible enough. After all, everyone knows that Hollywood producers have never gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Like the poodle in the microwave, however, the story is probably apocryphal—though with typical slyness, the author himself claims it was true. “This was a marketing decision,” Bennett writes in the preface to the published version of the screenplay, “a survey having apparently shown that there were many moviegoers who came away from Kenneth Branagh's film of Henry V wishing they had seen its four predecessors.”²

That alterations must be made between stageplays and screen adaptations is no news. The transformation of The Madness of George III into The Madness of King George, however, seems less conditioned by the technical differences between the two media, than, as the title change suggests, by the playwright's and the director's calculated adjustments to the cultural expectations and tastes of two different audiences.

Bennett wrote his stageplay for the narrow constituency of the Royal National Theatre, those better than average educated and monied Londoners and Anglophile tourists for whom theatre-going is a habit. He and Nicholas Hytner, who directed the stage production and the film version, knew that the film needed to reach a world-wide audience, of which the Americans represent the most lucrative part. The screenplay Bennett adapted from his own drama and the directing choices Hytner made in the film reflect this awareness. In an ironic reversal of the words Bennett puts in the mouth of William Pitt, by being “projected on a larger screen,” the film version of George III's bout with madness in the late 1780s downplays the “groundwork of politics” as it embraces the “domestic melodramas” of generational conflict and marital disruption, those dynamics of the dysfunctional family American audiences know so well from daytime confessional television. By downplaying and simplifying the political and constitutional issues featured in the drama and foregrounding the family in crisis, Bennett also finds himself working in another very American mode, that of classic American family dramas like Death of a Salesman and Long Day's Journey Into Night. Either way, high or low, Bennett and Hytner have revised the play with an eye on the American audience.

The structure of the play rests upon the strict dichotomies of space and ideology Bennett identifies as “Windsor,” the King's stronghold, and “Westminster,” the Parliamentary redoubt. Except for the odd scene set at royalist Kew and the Prince of Wales's Carlton House, the play moves back and forth between these simple oppositions. Act One is almost symmetrical, with eight scenes set at Windsor alternating with six scenes at Westminster and two at Carlton House. Though a little more diffusely arranged, ultimately Act Two's tally is neat: five scenes on royalist grounds versus five scenes set among the Whig opposition, capped of course by the play's grand finale at St. Paul's Cathedral. The audience at the National would presumably recognize the implications of such a structure, in addition to being more familiar with the positions represented by Pitt and Fox. Such careful crosscutting establishes both the centrality and fevered antagonisms of the political struggle at the time. More than a figurehead, George III is in many respects the embodiment of the state. His own conflicted health of mind and body becomes emblematic of the nation's. Whichever political faction can lay claim to speak for or through the reigning monarch becomes therefore, through a syllogistic relationship, the state.

The movie audience is presumed to be less historically astute, so Hytner “opens up” the film enough to lose that oscillation between Windsor and Westminster, with all its attendant implications. A farmyard, a cricket game, a Lincolnshire field break up the intense volleying back and forth between the Pitt and Fox factions for control of the King's person. In fact, the production crew seems so indifferent to the historical acumen of the moviegoer that the film's opening scene contains a close-up of a door at Westminster—actually Eton College—with the clearly visible grafitto “1862” carved into the wood. After all, if the audience doesn't know who George III is, is it likely they'll know the difference between 1862 and 1788?

Changes in the cast of characters between play and film also offer revealing glimpses into Bennett and Hytner's strategies for their new audience. A fair number of figures disappear, and while minor comic butts like Sir Boothby Skrymshir and his dim nephew Ramsden, who pop up here and there seeking patronage from both the Tory and Whig factions, aren't much of a loss, when Edmund Burke disappears and Richard Brinsley Sheridan is reduced to a spear carrier at Carlton House, it becomes clear that the play's political content, complete with its complex relationship to the late Georgian literary sphere, is being diluted. Gone are allusions to Goethe and Gibbon, as well as the witty exchange prompted by Burke's asking Sheridan if he could ever abandon politics:

SHERIDAN:
As distinct from the theatre, you mean? I don't know. There's the drama, of course. The temperament. And the acting, I suppose.
BURKE:
What would you miss about politics?
SHERIDAN:
I'm talking about politics.(3)

The other major casualty in the move from play to film is Dr. Ida Macalpine, a twentieth-century physician, who turns up at the end of the play to propose the porphyria theory of the King's illness. Never happy with this intrusion—“this didn't entirely work”—Bennett recalls that “when the play was revived the following season, the scene was omitted” (King George xx). When writing the film version Bennett turned to generic American movies of “thirty years ago” to solve this expository problem. In his favorite scenario, as two of the King's pages empty chamber pots in the river, one would wistfully predict that some day the world would know his master was not mad but suffering from porphyria. He would raise the chamber pot in the air, and the faces of other supposed royal sufferers from porphyria—Mary, Queen of Scots, Queen Anne, and James I—would beam down from the heavens (King George xx), accompanied no doubt by a chorus of stringed instruments and an angelic choir.

Bennett knows his Hollywood clichés, but also knows that film can offer less camp ways of providing this information to the viewers. In the introduction to the play version, written two years before he undertook the screen adaptation, he notes quite ruefully that “in a film one could deal with this explanation in the final credits” (George III xx), and dispense with the doctor ex machina of Ida Macalpine. Which, in the end, is precisely what he did.

In fact, Bennett's play already contains many film-like touches, especially in the transitions between scenes. For examples, he will elide the action, creating by a change in lighting a dissolve of sorts, from Pitt speaking to the King to Pitt addressing the House of Commons. Or Bennett will cut from the King being strapped into his restraining chair to the Prince of Wales being cinched into his girdle. With his film version, however, Bennett adds to these grammatical conventions the vocabulary of film conventions, generic conventions designed to appeal to an audience raised on the American film noir and western.

Take for instance Lady Pembroke. The stage directions describe her as an “impressive sight,” a handsome woman of “around fifty” (George III 10). Once the King's dementia loosens his inhibitions, he finds her irresistible, and often tries to wrestle her to the floor; the film keeps that comic frustration, but creates a very different Lady Pembroke. As played by Amanda Donohoe she looks a couple of decades short of fifty, a ripe and luscious Mistress of the Robes to the Queen, who, as embodied by Helen Mirren, is not exactly the German dumpling Bennett placed on stage either.⁴

Even more to the point, the screenplay turns Lady Pembroke into a conventional femme fatale. Early on she flirts with Greville, the King's new equerry and the film's Everyman figure, through whose eyes the audience is meant to apprehend this alien culture of royalty. Later, she coolly seduces him in order to give the Queen access to the King after he has been removed from Windsor and incarcerated at Kew.⁵ On the basis of this one encounter the susceptible Greville falls in love with Lady Pembroke, but, at the end of the film, when he attempts to renew their intimacies, she curtly brushes him off with a simple statement of fact: “it was what was required, Mr. Greville, that was all” (King George 71). Greville's disillusioning initiation into the mores of the aristocracy is of course the stuff of any education novel, but his sexual conning by a woman with an ulterior motive would also be very familiar to any fan of film noir.

The film's most shameless invocation of an American film convention comes at the climactic moment in the plot, when the Regency Bill is about to be put to a final vote in Parliament. If a vote is taken, the Prince of Wales is sure to be declared Regent, and George III will be put away forever. In the play, news that the King has recovered his wits is enough to squelch the Prince of Wale's accession. The film restages the classic cavalry rescue scene. Pitt cannot turn the tide with a few words in the House; the King himself must appear at Westminster—racing from Kew in a carriage trying to beat the clock, with the usual suspenseful intercutting between preparations for the vote and the progress of the King, slowed down by flocks of bleating sheep (the MPs?) blocking the roadway.

Needless to say, the King does arrive in time, the MPs flood out of their chamber, Parliament hails George III as their monarch, the Prince of Wales faints at being foiled, and a thoroughly entertaining and thoroughly familiar episode from the Saturday serials comes to a close. This sequence seems to have originated in the brain of the director, but Bennett writes amusingly about how the lengthy process of revision and the exigencies of collaboration wore down his resistance: “Had Nicholas Hytner at the outset suggested bringing the King from Kew to Westminster to confront the MPs, I would have been outraged at this adjustment to what had actually happened. By the time I was plodding through the third draft I would have taken the King to Blackpool if I thought it would have helped” (King George xxi).

The largest single change from play to film is, however, the introduction of Maria Fitzherbert, the secret wife of the Prince of Wales. Bennett says he added her because “the plot needed thickening”—which is true—and because he “wanted Mrs. Fitzherbert to have her own story and not just be sitting around as the companion to the Prince” (King George xv). Though the evidence of her own story is debatable, Mrs. Fitzherbert indisputably does place the Prince of Wales in a family context. In the play Prinny surrounds himself with a male coterie, chief among them his younger brother Frederick, the Duke of York, and comes across as a fat foppish dilettante whose major concerns in life are furniture design and the agonies of tight corsetting. Maria humanizes the film's Prince, who, as played by Rupert Everett, is neither convincingly fat nor especially foppish—though clearly foolish. Her sweet concern for the King's health stands in sharp contrast to the maneuverings of every one else in the Prince's camp, and even checks the Prince's own baser tendencies to place his own advancement over his father's recovery. When Maria urges the Prince to remember the family ties instead of impatiently desiring power, (“This is your father, sir. Be kind”), Fox notes that “she has more sense than he has” (King George 60). Nor is this Prince totally unfeeling. When the Prince peruses the Regency Bill for the mention of a provision for Maria, who as a Catholic is legally prohibited from marrying the heir to the British throne, and finds none, he assures her, “It will happen, Maria, I promise you” (60), suggesting a devotion, however temporary, that dispels some of the self-absorption which defined his character in the play.

Most of Bennett's treatment of the family relations in the film is not as radical as his introduction of Maria Fitzherbert. The changes between stage and screen are few but telling. Most apparent is the recession of the political allusions and ambience which necessarily grants additional prominence to George III's family dilemma. The play's strongly defined political context keeps the family narrative, which Bennett pays a great deal of attention to, from dominating. The film loosens this political underpinning, and the family melodrama takes most of the attention by default. The film's rapid pacing and abbreviated scenes also sharpen the domestic dialogue. The Prince of Wales's remark when his mother slaps him after his father has tried to choke him—“Assaulted by both one's parents in the same evening! What is family life coming to?”—appears in both play and film. On the stage it is embedded in a long scene, while in the film it serves as the punchline for a thirty-second scene. As a result, the film audience is far more likely to remember its ironic comment on domestic tranquility.

Bennett chooses to foreground pathos more often than comedy in his depiction of the King's domestic relations. This serves to paint the King's tragedy as a personal one, the plight of a good family man—George did after all father fifteen children with the same woman and had no apparent mistresses—whose mental collapse is exacerbated by his anxiety about his loved ones. In one instance, Bennett uses a documented example of the King's dementia, his conviction that London was being flooded, to augment the audience's appreciation of George as a good father to his large brood. In actuality, George was desperate to rescue from the rising waters a manuscript he had been working on (Macalpine/Hunter 41). On stage, however, when he begins to rave, he insists that the children be carried to higher ground, and in the film this expression of fatherly concern becomes a full scene, with George hustling the youngest children out of bed in various degrees of distress and hysteria, and carrying them up to a rooftop.

This family-centric emphasis colors even the use Bennett makes of Shakespeare in both play and film. A reading of the Act IV reunion of Lear and Cordelia is the catalyst for, or at least an indicator of, the restoration of George III's wits. Anthony Lane has praised this scene for its bold proposition that “art—neither quackery nor dreadful discipline but the consolations of poetry—will finally draw the fever from the lunatic” (88)—a subtle and powerful reading, but not one likely to occur to most viewers of the film, who are more liable to agree with the interpretation of Shakespeare's play that Bennett has Thurlow deliver: “Tragic story. Of course, if that fool of a messenger had just got that little bit more of a move on, Cordelia wouldn't have been hanged, Lear wouldn't have died, and it would have ended happily … which I think would have made a much better ending. Because as it is, it's so damned tragic” (King George 67). By having Thurlow reduce the tragedy to a family quarrel reconciled, and regret that the father and daughter can't live happily ever after, Bennett is of course having his fun with this middlebrow view, which in the eighteenth century also found expression in Nahum Tate's happy ending version of Lear. And though twentieth-century American audiences may have only an intermittent acquaintance with Shakespeare and a minimal understanding of the principles of tragedy, most will applaud this affecting parallel between the restoration of Lear to his daughter and the imminent restoration of George to his wife and children—a reunion the film underlines with a scene of the two youngest children, Amelia and Adolphus, rushing to greet Papa on his return to Windsor. Almost as neatly as Nahum Tate, then, Bennett has domesticated and sentimentalized Lear.

The best example in the film of a greater foregrounding of the family comes in the very last scene, at St. Paul's Cathedral. On stage, only the King and Queen mount the staircase in their state robes to commence the Thanksgiving ceremony. The film offers the whole family, thus not only celebrating the restoration of the King and the rescue of the nation from its crisis, but gathering together royal parents and all the children, even the Prince of Wales and Duke of York, in a display of public solidarity. Bennett transfers stage dialogue from an earlier interview between the two oldest princes and their parents to the movie's final public and domestic scene.

KING:
We must try to be more a family. There are model farms now, model villages, even model factories. Well, we must be a model family for the nation to look to.

When the Prince of Wales replies that he wants something to do, however, Bennett supplies the King with some new advice:.

KING:
Smile at the people. Wave to them. Let them see we are happy! That is why we are here.

(King George 74).

The sight of the royal family on the steps of St. Paul's, waving to the cheering crowds—the parents sincerely, the children in varying degrees of sullen obedience—neatly fulfills the Queen's request at the beginning of the movie that her eldest son make a greater effort at public relations. “George, smile, you lazy hound. It's what you're paid for. Smile and wave. Come on, everybody, smile and wave” (King George 11). Despite the personal cost, the royals thus grant the nation the image of a happy family. In this way, Bennett slips in a slyly contemporary view of the figurehead role of the British royal family. Most Americans can remember Charles and Diana on those very steps of St. Paul's, and know how that rosy venture in public relations finally ended. Nor would they have much trouble catching the contemporary allusion in the play's wittiest line—“to be heir to the throne is not a position; it is a predicament” (George III 63)—though in the film Bennett helps them out by substituting “Prince of Wales” for “heir to the throne,” just in case they don't know the two are synonymous.

Not surprisingly, American tastes and values exert their most powerful influence upon Bennett's recasting of George III's mental relationship to the recently “lost” American colonies, and upon the question of the efficacy of the several therapeutic treatments, especially Dr. Willis's “restraining” method, designed to cure the King's supposed madness.

In the play George refers to America with longing and regret. His mania may be due in part to this pining, for as Anthony Lane notes, “when a man loses his colonies … his wits will not be far behind (87). A similar melancholic tone is present in the film, though not uniformly. George's elegiac speech on the “forests, as old as the world itself, meadows, plains, immense solitudes,” is carried over to the film, but without the second half which broadens the perspective: “Soon we shall lose India, the Indies, Ireland even …” (George III 25). The film insists on an American focus, and through the addition of at least three new scenes, crafts a new narrative trajectory for George to follow vis-à-vis the United States.

He starts out reluctant to accept the loss. When addressing Parliament he drops the word “former” from a reference to his North American possessions, and has to be corrected by a cough from the Lord Chancellor (King George 9). Some time later, when Pitt gently reminds him that the United States “are a fact, sir,” he becomes “furious, and thrusts his face into Pitt's and seems about to explode,” suggesting another link between the loss and incipient irrationality (author's direction, King George 15). A few scenes later he thrashes at thistle with a twig, shouting to himself, “This is the way we deal with America, sir. I'll teach you, sirs. Take that, Mr. Colonist,” clearing progressing even further toward a breakdown (King George 20).

Since most Americans with any knowledge of George III probably think of him as the tyrant that patriots like Washington fought to defeat, the danger of course lies in the possibility that George will lose the American viewers' sympathy over these political matters. George's loss of the colonies must be therefore characterized as a personal loss, one that any anxious parent might agonize over, but which a healthy person will learn to deal with. Bennett and Hytner wisely have cut the scene in the play where Willis attempts to force the King to name the thirteen American colonies as part of his therapy (George III 74-75). George refuses, and his resistance can only be read, in the play, as a refusal to be reconciled, a refusal that the film wants to avoid. So after the King has recovered and he and Pitt are once again in the Library, Bennett has written a new scene that clarifies the therapeutic nature of the King's ordeal. George III can now talk about America with resignation—he can finally let go.

KING:
… But what of the colonies, Mr. Pitt?
PITT:
America is now a nation, sir.
KING:
Well, we must get used to it. I have known stranger things. I once saw a sheep with five legs.

(King George 70).

Bennett's little deflationary joke at the end softens the capitulation, but surely the American viewers won't mind, priding themselves on being good sports and also knowing that, although the English can't help acting a little superior, in their heart of hearts, they secretly wish to be like their American cousins.

Bennett's attitude toward the therapist himself, Dr. Willis, also seems to have undergone a trans-Atlantic sea change from stage to film. The one virtue of having Dr. Macalpine barge into the story and announce to the stage audience that none of the medical treatments—not just Sir Lucas Pepys's coprophilia, but also Willis's bondage and discipline—actually worked is that the King's ordeal takes on a horrific irony. And, as Ben Brantley notes, irony “is Mr. Bennett's element” (13). Porphyria's cyclic nature would have led to remission regardless of treatment, a point the stage version underlines when the King rebuts Pitt's opinion that Willis's regime had “done you some service, sir.” “No,” George replies, “It is Time that has done me the service” (George III 88).

The film reverses those sentiments. After the King suggests that Willis must have done him some good, Pitt answers, “I think it is time has done you the service, sir” (King George 70). Now George the patient seems to believe in his doctor. Anthony Lane's suspicion that the film “chooses to fudge” the question of whether Willis's treatments actually helped is correct (87). The question is why?

Again the American audience intervenes. Bennett's diary entry for November 17, 1980, offers a revealing assessment of the American capacity for earnest self-improvement. Taken to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in New York's Greenwich Village by a friend promising a “theatrical event,” Bennett feels very much out of place. And not because he's not an alcoholic. Dreading the moment when he must stand up and tell his story, Bennett imagines saying, “My name is Alan and I'm English and I don't do this sort of thing.” Luckily some woman monopolizes the meeting with her own story, and Bennett escapes, his privacy intact. He concludes his account, however, with a back-handed compliment: “Still, as so often with Americans, one comes away thinking that they do this kind of thing so much better than we do, and that, wanting irony, they show each other more concern” (Writing Home 109-110).

It is this perceived American lack of a sense of irony that almost requires Bennett to recast the impact of Dr. Willis on the madness of King George. If all the indignities that Willis serves up are as pointless as the obviously crackpot theories of the other doctors, the American audience might become dispirited. The graphic display of the King's blistering with heated cups, and the sight of a once proud and generally benevolent man strapped by force into a chair, gagged with a filthy rag, and broken by repeated insults are bad enough. It would be intolerable to think that all this has gone for naught and that passive acceptance would have led to the same result. The irony might be almost as sadistic as the treatment. As Bennett's earlier observations on the AA meeting suggest, Americans tend to put greater faith than the English in therapeutic ventures. Taking arms against a sea of troubles is not a strategy to be debated in the home of the self-help movement. Action is a moral imperative, success goes to the enterprising, and Willis's scheme is nothing if not bold. No stiff upper lip for the Americans, thank you.

As a result, the film audience is left with the distinct possibility that Willis might have made a difference. Though he looks like a cross between “a male nanny and rather sinister social worker,” as played by Ian Holm, Willis inspires a great deal more confidence than those doctors, “looking like grotesques in a Hogarth print,” who normally attend the King (Baruma 16). On stage, Willis hears that he is not welcome at the St. Paul's service, and is dismissed without hesitation: “Be off, sir. Back to your sheep and your pigs. The King is himself again” (George III 93). The theatre audience already knows, thanks to Dr. Macalpine, that the King will have other attacks in 1802 and 1810, and that the doctors would “have done better to leave him alone” (George III 93). The irony in the King's dismissal of Willis is thus double-edged: he will be back and once again do more harm than good. In the film this irony is diminished. One of the last shots in the film is of Willis mixing in with the crowd at St. Paul's, no longer at the King's side, but nearby, ever ready, just in case. The following statement does appear on screen just before the credits: “The colour of the King's urine suggests he was suffering from porphyria, a physical illness that affects the nervous system. The disease is periodic, unpredictable—and hereditary.” But only a careful cinematic reader will catch the ironic implications. Moviegoers will probably have already kicked over their popcorn boxes in their rush for the exit.

For these viewers, Mr. and Mrs. King, as the royal couple playfully call themselves in private, have apparently ridden out another storm in their unapologetically bourgeois marriage. Clouds may one day gather again on the horizon, but then what family doesn't have its troubles?

Notes

1. Anthony Lane, “Power Mad,” The New Yorker, January 6, 1995, 86. Even though The Madness of King George was an Anglo-American co-production (Channel Four Films and The Samuel Goldwyn Company), the American audience's needs carried a great deal of weight. The policy at Channel Four Films has been to make their films “accessible to as wide an audience as possible.” Recently, the thick Scottish accents in Trainspotting were re-dubbed by Channel Four “so that Americans would understand what they were saying” (New York Times, August 6, 1996, B4).

2. Alan Bennett, The Madness of King George, London: Faber and Faber, 1995, pp. xiii-xiv. Note: all future references to the screenplay will be indicated by King George in the text.

3. Alan Bennett, The Madness of George III, London: Faber and Faber, 1992, p. 6. Note: all future references to the stageplay will be indicated by George III in the text.

4. As also witnessed by the casting of the lean, handsome Rupert Everett as the puffy toad Prince, the universal law that movie stars must be more glamorous than stage actors is not challenged by this film.

5. This episode is completely invented by Bennett. In actuality the Queen was given apartments at Kew (see Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad-Business, London: Allen Lane, 1969, p. 31).

Works Cited

Bennett, Alan. The Madness of George III. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

Bennett, Alan. The Madness of King George. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.

Bennett, Alan. Writing Home. London: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Brantley, Ben. “Swimming in Irony.” The New York Times Book Review, October 1, 1995: 13-14.

Buruma, Ian. “The Great Art of Embarrassment.” The New York Review of Books, February 16, 1995: 15-18.

Lane, Anthony. “Power Mad.” The New Yorker, January 6, 1995: 86-88.

Macalpine, Ida and Richard Hunter. George III and the Mad-Business. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1969.