A reader’s foreword Pardon me, but your dramatizations are no dramatizations. They are rather personal interpretations and arrangements of the works alluded to, always adding something extra to the originals and sometimes regulating them by new thoughts and ideas, giving them another direction and style by also ignoring parts of the original text. The result is a complement to the original, more often than not enriching the original by underlining what’s written between the lines that isn’t obvious to the general reader, thus making of the original a sometimes totally different work of literature. Some may object to this, but I regard it as more of a kind of flattery to the original authors by enhancing qualities they weren’t aware of themselves, like Plato was accused of putting words into Socrates’ mouth that he never spoke, but which nevertheless add to the quality of Socrates. This play is a typical example of this special art of yours: it is the entire “Les Miserables” story but concentrated to essentials in a kind of condensation, which only succeeds in pointing out the original quality by giving it a clearer and more concise form with austerely clearcut characters. No offence please, and no flattery, just an observation.
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