The Hobbit Play - Authorized by Tolkien

[littlemanpoet]

The play I saw was, in fact, dramatized by Patricia Gray.

The notion that this increased the number of roles for females did occur to me. However, I think that of the 13 dwarves, 10 were played by actresses. They were duly packed up in many layers of dwarvish garb and thick eyebrows and plastic foreheads and beards, so it worked.

It was actually pretty entertaining on the whole, but there was just the one major error in this version: supposedly the dwarves know nothing about the Ring, and when faced with capture by the Elves, Thorin says, "Bilbo, put on your Ring" ... that I don't actually know about. Ooooops.

[jallanite]

I find that, as so often, Hammond and Scull have interesting comments about both these Hobbit plays. In their The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion & Guide: Reader’s Guide, page 9, they comment:

The scripts of a dramatization by Patricia Gray and of a musical by Allan Jay Friedman, David Rogers, and Ruth Perry were published in 1968 and 1972 respectively by the Dramatic Publishing Company of Chicago, ‘authorized by Professor J. R. R. Tolkien’. This imprimatur, however, was given only as part of a compromise between the publisher and George Allen & Unwin, at a time when the validity of the copyright of the first edition of The Hobbit in the United States, and therefore the ability to control or prevent dramatic adaptations, was seriously in question (see * Ace Books controversy, and further in the present entry.) In fact Tolkien disliked at least the version by Gray and still less that he had little or no say in the matter. Through * Rayner Unwin he requested changes where the adapter had departed from the text without (as he felt) any dramatic necessity. Although the Dramatic Publishing Company held that they knew best what was needed for an effective stage play, they agreed to some of Tolkien’s requests, and Unwin felt that these ‘repaired a lot of the worst excesses and infelicities’ (letter to Tolkien, 19 June 1968, Tolkien-George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). On 20 June Unwin wrote to H. N. Swanson, the American agent for Allen & Unwin, that ‘neither Professor Tolkien nor I are concerned about the process of dramatization so long as it is a dramatization of the book in question and that intrusions from elsewhere conform to the spirit and style of the original’. Tolkien further agreed that ‘the publication is with his authorization . . . [but] he would not wish it to be said that the dramatization had his approval’ (George Allen & Unwin archive, University of Reading).

So much for what Tolkien’s authorization actually meant.

[littlemanpoet]

Thanks for the clarification, Jallanite.