Bartleby: A Tale of Wall Street was intended for narrow-cast as an audio play at Writing on the Wall’s WoWFest 2021. As lockdown was in place, it was made available online, along with other festival events. The script, by Tom Hall, was spoken by David Llewellyn, with original sound design by Andy Frizzell, who also engineered the recording. Victor Merriman directed the play for OHTC.
Tom Hall contributed the following author’s note on Herman Melville and ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’,
Unlike his friend and contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville chose not to append an “unriddling” to his allegorical tales. He left them to us in their undiluted mystery; less questions without answers than answers to questions yet unasked.
If that seems obscure, consider his story “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853). As recalled by a Wall Street lawyer, the narrative concerns an ordinary copyist who one day and without apparent pretext declines henceforth to perform work of any kind in the office. He will not resign. He will not explain. He will not leave. When urged to resume his duties, he simply declares, “I prefer not to.”
Herman Melville is today principally known for novels marked by a highly discursive, encyclopedic, seemingly undisciplined method of composition; traits he shares with 20th century modernists such as Joyce, Proust, and – in his works’ unresolved obliqueness – Kafka. These qualities may account in part for the public indifference and critical neglect which greeted the initial publication of books such as Moby Dick, The Confidence Man, and Pierre. If ever a writer was out of tune with the times, yet alert to where those times would take us, that scribe – that scrivener – was Melville. His depiction of the sullen, morbid resistance of a lone office worker to the rational demands of economic alienation presents us with the haunting figure of one who will always remain a ghost in the machine.
While writing this audio play, I consciously avoided consulting the original text, which I’d last read many years before. The process thus became one of mental retrieval but also one of digression and, inevitably, of departure. It is, therefore, a play of memory playing on memory, which I thought suitable to the narrative framework. ENDS
Tom Hall was born in Vermont, USA, has lived in the Mexican states of Vera Cruz and Chiapas and currently resides in Dublin, Ireland. He taught for several years in the Drama Department at the Dublin Conservatory of Music and Drama. Produced plays include A Dublin Mystery Cycle (CM&D, 2000), Raccoon (Cobalt Café, Dublin, 2001; Everyman Theatre Bistro, Liverpool, 2008) The Death of Zapata (Dundalk IT, 2004) and Boss (Meridian Theatre Company, Cork: 2008). Bartleby is the first completed recording in an ongoing original audio drama project.