Catch-22

By Chris Fite-Wassilak

If you love a book, you’ll want to make an adaptation; a comic book, a film, a play, maybe even a musical. But if you make an adaptation, it means you don’t really love the book: you’re relying on source material that you inevitably have to betray, you have to sacrifice those very things that define the book. Perhaps it’s too neat that such a contradictory fate be dealt to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. By now a ‘classic anti-war’ novel, his 1961 absurdist comedy of WW2 manners put a new term into the English language. In the book, ‘Catch 22’ is a law that is constantly evoked, but never precisely defined or even proved to actually exist; it has become a phrase we all know to describe any lose-lose situation. It is generally the case that the book will be better than the adaptation (a notable exception would be Roderick Thorpe’s Nothing Lasts Forever [1979], which was transformed into Die Hard), but when you read the words ‘musical’ and ‘dance’ alongside ‘from an original script by Joseph Heller’, for a stage production of Catch-22 currently touring the UK, you have to wonder.

Heller’s book was released to mixed reviews, some claiming it lacked structure, but the self-fulfilling nightmares, rational paranoia and frustrating circuitousness that his cast of characters are put through eventually struck a chord with both post-war veterans and the emerging counterculture of a younger generation. Catch 22 managed to translate Franz Kafka and Ludwig Wittgenstein into the more easily digestible acerbic quips of a born New Yorker, as the protagonist Yossarian tries earnestly to figure out why both sides in the war keep trying to get him killed. There are two incessantly repeated questions in both the novel and the script adaptation: ‘Are you crazy?’ and ‘What difference does it make?’ The pair form a kind of kōan, or Zen riddle, each a response to the other.

Geoff Arnold and Christopher Price in Catch 22. Photograph: Topher McGrillis

Mike Nichols, in between The Graduate (1967) and Carnal Knowledge (1971), attempted to adapt Heller’s novel for the big screen, using the mountains of Sonora, Mexico, to play the role of the Italian countryside in which the fictional U.S. Air Force base is set. With a multi-million dollar budget and the use of actual B-25s for its flight scenes, Alan Arkin, with a thick rug of dark hair at the time, starred alongside Martin Sheen, Jon Voight, and Art Garfunkel. Bob Newhart and Orson Welles also made brief appearances; all acted with stiff, unmoving faces as if watching themselves from a distance. The film had little impact (except maybe for stirring a wallowing Paul Simon enough to write ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ while Garfunkel was away filming), but Heller approved and was impressed enough to pen his own stage adaptation, with an eye towards Broadway. His 1971 script, which similarly relied on non-stop dialogue to force itself through a chronological version of events, began with a two-week run in his adopted hometown resort of East Hampton. And stopped there. Heller released a sequel to the novel, Closing Time, in 1994, reprising what characters he could as aging veterans in New York City, as they recounted past decades spent on on Coney Island, where Heller himself was raised, and large chunks of Catch-22 itself. Heller died in 1999 from a heart attack; his last novel, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, published posthumously a year later, depicted an aged writer who was struggling to write something that could match the strength and success of his first novel.

Geoff Arnold, Daniel Ainsworth and Philip Arditti in Catch 22. Photograph: Topher McGrillis

In 2007, a British director based in New York reprised the Catch-22 script for a short tour across parts of the U.S.; as with Closing Time, reviews commented on the bravery and impossibility of attempting to take on Catch-22. I first read the book as a teenager, when it was easily flattened to an ‘individual against society’ sort of parable; on re-reading, Heller’s novel is more a dense weave of doubt and conflicting attempts to define the world around us. Each event, described randomly in increments from various perspectives, becomes an integral part of a self-replicating pattern, perhaps depicting a kaleidoscopic spiral. Heller’s stage script, and the current production on now forty-three years later, is necessarily more episodic, linear. Catch-22 was always high parody, so on one level the book’s rapid dialogues are almost made for the stage, complete with nods and winks to the audience. It’s overplayed with breezy fun, one ridiculous situation folding incessantly into the next as the nine cast members swap between dozens of characters and attempt to vary their cartoonish American accents. Musical interludes and a few dance routines are inserted – more for a break from the constant talking than anything else. (There’s no Yossarian singing, ‘I’m going to live forever or die trying,’ thank goodness.) Here, Catch-22 is a physical sitcom, a slapstick purgatory that takes the script’s comedy at face value, leaving it feeling more focused on laughs than the troubled introspection that prevents each of the characters from communicating with each other. Like the novel, it’s fast-paced and entertaining, but in its selection of scenes it renders each moment too precious, too examined, too didactically moral, and a pale shadow of the relentless spiral Heller envisioned. If you love something, bind it in an elaborate oxymoron and let it be.

Catch-22 began its run at the Derby Theatre 17 – 21 June, and continues at the Richmond Theatre 24 – 29 June