From such scenes, and such exercises, we built the play of Bradley's fall. Let its magic transform the lives of those who spell its liberation. Because novels don't lead straight to staging. Dead End, then certainly Huis Clos. Play becomes the imitation, not of an action, and not even of a fiction, but of the shadow of a fiction.
Fictions gain strength by the way they deploy the devices distinctive to the genre.
And all of those devices center on absence, the space stretching away toward a negation between signifiers and the possibility of a signified. A novel suggests. A novel may mean. But a play is. And therefore plays that imitate novels are, inevitably, bad imitation.