My Adaptation to 'Lamb to the Slaughter' by Roald Dahl

The text I am adapting is a short story called “Lamb To The Slaughter” by Roald Dahl. In this text, there were a lot of things that interested me. In the story, Roald Dahl uses the themes of death and murder. Patrick Maloney is one of the main characters. He is a detective who becomes a victim of a crime when his wife murders him by hitting him in the back of the head with a frozen leg of lamb. There is also a lot of stereotypical gender roles such as the fact that Mary is a housewife who is frequently giving into her husband's needs, she always has a drink prepared for him, she always wants to comfort her husband, and is always willing to make her husband food. Suddenly when Maloney says he’s leaving her since he loves another woman, she feels stripped off her identity as a wife to him. She also shows that she feels betrayed which affected her mentality. This betrayal had brought out the murderous side of Mary. This is one of the main themes of the story since it reveals the dynamic character of the story. These themes are important to the story since they connect all parts of the story such as characters, plot, and events.

For “Lamb To The Slaughter” I chose to create a play. I chose a play because it gives viewers the ability to see various emotions within the characters which cannot be found within a short story. It is also easier to visualize what the viewer is seeing in comparison to reading a short story. When reading a short story, there is too much information to take in and infer which can make it harder to understand and visualize. That is why I chose to do a play as it is very direct to the reader.

The changes I made to “Lamb To The Slaughter” was based on my imagination. I changed the character’s names from Mary to Linda, Maloney to Drew, Sam to Levon, and Jack to Dennis. I changed the name of the characters because I wanted to avoid plagiarism and I also wanted to use my creativity to find names which I felt were better for the story. I decreased the number of characters in the story because I wanted to keep it short and to the point to make sure the audience would not get bored. In my play, I made Mary being a pregnant woman a complete surprise to Maloney as it would be a shock to the audience. When the couple was arguing I put some of the words in caps to indicate that they are yelling. This shows more emotion to the play, while in the story you can’t tell if they are yelling because they are just lines that are quoted. When Maloney gets hit in the head, I made him see his wife swing the lamb leg at his head before getting hit which would allow the play to be more easier to visualize than the story. For the ending, instead of Maloney dying on the spot, I changed it to him disappearing and leaving a bloodstain, because it will raise the audience's curiosity on what happened to Maloney. Mrs. Maloney then had a police officer put her in handcuffs and send her into a police car, the driver of the police car was Maloney who had looked at her with disappointment. I changed the ending to show when doing something bad there will always be consequences, no matter what. That was a small change that I wanted to make as it shows viewers that they can’t run away from the problems that they create.