Homages in lieu of a manifesto. Georges Balanchine used to insist that it made no sense for his dancers to do the same thing the music was doing. Why should choreography double composition? Perhaps you never can tell the dancer from the dance, but certainly you should be able to tell the dancer from the score. Alfred Hitchcock used to direct his actors to perform love scenes as though they were plotting murder, and to plot murder as if they were making love. Hitchcock and Balanchine seem to me to know everything there is to know about adaptation.

Part III foregrounds Grotowski. The next chapter (5) describes a Grotowskian adaptation of Little Dorrit, ultimately guiding you through the performance as it was originally staged. That's followed by a much shorter, final chapter (6) offering a self-help guide toward starting up your own adaptation. After that, of course, you're After Dickens on your own.

What can come from this juxtaposition of Dickens and Grotowski? One answer would be: a safer exit from Dickensian shame than any tumbril might provide. Another answer, actually another way to put the same answer, would be what Stefan Brecht writing on Grotowski defines as “real information,” that is: what “might have been, could not be, might be, or cannot become” (S. Brecht 1970: 189). Real information about the Dickensian sources. About their evasions, their cultural decorums, their self-and consumer-imposed censorships.