Winter of 1990–91. The gift shop of the Metropolitan opera is selling a beach towel. The top of the towel proclaims: “The Original Ending of Verdi's Aida.” The middle displays a pyramid, some palm trees, and two figures in Egyptian dress, one male, the other female, peeking, suspicious and surprised, through an opening in the structure. And at the bottom: “Who would have thought there was a back door to this place?”

After Dickens is looking for that back door: to Dickens, to adaptation, to theatre, to theory. The back door that allows all four to escape, like Aida and Radames, from the nineteenth century, the century of the liebestod, the ecstatic union that relies on live burial. I want to adapt in a way that frees the originals from a regime which identifies bliss with death and insists on mere pleasure as the only real good: the greatest good of the greatest number, yes, but never the ecstatic. But on that retrograde threshold I also want to locate an even more encompassing “site of bliss,” a moment and place for us as well as the characters (Barthes 1975: 4).

The “site of bliss,” Roland Barthes says, is the place, the moment, where and when “the garment gapes,” an intermittence “which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing … between two edges” (pp.9–10).