Our challenge for Day 22 of 29 Plays Later was to take a famous first line from literature and then go off somewhere else with it.
The opening of Albert Camus’s L’étranger goes like this: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” The novel is normally translated as The Stranger these days, but the copy I first read was still The Outsider. I took The Outsider and mixed it up with the plot and characters of The Outsiders, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 new wave film Bande à part (usually translated as Band of Outsiders).
I dragged these two masterpieces into some kind of absurdist existential new wave caper movie for radio. There’s more plot than the whole movie, and I was filling in dialogue for the fifteen chapters until 2am, so it’s as rushed and hammy and confused as ever, but you get the gist, or as say in French, le gist.
22_-_MEURSAULT_-_AJ_DEHANY (pdf, 42pp, 4 actors)
Check out the other challengers at #29playslater and check my main Mann Sarah Mann. À bientôt!
aj.
AJ Dehany 
In the next draft I’ll intersperse it with a couple of scenes where Meursault does things out of L’Etranger to keep his thread going, and I need to work out something they do wrong that leads Meursault to be able to track them down later. Any ideas?
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Interesting piece about how that first line has been mistranslated. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lost-in-translation-what-the-first-line-of-the-stranger-should-be
I don’t agree with its solutions though. It seems simple enough that the most appropriate translation in English would be “Today my mother died.”
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