Plot introduction
Marianne is a young girl who is bedridden with a long-term illness. She draws a picture to fill her time, and finds that she spends her dreams within the picture she has drawn. As time goes by, she becomes sicker, and starts to spend more and more time trapped within her fantasy world, and her attempts to make things better by adding to and crossing out things in the drawing make things progressively worse. Her only companion in her dreamworld is a boy called Mark, who is also a long-term invalid in the real world.
Catherine Storr's later novel Marianne and Mark was a sequel to Marianne Dreams.[1]
Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
Marianne Dreams has been the basis of several film, TV and radio adaptations, including the 1972 British ITV children's TV series Escape Into Night (which was quite faithful to the novel), and the movie Paperhouse (which was less so). The author adapted it herself as an opera libretto in 1999: the first performance of the opera Marianne Dreams took place in 2004 with music by the British composer Andrew Lowe Watson. Will Tuckett directed a new adaptation by Moira Buffini at the Almeida Theatre in December 2007.
References
1. ^Classics : Marianne Dreams (1958)
External links
{{Portal |Children's literature}}- Article in "The Independent"
7 : 1958 British novels|Children's fantasy novels|British children's novels|British novels adapted into films|Novels about dreams|Faber and Faber books|1958 children's books