Heart of Darkness - Adaptations

Adaptations

A radio adaptation starring Orson Welles aired in the USA on November 6, 1938, as part of his Mercury Theatre on the Air program. The episode also adapted Clarence Day's Life with Father.

The CBS television anthology Playhouse 90 aired a 90-minute loose adaptation in 1958. This version, written by Stewart Stern, uses the encounter between Marlow (Roddy McDowall) and Kurtz (Boris Karloff) as its final act, and adds a backstory in which Marlow had been Kurtz's adopted son. The cast includes Inga Swenson and Eartha Kitt.

The most famous adaptation is Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 motion picture Apocalypse Now, which moves the story from the Congo to Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. In Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen plays Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a US Army officer charged with "terminating" the command of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. Marlon Brando played Kurtz, and it remains one of his most famous roles.

A production documentary of the film was titled, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, which exposed some of the major difficulties director Coppola faced in seeing the movie through to completion. The difficulties Coppola and his crew faced often mirrored some of the themes of the book.

In 1991, Australian author and playwright Larry Buttrose wrote and staged a theatrical production of Kurtz (based on Heart of Darkness) with the Crossroads Theatre Company, Sydney. The play was announced to be broadcast as a radio play to Australian radio audiences in August 2011 by the Vision Australia Radio Network, and also by the RPH - Radio Print Handicapped Network across Australia.

On March 13, 1993, TNT aired a new version of the story directed by Nicolas Roeg, starring Tim Roth as Marlow and John Malkovich as Kurtz.

In 2011, an operatic adaptation by composer Tarik O'Regan and librettist Tom Phillips was premiered at the Royal Opera House in London.

The video game Spec Ops: The Line, released on 26 June 2012, is a loose, modernized adaptation of Heart of Darkness. The character John Konrad, who replaces the character Kurtz, is a reference to the author of the novella.