Jane Rogers (How the tides turned, Review, 10 December) doesn’t mention an earlier radio adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Beach of Falesa by Dylan Thomas, nor a film option bought by Richard Burton, who wanted to cast Elizabeth Taylor as the young Polynesian woman, Uma. The film was never made and I’m not sure if Dylan Thomas’s adaptation was ever broadcast. It’s good to see Stevenson’s Pacific stories getting some attention. Some went beyond the “new realism” that Rogers describes and sought an indigenous readership. The Bottle Imp, for example, the outline of which Stevenson knew as an early 19th-century melodrama, though it was a tale of Germanic folk origin, was translated into Samoan and published in a local missionary magazine. It would have found its way into most Samoan homes.
Rod Edmond
Deal, Kent
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