This essay examines the alterations made by George Colman the Younger in adapting William Godwin’s tragic novel, Caleb Williams (1794), for the stage, as the three act musical comedy, The Iron Chest (1796). Colman’s extensive modifications were of both a political kind, to satisfy the Examiner of Plays, and of a dramaturgical kind to satisfy the expectations and interests of playhouse audiences. Paying particular attention to the ways in which Colman’s choices open up our understanding of the distinctions and differences between the narratological and the dramaturgical, the essay illustrates why Colman could expect any political content to be overlooked in the play’s performance and reception, even if he retained some elements of the political critique embedded in Godwin’s novel. In this manner, the essay both illuminates the formal affordances and constraints that regulated representation on the late eighteenth-century stage and makes a case for why performance conventions, and not just printed play texts, should be taken into consideration in our assessments of the politics of popular plays in the period.