Bringing Literature to Life at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, 13th October 2012
By Robert Beck
As a theatre goer and prolific reader, it comes as no surprise that I love it when a story that I have enjoyed reading is adapted to the stage. Yet where does one start in recreating the essence of the written word in a completely different medium and how does one navigate that delicate path of re-writing another author’s work? Luckily for me, Jeremy Dyson, best known as the non-performing member of the award-winning group The League of Gentlemen; the novelist Jane Rogers; and Nick Stafford, the writer responsible for adapting Michael Morpurgo’s novel Warhorse for the stage are sitting in front of me, ready to discuss these issues and offer up their own experiences of adapting works from the page to the stage.
The discussion is instantaneous and straight away Dyson begins to tell us about his experience of adapting the short stories of Roald Dahl to the stage while the other two listen and make occasional comment. Maybe it’s the oak furniture dotted around the edge of the room or the red velvet chairs but it feels like I am in someone’s living room having a chat with three acclaimed authors about adaptations. The three joke about their differing experiences with authors (both alive and dead). Dyson tells us of the hard time he had getting Dahl’s family to agree a stage adaptation of his short stories Tales of the Unexpected:
“The theatre had already booked the show for April yet, for three months, nothing happened because we couldn’t get the estate on board. It was a bit stressful.”
Then Stafford relates his relationship with Morpurgo who was very much on board with the project to the point where, according to Stafford, he appeared on stage in a crowd scene one night. As for Rogers, she jokes that she has really only worked with dead writers and that it’s easier that way!
As the name of the event would suggest, the focus of the discussion is bringing literature to life. It’s about taking the characters that a reader has imagined in their head and making them physically real. You are taking a fantasy and transplanting it into reality. It is also about dealing with the different mediums. In prose, a writer is able to hold the attention of a reader for much longer than they are if they are writing for the stage. Rogers, when talking about adapting work for radio, makes the point “how long does it take someone to switch channels?” All three writers agree that finding the drama in a piece of prose and exploiting it for performance is the hardest part of adapting. “You don’t have long before you’ve lost an audience. It’s about being engaging and finding that drama” is the conclusion that Dyson reaches.
Of course the audience also have plenty of questions for the writers about their various projects and experiences so the second half of the discussion is handed over to simple Q’n’A. Some of these questions are from a more academic perspective. “How did you react to the film adaptation of Warhorse?” one audience member asks Stafford. To which he smiles and answers that he feels the film didn’t invest in as many characters as the play and that, in his opinion, the play did things the film didn’t – an unsurprising opinion but one the audience member enthusiastically agrees with. While some of the questions are from aspiring writers seeking advice on adapting texts themselves. It was heartening to see three successful writers so keen to help out those who are just starting out and their responses to these questions were detailed and thorough.
Perhaps the most important idea that I drew out of this event was how adaptations make literature a shared event. There is something magical about watching a story that you love being performed live. Adaptations also bring writers back into circulation and open them up to new audiences. There are many crime writers, Stafford relates, that were best sellers during their time who have all but disappeared now. Adapting the work of a writer who has fallen out of favour is a perfect way to restore them to greatness. “Adaptation is a great way to share a story with other people. Reading can be a very solitary activity but this is something you can enjoy with others” is the upbeat message that Rogers leaves us with.
So as the event finishes, I cannot help but feel that, all in all, it has been a very enlightening afternoon examining the relationship between prose and drama and how adapting stories that people love, far from detracting from the work, can develop and improve it.