Bestseller bounty

Next year is shaping up to be a big year for literary adaptations. Some of the most eagerly awaited shows of next year are based on bestselling or otherwise acclaimed novels.

Nottingham Playhouse’s first major production of the year will be the world premiere of the stage adaption of Christy Lefteri’s bestselling novel about Syrian refugees, The Beekeeper of Aleppo. It has been adapted by Nesrin Alrefaai and Matthew Spangler, who also adapted Nottingham Playhouse’s production of The Kite Runner, an international hit which had a Broadway run this summer.  Nottingham Playhouse is no doubt hoping to repeat this success. The adaptation will be directed by Olivier Award-winning Miranda Cromwell, the co-director along with Marianne Elliott of the Young Vic’s recent "Death of a Salesman" –which went on to play both the West End and Broadway.

Later in the spring, the acclaimed international company Complicité will present a stage version of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. Complicité is a hugely influential and endlessly innovative company, whose work has played around the world. Its previous show, "The Encounter", which inventively used binaural technology, won numerous awards. A new Complicité production is an event. "Drag Your Plow" will be directed by the company’s co-founder and artistic director Simon McBurney and will star Kathryn Hunter, the shape-shifting stage actor who played King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe this summer and all three of the witches in Joel Coen’s atmospheric black-and-white film of "The Tragedy of Macbeth". It will be fascinating to see how this company tackles the rich imaginative world of Tokarczuk’s book. The production kicks off at Bristol Old Vic ahead of a run at London’s Barbican.The stand-out show of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival was Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life (which I have previously written about in this column). First staged in 2018, the four-hour production, performed in Dutch by the ensemble from van Hove’s theatre Internationaal Theatre Amsterdam was a gruelling but gripping watch. It played the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October, where the New York Times called it “a collage of unrelenting torment”.

The impact of the pandemic is still being felt, as is the impact of austerity, so it’s understandable why companies and producers are drawn to familiar titles to bring in audiences

Now it has been announced that Ivo van Hove is to direct the English-language premiere of his adaptation in the West End, starring "Happy Valley"’s James Norton in the role of the endlessly suffering Jude St Francis. The production will also star Luke Thompson, Omari Douglas, Zach Wyatt, Zubin Varla, Nathalie Armin and Emilio Doorgasingh. Elliot Cowan will play the menacing triple role of all the men in Jude’s life who hurt and abuse him. 

The production will preview at Richmond Theatre in March, ahead of opening in the West End at the Harold Pinter Theatre where it will run until June. With its recurring scenes of self-harm and its aftermath, the show is an incredibly demanding of both its actors and its audience, putting both through the wringer. It will be interesting to see how it will fare without van Hove’s Dutch company, whose strength as performers and physical commitment was a real asset of the often-harrowing production. Given the strong feelings people have about Yanagihara’s novel and the fact that a screen version has yet to emerge, means interest will be high.

The Swan Theatre at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Stratford-upon-Avon home has been closed since before the pandemic. The RSC recently announced the refurbished stage will reopen with the world premiere stage adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Women’s Prize-winning novel Hamnet.  The moving and lyrical novel about the death of Shakespeare’s young son, will be adapted for the stage by Lolita Chakrabarti, who also wrote the acclaimed adaptation of Yann Martel’s Booker-winning The Life of Pi, which became a West End hit and will tour the UK in 2023. It will be directed by the RSC’s acting artistic director Erica Whyman. The production will no doubt gain an extra resonance from being performed so close to the places depicted in its pages and it seems like a canny choice for the RSC. "Hamnet" will run in Stratford-upon-Avon from April to June, but if it is as well received as "Life of Pi" then a London transfer seems likely.

The past year hasn’t been easy for theatres. The impact of the pandemic is still being felt, as is the impact of austerity – it’s thought that "The Woman in Black", based on Susan Hill’s novel, is departing the West End after 33 years in part because school party numbers have dwindled — so it’s understandable why companies and producers are drawn to familiar titles to bring in audiences. So is is likely that the coming year will bring more major adaptations to the stage.