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Luring BookTokers to the stage
An upcoming adaptation of Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts is bringing new audiences to the theatre.
Since its publication by Faber in 2020, Eliza Clark’s debut novel, Boy Parts, has sold over 30,000 copies in the UK and the audio book, produced by Audible and narrated by Clark, been downloaded over 10,000 times.
One of the drivers of its success has arguably been its popularity among users of the social media platform TikTok.
Fans offer up potted reviews in their posts and quote favourite lines of dialogue. (“The Devil is real. And he’s not a little red man with horns and a tail. He can be beautiful,” crops up a lot). The novel’s protagonist, Irina Sturges, a young photographer from Newcastle, who specialises in taking sexually explicit images of young men, has become a topic for much online discussion. Irina does some vile things over the course of the novel. She is at once a victim of assault and a perpetrator of assault, disregarding trivial things like consent. Her behaviour becomes more and more outrageous, her relationship with reality ever more detached. She’s appalling but also, in her desire to exert her control over her body of work as well as her actual body, she’s relatable. It’s these contradictions that make her so appealing. “She’s vain. She’s mean. She’s all that good stuff,” says one TikToker.
The interest in the novel is set to intensify with a forthcoming stage adaptation at London’s Soho Theatre, co-produced by Metal Rabbit. Written by playwright Gillian Greer, literary manager at Soho Theatre, and directed by Sara Joyce, the adaptation distils Clark’s book into a one-woman show in which Aimée Kelly, the young star of the recent film "The Duke" and the Apple TV+ series "Hijack", will bring Irina and her world to life.
The novel’s cult following online, fuelled in large part by the subset of TikTok users who post about the books they love – BookTok – was not lost on Soho Theatre, who have tailored their social media campaign for the show towards online communities who were already fans of Clark’s work.
Theatre marketing has had to evolve rapidly to keep apace with new platforms and the shifting ways in which audiences engage with social media, but this specific crossover with a novel’s fanbase feels rarer
“Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are helping us bring in new and diverse audiences," explains Hannah Andrews, communications manager at Soho Theatre. "This is particularly the case for our adaptation of Boy Parts, a book with such a strong online fanbase. Working with the show’s co-producers Metal Rabbit Productions, we can already see the impact of finding creative ways to engage online communities: 67% of tickets sold so far have been to first-time visitors. We hope Boy Parts can be a wonderful entry point for their discovery of the joys of theatre".
The theatre has given book fans access to presale tickets via Clark’s social media channels allowing them to build interest and awareness in the show before the press were made aware of it, generating buzz. They will also be inviting influencers and online fans of the book to opening night along with critics from more traditional media outlets. A lot of the marketing has also been laced with references that will appeal to readers familiar with the book – pictures of “bag salad” started cropping on Twitter and on tote bags.
Theatre marketing has had to evolve rapidly to keep apace with new platforms and the shifting ways in which audiences engage with social media, but this specific crossover with a novel’s fanbase feels rarer. Interestingly, Clark’s follow-up, Penance, published earlier this year, her deconstruction of the true crime genre, in which a teenage is brutally murdered by her classmates in a small Northern seaside town, explored the complexity of online fandom culture.
In terms of the show itself, Greer’s decision to distil the novel into a one-person format seems like an intelligent way of engaging with the novel’s themes, its voyeurism and violence, without having to represent them on the stage, while also maintaining the connection with Irina in a way that resonates with the novel’s readership. It’s a notably different approach to the stage adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho – a book that is often came up in reviews of Boy Parts – which was turned into a musical in 2013 that premiered at London’s Almeida Theatre (with "Doctor Who"’s Matt Smith as Patrick Bateman) before transferring to Broadway.
Conversations about audience development are commonplace in a theatre industry always on the lookout for new audiences, particularly those who don’t often attend the theatre. Books like Clark’s, which has a pre-existing network of passionate fans are a gift in this respect.
Obviously, not everything that goes viral on BookTok would work on stage (though there’s a strong case to be made for Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles) but given that the space has been described as “the biggest book club on the planet” it does feel like theatre could do more to explore this potential for crossover.
Boy Parts is at Soho Theatre from 19th October to 25th November.
