Short stories have big theatre potential

Annie Proulx’s short story "Brokeback Mountain" – which originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1997, before being published in her 1999 collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories – is just 35 pages long. The story of two ranch hands, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, who embark on a sexual relationship during a summer spent tending sheep and continue to yearn for each other throughout their lives has already been the basis for Ang Lee’s acclaimed 2005 film and an Ivo van Hove-directed 2014 opera, with a libretto by Proulx herself.

“Brokeback – the Musical" it most emphatically isn’t, though there were a few guilty moments on the first night when I wished it might have been”, wrote the Guardian’s opera critic at the time.

Well now there is a Brokeback musical – or, more accurately, a play with music. Adapted for the stage by Ashley Robinson, and featuring songs by Dan Gillespie Sells and direction by Jonathan Butterell, the latter two the creators of the hit musical "Everybody’s Talking About Jamie", it premiered in London last month at one of the capital’s newest and most awkwardly named venues, @sohoplace.

Mike Faist (Riff in Spielberg’s "West Side Story") and Lucas Hedges play Jack and Ennis in a show that has “a delicate, stirring power” according to The Stage’s Sam Marlowe, and “a potent, subtle piece of dramatic alchemy” according to Nick Curtis of the Evening Standard.

It’s fascinating how such a slender story can inspire not just one but multiple adaptations across multiple art forms, especially given the short story presents adaptors with a different set of challenges to a plot-dense novel.

Adaptation compression

When adapting a 700-page doorstop some material will inevitably need to be jettisoned, some secondary characters conflated or edited out, as the adaptor tries to retain the flavour of a novel while also considering the needs of a theatre audience.

With short stories there’s rarely much to strip away, rather it’s a question of fleshing out the world for a theatrical setting. For this reason, perhaps, an anthology approach is often adopted. This was the way William Gaskill, one-time director of the Royal Court, tackled the work of Raymond Carver, a writer whose name is often cited when discussing the short story as a form.

In "Carver" – it’s notable that they went with the writer’s name rather than a title of one of his stories – Gaskill wove together five of the writer’s work to create a collage effect. (Robert Altman also did something similar with Carver’s stories in his 1993 film "Short Cuts").

It’s fascinating how such a slender story can inspire not just one but multiple adaptations across multiple art forms

Twenty years ago, Simon McBurney – whose stage version of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead is currently touring internationally – directed "The Elephant Vanishes", based on a trio of Haruki Murikami’s short stories and made in collaboration Tokyo’s Setagaya Public Theatre. The show made considerable use of video projections to convey the sense of the ever-busy city, and according to Michael Billington’s review in the Guardian, “McBurney captures precisely the lonely oddity of individual lives that characterises Murakami’s work”.

Given the Roald Dahl Story Company’s seeming determination to turn all of his writings into screen and stage content with musicals of The Enormous Crocodile and The Witches on the cards, it’s noticeable that his short stories for adults have been largely untouched. Back in 2011 however, the Lyric Hammersmith staged "Twisted Tales", an adaptation of several stories from his Tales of the Unexpected collection.

Dahl’s reach

Adapted for the stage by the League of Gentlemen’s Jeremy Dyson – the non-performing member of the group – the show laced together a number of Dahl’s better known stories including William and Mary (the one with the brain in the jar) and Man From the South )the one with the fingers). While the resulting show, directed by Polly Findlay, captured some of Dahl’s macabre qualities, it didn’t match the success of Dyson’s previous show "Ghost Stories", which became a West End fixture and spawned a film adaptation.

One could even argue that "The Masque of Red Death", an iconic 2007 production by immersive theatre specialists Punchdrunk which saw the company taking over the entire Battersea Arts Centre building, was doing something similar. It enveloped audiences in a gothic world composed of elements from several of Poe’s short stories. Not a straightforward adaptation, it featured multiple scenes playing at once in different parts of a building and was as much an exercise in atmosphere and design as storytelling – a world in which you could lose yourself.

It’s interesting to think which other short story writers might lend themselves to adaptation – I wouldn’t mind a ride into the spikily seductive landscape of Sarah Hall’s imagination, for example – be it as an anthology or a single story opened out like a flower.

"Brokeback Mountain" is at @Sohoplace until 12th August.