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Philip Pullman on Coram Boy

Stories, children, theatre

Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, writes about adapting stories for the stage and the vital importance of children's theatre.

From time to time someone writes to me with a proposal to turn His Dark Materials into a video game.

“A video game?” I say, like Lady Bracknell.

And then they say well, it's been a play, and it's going to be a film – those are only adaptations – this is just another adaptation – it's just putting the story into another form.

And I say no it bloody isn't. It's a different thing entirely. Avaunt!

It's a question of preserving the integrity of the story. And the integrity of the story depends on there being a controlling intelligence thinking out every point of view. In the programmed waywardness and digitised serendipity of a video game, the shape of a story can get subverted, weakened, undermined, distorted, abandoned. Those outcomes are all very well if you have a taste for them, but if you do, you can leave my stories alone and make up your own.

Which brings me to the matter of storytelling in the theatre. What happens when a novel is turned into a play? Whose intelligence is in control in that process? What point of view prevails, and why? And why are stories on the stage important for children?

The first thing to realise is that the theatre has always taken stories that already existed and put them into dramatic form. There can't have been many Athenians who were so ignorant of the story of Oedipus that they genuinely didn't know the outcome when they went to see Sophocles's version of it; the tracking-down of Shakespeare's narrative sources has launched innumerable academic careers; and in the era of the novel, the theatre has feasted on the book like a vampire who has just been introduced to black pudding. There were six different adaptations of Scott's Ivanhoe playing in London in 1820 alone, and no less than eight of Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth within a year of the book's publication in 1845. Strong stories with vivid characters and exciting events will always find an audience, whether young or old, and the theatre is quite right to ransack the whole of literature in the search for them.

But for an adaptation to work as a play the story must submit itself to different constraints from the ones that rule on the page. The controlling intelligences here belong, of course, first to the playwright and then to the director, and it helps no end if they agree. It helps even more – but not necessarily much more – if they also agree with the author of the original story, supposing that lucky person to be alive. The job of the novelist in such a case is to turn up when invited and praise everyone extravagantly, and simper modestly when any praise comes in their direction. It isn't really to take part in the story-telling process – unless asked; but if they do want to say something in the rehearsal room or when looking at the script, they should remember the other question – the point-of-view one.

And I've never seen that better expressed than by Christopher Hampton. He once pointed out in a lecture (I paraphrase, but this was the part that stuck with me) that the novel and the film have more in common with each other than either of them does with the stage play. Both novel and film can go where they like, and come in close to draw our attention to the minutest details as well as pull back to show the grand sweep of armies across a battlefield. The audience in a theatre, however, sees the actors from a fixed distance. There are no close-ups on the stage.

Furthermore, the experience of watching a play takes much less time than that of reading the novel on which it's based. A very great deal has to be left out; characters have to be excised or combined, entire plot strands unwoven and withdrawn, those lengthy passages of luminous description, on which we so justly pride ourselves, amputated. In short, the whole process demands a different kind of story-telling, and writers who are good at one sort are not necessarily good at the other. It makes sense for a novelist whose work is being adapted for the stage to leave the job to an expert, and be patient with the narrative carpentry that has to take place.

On the other hand, the value of having the original author not too far away, and on friendly terms, is something that no sensible playwright or director will dismiss. No theatre person worth his or her salt would disdain the sort of story-telling experience that points out that if you clarify this moment of conflict, then it will add another dimension to the audience's understanding of him; or that the initiative in that scene needs to come from her and not them; or that there's a bargain implicit in this particular exchange, which that piece of action would make explicit for those in the gods. Sometimes an eye that's not too closely involved can see more clearly.

So where do children come into this?

Well, I've been saying for years that some of the best stories being written these days can be found in the books that children read. Precisely those strong narratives with vivid characters and exciting events, in fact, which I mentioned earlier. Jamila Gavin's Coram Boy is exactly the sort of thing I mean. In the days of Scott and Dickens, it was no shame for a novelist to deal in excitement and sensation and thrills. But when the novel became more interested in recording the minute and subtle flickerings of consciousness, or lifting the filmy veils of memory, or experimenting with the fractures and displacements of formalist modernism, the old attitude changed: exciting narratives could only find a home in the genre novel, in the thriller and the murder story, or in the children's book. In old-fashioned social terms (and a good deal of literary modernism was astonishingly snobbish in origin, as John Carey has shown) story was relegated to the servants' quarters and the nursery.

So much the worse for the drawing-room, in my view.

Because there's a power in dramatic events – in struggle and challenge, in betrayal and revenge, in love and sacrifice – that ignores every kind of disdain and engages with us physically. We tremble, we grow cold, we shed tears, our hearts race, we can barely breathe. The importance of cherishing and preserving a physical, sensuous connection with things was something I laid great stress on in His Dark Materials, and I meant it. Such experiences are profoundly important to our full development as human beings.

And we can get these feelings from books, to be sure; and sometimes from cinema, and occasionally from television, though more securely from radio; but the best place to find this true passionate physical engagement with the bones and the blood of story is the theatre. Children need this as flowers need sunlight. This government, to its great credit, has instituted the Bookstart programme, which makes sure that every new-born child has a gift of books. A wonderful idea! And wouldn't it be even better if they added some theatre vouchers, so that no child would grow up without the experience of seeing real stories on a real stage? Theatrestart – there's a name for it. What about it, Mr Brown?

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