How did that impact on your approach?
What mostly happens with things like novel adaptations is that there is a novel that a playwright adapts for the stage. And so, it is an adaptation of a story that already exists. What’s unique about this is that Ian has written a new story for the stage, alongside a playwright. So, it’s not that Rona Munro adapted this story, it’s that Ian has written it, and then they’ve worked very closely together to create the play.
As a result, when sometimes there might be something in the writer’s head that’s not really hitting the page — you often ask those questions of a playwright — in this case, I could ask those questions directly of Ian, who knows those people inside out. So even if something wasn’t clear on the page, it was absolutely vivid in his imagination, and then he was able to describe it in such a way that Rona could make it work for the stage. Novel writing and playwrighting are so different. I always think novels are more like film, in the sense that you can get inside someone’s head and you can work out what they’re thinking, and you don’t have to have a lot of action because you can have a lot of internal monologue. But, with theatre you only really know people by what they say and what they do, and so it’s a much more behavioural writing mode. Adaptations are always very challenging for that reason. So, doing it this way seemed to me the best of both worlds.
Because Rebus is a detective character and the books are crime novels, did you think much about the genre, more than in other plays?
In this particular instance, we thought about it a lot as a thriller. Rona is an avid thriller reader. She knew the Rebus books inside out before she was ever approached to work on them. One of the things we talked about a lot was that Rebus is a detective, so there has to be a crime to be solved. Looking at the evolution of the script, we have been very aware that it’s a detective story. What Ian and Rona have written into this, is that Rebus is a character who has a lot of demons, and those live in his head. One of the things theatre can do is make those manifest, and physicalise them and make them 3-D. So that’s one of the things that theatre has allowed him to do.
I think the other thing that Rona’s done brilliantly is writing a series of really strong and long dialogues. Interestingly, that’s not something you can do on film or in novel writing. In film, you have lots of short scenes, you can’t really sit in a dialogue for twenty minutes. It is a particularly theatrical thing you can do, which has allowed us to stay with these characters that we know really well, like Rebus and Cafferty and Siobhan, and watch the minutiae of their interaction over a sustained period of real-life time. So I think that that’s coinciding with being absolutely honourable to the form that he writes in, to the character and being a detective story, but also asking why are you going to do this on stage, why aren’t you going to do this in a different medium? Because there is Rebus on radio, there is Rebus on television — so why are people going to want to see a play?
We had to think why does this work for the stage and not for the television or a novel? Why is this story better told onstage?’ One of the things Ian had said, which I think is really smart, is he hadn’t wanted to write something until he felt he had a Rebus story that could only be told on the stage. And that was a really good way in for us understanding the story. For example, the way it’s designed is absolutely taking on board the noir thriller genre. It’s designed to feel very much like a thriller. A lot of inspirations have come from the noir thriller cinematic feel.
Theatre is a very collaborative medium but if you have the creator of the Rebus character there, did ownership come into it or was it as purely collaborative as theatre usually is?
It’s been incredibly collaborative — I have to say that Ian has allowed it to be so, he’s been very generous. What is not collaborative is that no one can know those characters better than he knows those characters, but that would be true of any playwright or any primary artist. But in terms of how you turn that story into something that works on stage, he has worked incredibly collaboratively with Rona, and how we, director Robin Lefevre, designer Ti Green and the production team at Birmingham Repertory Theatre, turn what’s on the page into something that’s going to be onstage.
In reality, what that means is that you’re constantly having a dialogue. We sat down and said who are the people you would like to see onstage playing Rebus; who would you like to see playing Siobhan; this is the world as I imagine it. So, it’s been really necessarily collaborative and I’ve learnt — because of course I’ve read and loved the novels — so much more about Ian’s approach to those characters through having access to him which has been fantastic.
Were there any themes particularly that spoke to you? Is that something that’s important to you, to approach it on that level or are you led by what’s interesting others in the first instance?
It has to strike at your heart — something in you has to be emotionally moved by it. What I found really interesting was the idea that you want to love Rebus for being a maverick and wanting to play outside the rules, but the story also really doesn’t romanticise the consequences of being a maverick. Someone is caught and someone goes to prison for a crime that they did, but someone else doesn’t and actually there is an inference that if you’d gone by the book and done it the right way — and it would have been a bit laborious and a bit boring and a bit administrative — but actually the result might have been a truer result. I think there’s a fascinating tension because it’s about how you choose to live your life, and whether you choose to live your life in the system or out of the system and what the pros and cons are. But it’s quite a dispassionate look at that. It doesn’t really say ‘this is the way to do it, we should all be romantic, outside-the-loop kind of people’. Because there are consequences to that, there are hard lessons to learn from it, and you wonder too ‘do I always want to be inside the system?’
I also think in this particular story Rebus’s relationship to young women — his desire to protect them — the huge cost to these young women of living a life that is slightly on the edges, is of enormous interest to me as well. And there’s just something about the world of the detectives or the high calibre criminal that Cafferty is. It’s not my world and it’s always fascinating. I’m sure it’s true of all arts but sometimes what’s fascinating about theatre is that it reflects a world, an experience that you’re living which it helps you process, but sometimes it’s an introduction to a world that you do not live in. Ian’s writing is so authentic and his knowledge of that world so profound that you feel you are genuinely glimpsing something that is usually behind closed doors.
Finally, I think because Rebus is now retired, and his way of policing — which is really hands-on, going to the bar where the incident happened and tracking someone down by foot — has been superseded by technology because most police work is now done at computers. Of course, there is a sense of nostalgia but there’s also a sense that he’s out of touch. The pros and cons, the benefits and risks of the different types of policing — which is a metaphor for a lot of the way the world is going — is again very intriguing. It’s also so human because he can’t race upstairs like he used to because he’s a man in his sixties! His back’s not great, and he can’t chase or and escape criminals because he’s a bit tired. I love that humanity in it, I love that he has become an older man who is retired, who’s struggling with technology, and who walks into police stations or places where he would have known everybody and knows nobody because there’s a new generation of people there. It’s a very interesting, slightly painful, look at late middle-age and how you’ve shifted and moved on.