As the world premiere of Bryony Lavery's adaptation of The Lovely Bones heads for Liverpool at the end of this month, here we share a syndicated interview by Holly Williams.
The Lovely Bones comes to The Everyman Theatre in Liverpool 25 September - 5 October.
“Your
characters never really go away – of course you feel a fondness towards them.”
Novelist Alice Sebold has recently had reason to revisit the characters of The
Lovely Bones, her 2002 globally best-selling novel about a young girl, Susie
Salmon, who watches her family from heaven after she’s raped and murdered by a
serial killer.
For
those who’ve never encountered the novel, it might sound like grim reading. In
fact, The Lovely Bones found a huge audience due to its tenderly drawn portrait
of a family coming to terms with grief. Millions of readers felt a fondness of
their own for Susie and the Salmon family.
Now,
they’re coming to life onstage. Bryony Lavery has adapted the novel, for the
first theatrical version of The Lovely Bones anywhere in the world.
What
was her initial reaction to being asked to turn this smash hit book into a
stage play?
“I
think it was ‘yikes!’” laughs Lavery. “It’s not a straight narrative – it’s
like loads of paths through a rather beautiful and disturbing forest. Which
doesn’t make it easy to adapt at all…”
Still,
the playwright is no stranger to crafting stage versions of classic novels,
from Brighton Rock to A Christmas Carol to 101 Dalmatians – and she’d add The
Lovely Bones to their rank. “It is a classic. It always brings us comfort,
because of its strength and its honesty and its toughness, actually.”
But
what did the American writer think of her novel being turned into a play?
“I
liked the idea – I think there are things you can do onstage that you can’t do
in any other medium,” says Sebold. She’s been reading drafts and offering
feedback, but she’s happy to cede control of the material. “I just trust the
people who are performing it and directing it – they know what happens to words
when you put them on stage, and I don’t.”
Plus,
part of the appeal was that Sebold couldn’t imagine quite how the story, which
moves seamlessly between heaven and earth, could actually be realised on stage.
“For
me, it’s going to be amazing to see: how do they have different levels, heaven
and earth, and the various places that are in the novel? How do they make it
real, but not too real? That’s one of the reasons why I think theatre can be
fascinating: there are lots of imaginative recesses for the audience to fill.”
The
process of adaptation is something Lavery gets great satisfaction from – partly
because of the need to solve these challenges. “I love it. I get to be the
junior writer to great writers. But the main thrill is to make it a
theatrical-shaped piece of work rather than a novel, and each one has different
problems and different joys.”
Lavery’s
initial idea for staging this story was to have very defined heaven and earth
spaces on different physical levels. But after workshops with actors and the
show’s director, Melly Still, they discovered that heaven could be everywhere –
because “that’s the magic of theatre.”
“The
most wonderful thing about it is our Susie wanders through her family [on
earth], but of course they can’t see her,” explains Lavery. “So one feels
incredible empathy with her, because she’s this child that’s being ignored.”
This
adds a degree of poignancy – but also, a degree of humour. This Susie has a
very familiar teenage stroppy exasperation with her situation in the afterlife,
and at her family not listening to her.
“That
yields a lot of comedy and texture, because she’s so furious about it; she’s a
wonderful pouty teenager at times,” Lavery says. And she adds that laughter is
really necessary in this often dark story.
“You
can’t hold your breath for two hours; you need to open a steam valve and let
something out.”
Working
on dark material can be harrowing – but the process here has, in fact, proved
to be really rather good fun. Because of this, Sebold has ended up being rather
more involved in the production than she had expected.
Speaking
warmly of pinging emails back and forth across the Atlantic with Lavery, she
says; “One of my favourite words is ‘moxie’, and she seems to have quite a bit
of it…”
For
Lavery, it’s not so common to be adapting material where the original writer is
still with us. But working with Sebold has been wonderful, she says. “I was
quite daunted at first, because Dickens and Graham Green and people don’t send
notes… but a writer’s notes to another writer are always thrilling and
challenging.”
Is she
looking forward to Sebold seeing it? “Of course – because she sounds fun. But
I’ll be as nervous as anything.”
How
does it feel for Sebold, handing over her much-loved characters to someone
else?
“There
are some authors who like a sense of control where those things are concerned,
but I really enjoy seeing what other people do with my stuff,” she says
sanguinely.
Still,
in revisiting The Lovely Bones Sebold must also revisit a very real trauma of
her own. In 1981, when she was a student, she was raped and beaten while
walking home one evening.
The
novel is certainly not about her, but the attack was a spur.
“When
people say ‘it’s autobiographical’ the first thing I say is ‘but I’m not
dead’,” she comments dryly. And while she acknowledges that, without that
experience, she might not have written The Lovely Bones, she says that her true
inspiration was “all of those girls who never had a voice because they died,
unlike myself.”
She
recalls how, in the Seventies – when the story is set – there seemed to be “so
many serial killers”, and so many young female victims. “And we were fascinated
by serial killers like Ted Bundy, but we didn’t really know anything about the
women he killed. I was very aware of this voiceless mass of women – that was
pretty much the inspiration for me,” she says.
Sexual
violence is certainly not something we’ve done away in the intervening decades.
But The Lovely Bones has also proved a timeless story, and one worth revisiting
for altogether more hopeful reasons.
There
is something comforting in the balanced structure of the story: not only do the
family on earth slowly come to some acceptance of their grief – a process
anyone who’s lost anyone will recognise - but in heaven, too, Susie must go on
the same journey of letting go.
“It’s
not about murder; it’s about redemption,” agrees Lavery. “’The lovely bones’
refers to the lovely new bones that grow around this reconfigured family. It’s
a tough book – it doesn’t do ‘oh the murderer’s going to get caught and
everybody’s going to be happy’ – but it's about reconstruction after terrible
disasters.
“And
it’s about family – even if one of them is in heaven.”
Sebold
still often hears from readers that the book provided solace when trying to
come to terms with a death in the family, even if in very different
circumstances.
“That
was a wonderfully unexpected result of writing the book,” she says. “It’s like
a play being written: you just can't predict where your work is going to go.”
Bryony Lavery
Alice Sebold
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