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Terry Pratchett's Nation at the National | reviews, news & interviews

Terry Pratchett's Nation at the National

Terry Pratchett's Nation at the National

Melly Still and Mark Ravenhill discuss bringing Terry Pratchett's parallel universe to the National Theatre

Tomorrow sees the opening night of Terry Pratchett’s Nation at the National Theatre.  Adapted by Mark Ravenhill and directed by Melly Still, it is the latest in what has become a tradition of epic end-of-year family extravaganzas at the National such as Coram Boy, which Still also directed, and War Horse. But although Pratchett is one of UK’s top selling authors, neither Still nor Ravenhill were familiar with Pratchett’s books until recently. “I was always a bit put off by the covers,” confesses Still. “I’d heard a couple of radio adaptations,” says Ravenhill, “which I enjoyed, but I wouldn’t have been the right adapter for any of the Discworld books.” So what is so different about Nation?

"I read a review of Nation around last November,” remembers Still, “and thought the story sounded really interesting. A few weeks later Nick [Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre] approached me about a stage version and when I read it, I found it very appealing. It deals with some very intense themes, such as death, disaster, religion and belief systems but what really struck me is that it’s actually about goodness. The two main characters, Mau and Daphne, are young enough not to have been indoctrinated with adult prejudices and vices; they are open to discovery and are inherently good - unlike the children in Lord of the Flies, who are inherently savage.”

Ravenhill came on board for very similar reasons. “It’s just a brilliant story. When we met Pratchett he said that the themes of the book were so serious that he could only have written about them for young people. I don’t want to put words into his mouth but what I think he meant was that as people get older, they find big powerful emotions more difficult to deal with whereas younger people are more open.” Nation is, apparently, very different to Pratchett’s other books although as it is set in a parallel universe, there is still a huge dollop of fantasy.

Set in 1860, two teenagers have been thrown together by a tsunami that has destroyed Mau’s village on a South Sea island and left Daphne, a well-brought up girl from London and 139th in line for the British throne, shipwrecked on Mau’s island. Neither speaks each other’s language and yet somehow they must find a way to survive and forge a new nation.

Far from being intimidated by the idea of recreating a tsunami on the Olivier stage, not to mention sharks and talking birds, Still strikes me as the kind of director who probably thought, “A tsunami! Brilliant! I’ve never done one of those before!”

“Well, there was nothing in the book that made me think, ‘I can’t think how we’re going to do this,’” she says. “You’re not trying to recreate an actual beach; you’re trying to find a poetic representation. These locations are not just ‘the beach’ or ‘the forest’, they are psychological places as well as physical ones and I love the challenge of trying to portray an inner and outer landscape.”

Still spent years working as a set designer and choreographer, which must partly explain why she isn’t fazed by staging scenes that might have come straight from the pages of National Geographic.

“At first I wanted to be a choreographer of some sort and working in the theatre appealed because I love stories but being a movement director isn’t very satisfying because you’re not massively involved in the storytelling.”

Together with her then-partner, director Tim Supple, she went on to devise a series of highly original shows, including Grimm Tales and The Jungle Book, breathing new life into classic old tales. However Supple always took the lead - “in his brilliant way,” says Still, loyally - until they were invited to restage their production of Beauties and Beasties at the Bristol Old Vic. As Supple was already committed to another project, Still took the show to Bristol which was such a success she was asked to direct an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Then the call came from the National – would she like to direct Coram Boy in the Olivier?

“I’d had a long apprenticeship but it was as a massive leap and there’s something almost gladitorial about the Olivier. You know, ‘Let’s chuck 'em in and see if they get chewed up or not,’ but for some reason, I wasn't intimidated. I learnt a huge amount, not least about managing a vast team and how to delegate.”

Still is also co-designing the show and has taken advantage of all the technical wizardry the Olivier has to offer. “I can’t think of an element of theatre we’re not using,” says Ravenhill. “We’ve got masks, puppets, people flying around, explosions, a revolving stage. It makes quite a change from trying to work out how to write a play for four actors with a table and chair.”

Ravenhill is of course best known for his play Shopping and Fucking, but he has written three plays for the National for teenagers and a pantomime, Dick Whittington and his Cat, for the Barbican, so he is comfortable with writing for a younger audience. “But I’d never adapted anything before and I think I was quite naïve,” says Ravenhill. “I assumed I’d spend a lot of time talking it over with the author but Terry Pratchett is phenomenally busy and we only managed to meet once. He was extremely helpful and fortunately it turned out that the things he cared about most in the book were roughly the same things that stood out for me, although I also sensed that he realised that writing a play is a completely different skill and he didn’t want to intervene.

“Obviously I had to make enormous cuts. The word count of the book must be around 200,000 words and the word count of a long play is 20,000 – and that would be a long play - so you’ve got 10 per cent of the words to play with. You just have to keep mulling over the events and thinking how you can pull them together and I think that compared to a lot of adaptations, most of the story is there.”

Ravenhill's main problem was rewriting dialogue that had worked in the context of the novel, but not on stage. “Obviously a lot of the book is seen from either Mau or Daphne’s viewpoint but theatre is objective and you’re watching the characters rather than seeing things through their eyes. There was one scene in particular, which was very hard to write without the characters explaining the plot elements to each other. I suppose,” he says, after a moment’s thought, “I’d describe adapting someone else’s novel as a bit like adopting a child rather than having your own.

“I’m curious to see what the next couple of weeks will bring.You learn so much when you watch a show with an audience. A play is only finished when the audience is there and they always tell you that it’s a slightly different play from the one that you thought it was.”

“Experience tells me that it will change a lot, right up until the first night,” says Still. “It’s a far more complicated show technically than I’m used to and I’m sure I haven’t faced my greatest challenge yet. But we’ll get there in the end.”

Nation is in repertory at the Olivier, National Theatre, until spring 2010, and tours the UK later in the year. Information here. The play will be broadcast live in HD to cinemas in the NTLive series on 30 January 2010. Information here.

On 16 January at 6.00pm at the Olivier Theatre, Melly Still and Mark Ravenhill will discuss bringing Terry Pratchett’s parallel universe to the stage. Information here.

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