How adaptable is Alasdair Gray?
Alasdair Gray has inspired creativity in many other people but his own work is often described as unique and uncategorisable. So how adaptable is Alasdair Gray? How do you manage the scope of his work and match its ambition?
Sandy Grierson, 2015 Citizens Theatre's stage production of Lanark (adapted by David Grieg and Graham Eatough, photo by Tim Morozzo)
Reimagining Alasdair Gray: From page to stage, screen and radio
Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2023 film of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things is a bold reimagining with a striking visual aesthetic and a star cast including Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe. And screenwriter Tony McNamara answers our questions about his creative process in a companion piece to this investigation, Adapting Poor Things.
Poor Things movie poster. Searchlight Pictures.
Poor Things movie poster. Searchlight Pictures.
Dramatising Lanark and 1982 Janine
But Yorgos Lanthimos’s movie is just the latest in a series of dramatisations of Alasdair Gray’s books. Our own resident writer and experienced adapter, Anita Sullivan, has been talking to the daring creatives who blazed the trail by reworking Alasdair’s novels for stage and radio:
TAG (Theatre About Glasgow) Theatre’s 1995 staging of Lanark for the Edinburgh International Festival, adapted by Alastair Cording and directed by Tony Graham
BBC Radio 4’s 2014 adaptation of Lanark by Robin Brooks, with Allegra productions
Citizens Theatre / Edinburgh International Festival 2015 production of Lanark: A Life in Three Acts, conceived by writer David Greig and director Graham Eatough
A long-planned potential stage adaptation of 1982, Janine by Ben Schaffer
What challenges did these teams face? What decisions did they make? How epic was the process? Not all the drama happened on stage!
First encounters with Alasdair Gray
All these adaptations were created by people who feel a deep connection with Alasdair Gray’s work. It had immediate impact and a lifelong influence. But each saw something different, were inspired in different ways.
David Greig was 15 or 16 when someone put Lanark in his hand, and he was astonished:
“Everything about it is like the opening of a door. You can write a book that knows it’s a book, you can write a book in the wrong order, that has drawings in it. You can write a book that has fantastical elements but also naturalistic elements… and the biggest of all things, you can be Scottish and do this. You can wave that book and say ‘I came from the place where this happened’.”
Playwright Alastair Cording echoes that experience of Lanark. But he encountered Gray as an artist first, seeing his painting Cowcaddens Landscape at the McLellan Galleries: a glowering twisted perspective of Glasgow, distant fleeting sunlight.
“I instantly recognized that that was the corner in my district of Glasgow. And it was the first time I saw an artistic representation of a life I knew.”
Alasdair Gray. Cowcaddens Streetscape in the Fifties, 1964, oil (and mixed media) on board.
Director Tony Graham was drawn to Lanark’s bold political vision, something he wasn’t seeing in contemporary English writers.
“It’s only with Angela Carter that you get anything like the radicalism, real radicalism which is a root critique of a society. So not just well-written observations… it goes beyond. And it’s that ‘going beyond’ that was so attractive to me when I read Lanark. ”
Robin Brooks remembers the impact Lanark had on him when he was young. But it was Unthank not the reality of Glasgow that hooked him, the use of fantasy inside a serious literary work.
“Speaking as someone who has radio at the heart of what they do, there’s a very powerful link between the genre of fantasy and the medium of radio drama.”
Alasdair Gray was barely known in American when 1982, Janine caught Ben Schaffer’s eye in Forbidden Planet bookshop, New York.
“The very unusual design of the cover, and then on the back the blurb that Alasdair wrote, maligning his own book. And I just thought, this is my kind of guy, you know. I want to know more about the person who would design a book that’s essential saying, ‘don’t read this book’. But I did, and it was as brilliant as I hoped.”
Ben Schaffer’s copy of 1982, Janine by Alasdair Gray
1982, Janine back cover ’blurb’ by Alasdair Gray
The desire to adapt Lanark and 1982, Janine
It’s one thing to be inspired by a book, quite another to want to adapt it. Alasdair Gray’s work is multi-layered, form-breaking, political, digressive, and monumental in all senses. Why would anyone try to translate this into an evening of theatre or 90 minutes of radio?
“People said to me at the time, ‘you cannot do this, Lanark cannot be staged’ I was told again and again and again. And I loved that.”
Tony had worked with Alastair Cording on the hugely successful Scots Quair Trilogy. So when The Edinburgh International Festival asked him for ‘another Scottish blockbuster’, Tony thought of Lanark. Alastair Cording was up for the challenge and was also a friend of Alasdair Gray. This became the TAG production.
Cover of 1st edition of Lanark by Alasdair Gray
UPDATE IMAGE: Storyboard excerpt from Alasdair’s own screenplay for Lanark published in A Gray Playbook
Graham Eatough and David Greig were long-term collaborators at Suspect Culture theatre company. From the start Graham saw Lanark’s 4 books structured into 3 acts. He spoke to Alasdair Gray about it, then put it to David. This became the Citizens’ Theatre production.
“The thing about adapting Alasdair Gray’s Lanark for the stage is that it is an impossible job. So therefore the only way I would consider approaching this, is if we did the one thing no one would expect us to do… which is to adapt Alasdair Gray’s Lanark for the stage.”
Inspired by the Edinburgh Festival Fringe story in 1982, Janine, Ben Schaffer came to Scotland. Sitting in the Assembly Rooms watching an average Fringe comedy, he realised he had to write the play he wanted to sit in the audience and see himself.
“What is the purpose of adapting something at all? I don’t really know what the purpose of it is, but there are several options. Some are more noble than others. But in my case it was really a selfish desire to see this.”
To adapt something well you have to get underneath and inside it. You also need to love it, as you will have a long, intense relationship with it. The relationship can be playful, but also respectful.
Alasdair Gray’s involvement with the productions
Alasdair Gray handed permission to all the production teams without restrictions, something that was also true for the movie of Poor Things. Given that Lanark took him 30 years to write, this is an astonishing gift.
“It was kind of him to trust us to do it and I think for him there was a self-protection … if you don’t get involved then when you come to see it and if it, as it almost inevitably will, disappoints you, you’re not emotionally invested in it.”
Alasdair came to an early workshop with the Citizens’ team and enjoyed meeting the cast. He sketched David Grieg, although the drawing was whisked away by the marketing department and never returned. He also gave permission to film his flat for the ‘Lanark meets his author’ part of the story.
Robin Brooks’ only contact with Alasdair Gray was a brief hello at ‘very Scottish’ book launch, and then later when Gray came to the recording studio to play the part of the author.
“He did it in one take and he aced it. It was fantastic. I’ve never forgotten it. I loved it. And he was charming and flirted with all the actresses… I know you’re not allowed to do that anymore but it was funny.”
In that mind-bendingly post-modern moment, author met adaptor met author and the actor playing Lanark. True to character, Alasdair Gray made a few amendments.
Alasdair’s amendments to Robin Brooks’ script for his 2014 radio adaptation of Lanark
Graham Eatough with actor Sandy Grierson in rehearsals for the 2015 stage production of Lanark (photo by Tim Morozzo)
Transatlantic emails led to a whisky-warmed conversation during the 2014 Edinburgh Festivals, where Alasdair Gray gave Ben Schaffer his permission to adapt 1982, Janine.
“I think he didn’t have a huge number of suggestions, because he felt, rightly or wrongly, that it was up to me. This was my project. He had written the novel and he was done with it, and whatever I wanted to do was okay with him.”
Alasdair Gray also suggested Ben use parts of his 1987 stage play McGrotty and Ludmilla: A Political Pantomime for the ill-fated Fringe production staged in Edinburgh by the characters in the 1982, Janine. In Ben’s adaptation McGrotty and Ludmilla becomes a play-within-a-play.
With Alasdair Gray’s blessing, the process of adapting, compressing and transforming these four projects began.
How to adapt a novel into a drama script?
Give 10 writers the same book to adapt, you’ll end up with 10 very different scripts. They come from different minds, visions and processes. So where do you start, particularly on a cultural brick of a book like Lanark?
“Giles Havergal at the Citizens Theatre gave me by far the best advice on how to adapt. You read the book, you read the book, and reread it again, and you absorb it… and you throw it out the window.”
Alastair Cording also recalled advice from Havergal.
“If you don’t make it theatrical, the audience who know the book will notice what’s missing. That’s all they will see, and they will complain about it. So you have to make it work as theatre.”
Poster for the 1995 TAG Theatre’s stage production of Lanark
Old TAG van in Gorbals, TAG Theatre (flickr)
Theatre and film are collaborative art-forms and designers have a key role to play in the storytelling, particularly with a book set in two distinct but interlocked worlds.
“It involves getting the teams together from the beginning and trying to share an integrated approach. Instead of the writer disappearing off, writing a script then handing it to the designer.”
Once the team had agreed an approach and broken down the story, they went off individually to work on their own areas. David Greig (away in a bothy) had his own distinctive method of processing the book.
“I read the book, I underlined every section I thought was potentially stageable or useable and I remember creating this pile of cards, index cards. It was really thick. I shuffled them so they were random, then I would turn over the cards and write a response to whatever was in front of me until I had done every card. The I had a big pile of random cards. But then I took all the cards and rearranged them.”
Having created the cards, David then had a resource he could manipulate and reorder. Lanark’s 4 books turned into the play’s 3 acts.
Graham Eatough’s copy of Lanark by Alasdair Gray
Cast in 2015 stage production of Lanark (photo by Tim Morozzo)
Robin Brooks, an experienced adaptor, felt Lanark was made for radio.
“The medium of radio is very close to that of the novel because when you’re reading a novel you hear those voices in your head. If you’re doing something on the stage or screen its very different. To make a coherent theatre show out of Lanark is much tougher call.”
Both Robin and David’s versions of Lanark were told in (generally) the same order as the book and kept the book’s two worlds distinct. But Alastair Cording’s version wove the two worlds together, juxtaposing Lanark’s Unthank world with scenes from Thaw’s Glasgow. He also created two ‘characters’, which we’ll discuss later.
Ben Schaffer’s process was different again, this time driven by the form of the book: one man alone in one room on one critical night.
“I thought, well, monologues can be performed, and it would be interesting to see how this person interacts with his memories and fantasies, all things that are internal. But could we externalize them on stage, and see into his head?”
Organising the content is only the first step. You also have to make cuts.
How to abridge an epic novel?
David Greig makes no apology for creating a long play.
“It seemed to me absolutely reasonable that if you were going to see Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, set aside the evening and arrive at 6.30. That’s what you’re going to see, it’s not a small thing.”
The TAG version had to fit into the International Festival programme, which meant it had to be 2 hours and 30 minutes including a 15 minute interval. As Tony Graham says…
“It’s like cooking, it’s a kind of reduction. But it’s not a reduction of meaning, that’s the important thing. How do you sustain meaning? How do you capture that?”
Programme cover of Theatre Scotland’s (TAG Theatre) 1995 stage production of Lanark
Programme back cover of Theatre Scotland’s (TAG Theatre) 1995 stage production of Lanark
Robin Brooks Radio 4 slot was even shorter - just 90 minutes.
“With any novel you’re adapting, you abridge it, because you have to. Even if you’re given 3 hours on a stage that’s a fraction of what it would be if you sat down and read it all out loud. And the question is how much can you abridge? How much ought you to abridge? What will you give up?”
You answer that question from two directions. First, you identify the heart of the story, the part that engages you as an adaptor, as this defines the tone and core story arc. For David Greig the heart was in Lanark’s world of the Elite. For Alastair Cording, it was Thaw’s world, specifically the painting of the mural in Cowlairs Parish Church.
“Thaw is in the act of creating a world, but he loses control of it, and it drives him to madness. At the opposite end of the book we have apocalypse, but the author of that apocalypse is no longer in charge of his creation.”
Oran Mor murals by Alasdair Gray and many helping hands (photo @MarkWildPhotography)
Oran Mor murals by Alasdair Gray and many helping hands (photo @MarkWildPhotography)
1982, Janine has several extended BDSM (bondage, discipline / domination, sadism / submission, masochism) fantasy scenes. Ben Schaffer took the decision to cut these drastically.
“I feel that when you’re in a room where it’s happening, you get the point pretty quickly. You don’t need to see hours of that to understand what it means.”
It’s one thing to read these scenes privately, another thing to see them as part of a shared experience with physical performers, unable to choose to turn the page. We’ll encounter this problem in Lanark too.
Staging an impossible postmodern book?
With Lanark you are creating two worlds on the same stage, one naturalistic the other fantastic. This doesn’t just impact visual design, but character, dialogue and performance.
You might think the big challenge would be creating a dragon, a giant mouth, or an apocalypse. But the Citizens’ team actually found the naturalistic world more problematic, as Graham Eatough explains.
“Where theatre really struggles is the biography, the scope of ‘here’s a whole life in the real world’ which of course the Duncan Thaw story is. It’s this coming of age from birth through to adulthood, it’s a massive sprawling. It’s not as locationally or as time specific as the Unthank stuff. There you have to turn to a different theatre language.”
David Greig also felt this keenly.
“If you’re going to adapt Alasdair Gray’s Lanark the only way you can do it is by pushing the form because the book is pushing at the edges of being a book, so you have to push at the edges of being a play. You have to be longer than anyone else’s play, you have to be stranger, in the wrong order, and you have to expose the mechanism of theatre itself.”
Thaw/Glasgow scene, 2015 stage production of Lanark (photo by Tim Morozzo)
Lanark/Unthank scene, 2015 stage production of Lanark (photo by Tim Morozzo)
Counter-intuitively in the Citizens’ production, the Lanark/Unthank world was played as conventional theatre, with real sets and traditional dialogue-lead scenes. The Thaw/ Glasgow scenes were played on an abstract scaffold set, by an ensemble of storytellers stepping in and out of characters. A kind of ‘memoryscape’.
The unstageable part 1: ambiguity
This brings us to the ‘unstageable’ moments. At the end of Book 3, Thaw is losing his grip on reality, his agency handed over to Crow. He (probably) commits murder and then (apparently) drowns himself. On the page this expressionistic, dreamlike sequence holds all outcomes as possibilities.
David Greig explains.
“The book allows you to remain uncertain about what this is, but that’s a hell of a lot harder on stage, and the emotional impact is very different. I’m sure each reader has their own experience.”
For the TAG production, Alastair Cording managed this moment by writing beyond naturalism, turning Crow’s speech into a harsh voice, a compressed poetry.
“I took from the start that whatever I did with dialogue, it had to come from Alasdair’s words on the page. So it’s fiercely edited down, perhaps rejigged a little, but it’s words he used, phrases he used. I may have used repetitions to create the kind of surreal nightmare poetry of those sequences.”
Playscript scene 44 from 1995 stage production of Lanark
Book chapter of Lanark relating to scene 44 of the playscript
1982, Janine has a similar moment of ambiguous truth. When Jock meets the ‘whore under the bridge’ she may or may not be his first love Denny, whose life he ruined. Ben Schaffer retains that ambiguity in his text.
“Personally I feel the odds of that being the case are absurd. It’s McLeish’s own self-obsession that he assumes everything reflects his past…. On the other hand, the text is leading us to the opposite conclusion, so I don’t know what the intention was there of Mr. Gray! We’ll let the audience decide for themselves.”
The unstageable part 2: creative typography and quantum time
Alasdair Gray subverts narrative and typographic form. 1982, Janine has the typographic masterpiece The Ministry of Voices. How do you adapt that for the stage?
Ben Schaffer’s adaptation uses an all-female cast, with the exception of Jock. In the Ministry of Voices they play all the parts as a kind of Greek Chorus of overlapping energies. It would be interesting to hear the Robin Brooks radio version!
The Ministry of Voices page from 1982, Janine
Lanark and Rima, 2015 stage production of Lanark (photo Tim Morozzo)
Timebending is a running theme in Alasdair Gray’s novels. To return to Unthank, Lanark and Rima must cross the Intercalendrical Zone where time unravels: they see past and present versions of themselves on the journey. Rima goes through accelerated pregnancy.
The TAG production cut the portrayal of the journey through the Zone completely: ironically, because of time-constraints. The Citizens’ production had several ‘Rima and Lanark’ couples performing, in front of the stage curtain and in the stalls.
Robin Brooks’ radio production embraced it fully.
“Yes, yes! It’s made for radio. And the apocalypse at the end. Radio can do that: you want a starship battle in a blizzard, we can do that. Before CGI we were the only people who could do that stuff.”
Graham Eatough sums it up beautifully.
“I suppose it’s true of any adaptation into another medium, it’s what’s the equivalent in your medium’s language of these literary techniques and ideas, tricks. What’s the theatrical equivalent of a footnote, you know? What’s the theatrical equivalent of the illustrated text? Marginalia? They’re just really exciting questions and because there’s no obvious answer they sort of necessitate a creative approach.”
Deviating from the original
All this returns us to the question of faithfulness. Often the greater the work the greater the pressure to be true to it, if that book is a cultural landmark. But you also need to be true to your new medium and the needs of your audience.
In all his work, Robin Brooks is a very faithful adaptor.
“I pride myself on not adding, if I can help it, not a single word. You can take away and you can rearrange and you might need to put in a line here or there to explain something which would not otherwise come across to a listener, that a reader would get. But those places are very far and few between.”
Ben Schaffer was even stricter.
“I think I only wrote one line that isn’t in the book. It’s a small joke where one was needed.”
On the other hand, Alastair Cording’s TAG version not only restructured the narrative and wrote poetry, he also created two new ‘characters’. Holding the Cowlairs mural at the heart of the play, Alastair created the character of The Painter, an embodiment of Thaw engaged with and obsessing about the Cowlairs Creation mural. The second creation extends The Catalyst, a character from the sinister Institute who activates repressed or untreatable patients. In Alastair Cording’s play she crosses over to Thaw’s world, speaks chorally with The Painter, steps into an Elite party and dances with Lanark. It’s a thoughtful, radical interpretation.
Graham Eatough is glad the Citizens’ version was closer to the book.
“In the end we got criticized for being a bit too faithful but that was quite conscious in a way. We didn’t want to stray too much.”
That decision felt particularly important during the final weeks of production, when Alasdair Gray had a life-threatening, life-changing fall.
The (near) death of the author
David Greig describes his feelings…
“Suddenly it’s like ‘oh man’ Alasdair is… it did seem like he really wasn’t going to come through that accident and… I remember this awful sick feeling… obviously I felt sad for Alasdair, his family and all of that… but also this feeling of ‘oh fuck’ we now are carrying this, what if it’s no good… all of that. It was horrible for a million reasons. It was very dark.”
Alasdair did recover, although not in time to see the show. But the accident changed his priorities. Ben Schaffer continued to work with Alasdair, but his interest in the Janine adaptation waned.
“I know he was desperate to finish his Dante work at that time… so my timing was very poor, in that I only got my act together towards the end of his life. But I am very grateful that I had the chance to meet with him twice in person.”
Endings and redemption
Alasdair Gray’s works do not end in darkness: he offers his characters continuance and redemption.
Alastair Cording describes the diversion of the apocalypse at the end of Lanark as ‘a tidal wave of light’.
“And it’s the light that Lanark has been looking for through all his experience in Unthank and the other the places… and in a sense in his dark and gloomy, 1950’s pouring wet-black Glasgow. The light is this... is the saviour of it. The saving grace of it all in the end.”
In 1982, Janine McLeish faces his survival and the new day with promises to, ‘not do nothing’. He sees Janine walk (almost) free of her bondage. But Ben Schaffer doubts McLeish’s ability to change.
“I like the fact that it ends on this kind of redemptive note. I don’t know if Gray believes that that’s possible, or if merely the character believes it’s possible. But it’s what we all must do - ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on’. That’s what it’s all about.”
What have we learned from all this?
Each of the creatives who adapted Alasdair’s work embarked on a journey. Most feel they met the challenge, most had moments of doubt, but all took valuable insights from working so intimately with Alasdair Gray’s texts.
“How much have I learned from Lanark? It’s unspeakable. So much! But the things I learned about process, about preparing, about your relationship with the writer. I probably have become a better director.”
Alastair Cording came away with a deep understanding of Lanark that simply reading it hadn’t given him. He states the drivers of the story simply and clearly.
“Duncan Thaw’s involved with the creation and Lanark is involved with the end of the world. I began to understand more and more of Lanark’s world as I looked at Duncan Thaw as a fictionalized version of Alasdair Gray’s own story.”
Robin Brooks was empowered to be bolder in his own writing:
“What I admire most about it is the ambition of it ‘I can do this’, I can do anything. I can write about anything, I’m going to create my worlds’. I love that, I think it’s marvellous. An inspiration.”
And for David Greig there was a joyful ending:
“We previewed in Glasgow, and I was physically sick in the toilets of the Citizen’s before hand… I thought it hadn’t worked, I thought it had failed in every way and just the pressure of it felt so amazingly intense. And I was sure we were going to be absolutely vilified. And then within six minutes, really quickly, I started to see the show through the eyes of the audience… and this is alright actually, this is exciting. And thereafter it was a joyful thing, the whole thing was joyful.”
With thanks to…
Robin Brooks - radio dramatist, actor, author and founder of Allegra Productions.
Alastair Cording - Scottish actor, playwright and writer.
Graham Eatough - theatre maker who also works in visual arts and film.
Tony Graham - freelance theatre director and founder of the Unicorn Theatre.
David Greig - Scottish playwright and theatre director and Artistic Director of Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre.
Ben Schaffer - American author and editor.
Explore more…
External links…
Lanark: A Life in Three Acts is a 2015 stage adaptation of Alasdair Gray's classic novel Lanark, conceived by writer David Greig and director Graham Eatough. Watch the trailer on YouTube.
Citizens Theatre is an iconic venue and theatre company based in the Gorbals area of Glasgow that creates ground-breaking theatre productions and empowering participatory projects.
TAG Theatre Company is a theatre company established in 1967 in Glasgow, Scotland as the outreach arm of the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow.
Anita Sullivan is a playwright whose many adaptations for stage and radio include Janet Frame’s An Angel at my Table, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
You can hear Alasdair reading and talking about books on our YouTube channel