SARAH HEMMING, FINANCIAL TIMES

'“It doesn’t feel like we honestly read depictions of present tense experience,” says Watson. “And there is so much drama in just existing . . . you’re meant to ignore a lot of how present tense experience actually is in order to reach profundity.”

But how will it work on stage? Isn’t the very interiority that makes the novel so vivid at odds with a medium that prizes action, plot and dialogue? Not so, says Katie Mitchell, the visionary international theatre director whose job it is to wrangle this intimate experience into a communal event. She was, she says, instantly struck by the novel’s inherent theatricality.

“I opened it and it looked like a musical score,” Mitchell says. “It seems to almost cry out to be spoken in a theatre . . . and I’m always interested in work that is on the edge. This is consciousness that we’re representing, which is just so exciting.”

“I think it has an epic quality,” adds playwright Miriam Battye, who has adapted the piece. “Because it’s inside someone’s brain, it has the potential to go anywhere.”'

 

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