Something is lost as Pratchett transfers to stage

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Written by Nicolette Jones

Friday, 20 November 2009 10:24

The National Theatre’s two previous big stagings of children’s books – Coram Boy and War Horse - were able to add something significant to the original texts. Coram Boy had the glorious music of Handel sung live; War Horse had the astonishing equine sculptures (puppets seems too diminishing a word for them). Both were triumphs of stagecraft that brought Jamila Gavin’s and Michael Morpurgo’s stories to life with all their emotional power.

I wish I could say that Nation was an equally successful adaptation. Mark Ravenhill’s staging has some wonderful theatrical effects – not least the scenes of swimming underwater. It does a credible tsunami. But Nation is a book that is difficult to translate into literal action. Like all Pratchett’s work, it plays textual tricks. Episodes that seem to be happening in reality resolve themselves into wishful thinking. There is a lot of wordplay. The book treads a tightrope between abstract and concrete. Something is lost when everything becomes action instead of ideas.

In the book, we are inside the head of the boy Mau, who returns from a solitary test of survival, a boy’s rite-of-passage into adulthood, to find the rest of his people have been killed by a tsunami, and we hear his own crisis of faith, his meditations on human nature, and his dawning understanding of both himself and society. Turned into episodes that we see rather than thought processes that we inhabit, the story’s plot developments are confusing and its characters more strange than sympathetic.

Mau becomes, as other survivors arrive, the leader of his own people. His companion in this journey is a repressed Victorian girl, Daphne (as she renames herself), shipwrecked on the same island, whose own journey is an overthrow of the limitations of her sex and class imposed on her by her culture. Again, the internal awakening is hard to represent. In the book, she teaches herself medicine from a manual washed up from the ship, until she is entirely fearless, knowledgeable and competent. In the play she casually saws off a man’s leg; the significance of this fails to carry.

The unfamiliar culture of Mau’s people is less comprehensible when depicted objectively than when we share the mindset of one of its adherents on the page. We are left with the mistaken impression that Pratchett admires primitive cultures principally for the possibility that they may have invented telescopes thousands of years earlier. Everything seems a bit reductive. Clever programme notes, with activities for youngsters related to creating your own society, work hard to fill the deficit and ensure that this production stimulates ideas in the way that Pratchett’s book does, but it would be preferable if the play itself did the job.

The ending is poignant, it’s true, though - compared to the heart-tugging of Coram Boy or War Horse – it causes disappointingly little need for tissues.

Still, the show would be worth the night out for a few jokes alone: for the portrayal of the imperialist Victorians, including a terrific moment with a box that plays triumphal music. And above all, for the parrot. Daphne is accompanied by a parrot that has been taught a lot of bad language by sailors. Played by a full grown man in a costume suggestive of plumage but adapted from Victorian woman’s clothing – an inventive shorthand for the culture he comes from – the bird, Milton, speaks lines from his own colourful repertoire and from earlier in the script at apposite, or splendidly inapposite, moments. He is hilarious, and wins the audience over. In Milton, we hear best the humour and irreverence of Pratchett. My teenage daughter and I were still laughing at Milton in the car on the way home.

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