GUEST BLOG: Playwright Paul Sirett On Adapting SINBAD THE SAILOR

What do you think of when you hear the title Sinbad the Sailor? A sailing ship? Pirates? Scimitars? Monkeys? Treasure? Adventure? Slippers with pointy toes? Voluminous breeches? Earrings?

Those were some of the images the title conjured up in my mind when we decided to write a pantomime based on Sinbad the Sailor for Christmas 2016. But what about the story? I'll be honest - I couldn't remember it. I knew there was a bird called the giant roc, and a character called the Old Man of the Sea, but that was about it. I'd never seen a pantomime version of Sinbad and neither had any of my colleagues. So, I was going to have to do some research...

The first thing I discovered was that Sinbad isn't one story - it's seven. The seven tales have a framing device in which a poor, young porter called Sinbad meets a rich, old merchant called Sinbad who proceeds to tell him the stories of his great adventures.

The seven stories have the same basic ingredients: Sinbad sets sail looking for adventure; he travels to magical places, meets monsters, encounters supernatural phenomena, kills a few creatures and/or people, steals lots of treasure; and he heads back home. None of the stories are obvious contenders for a pantomime. So the next question was: what do adaptors usually do?

The answer was simple. They usually ignore most of the original stories altogether and make up their own. I read six different pantomime treatments of Sinbad the Sailor - they were wildly, fantastically different. Some had aspects of the original stories; some had nothing of the original stories whatsoever (apart from having a character called Sinbad the Sailor, that is). So now the question was: what are we going to do?

Early on, we decided that we wanted a girl to be the hero of our story. So we invented Sinbadda (because she's badder than Sinbad...), but it didn't feel right to completely do away with Sinbad. So we brought him back, made them brother and sister, made her the swashbuckling hero and him a bit of a nerd.

But what about the story? The first thing I did was to take all of the most exciting aspects of the seven stories to create a menu of options. I tried a number of permutations, but I couldn't find a strong enough motor for the story. So I went back to basics and decided to use a good old-fashioned quest narrative. This would be the eighth and last voyage of Sinbad, a new adventure with a new quest - something that would give me plenty of room for manoeuvre.

Our story was simple: the Sultan of Al Avabitozat decrees that whoever can retrieve a Golden Casket, stolen from his palace by the Giant Roc (back to the original story), will win the hand of his daughter in marriage. The two rivals are Sinbad (and by extension, his sister, Sinbadda) and the Trump-inspired baddie, Prince Naw-ze Uzz. In addition to these characters we created a nurse (our dame), a nine-headed monster, a Genie, a monkey, and some pirates. And because we like to do things the hard way, we decided to start with a funeral.

I'm sure there will be Sinbad scholars out there somewhere who will be horrified with the liberties we have taken, and to them I apologise, but I am very proud of our version. A quest story is always compelling and our panto also has a little dash of politics - in its early English incarnation, pantomime was used to mime things on the stage about current affairs that no one was permitted to say out loud, and I love the idea that the roots of pantomime lie in political subversion.

I also like to think that a Stratford East panto celebrates pantomime as a living, breathing, evolving art form and not one that is preserved in aspic. A Theatre Royal panto will have all the fun of a traditional pantomime, but takes you to strange, delicious and unexpected new places.

Sinbad the Sailor at Theatre Royal Stratford East until 21 January, 2017

Watch a trailer below!

Photo credit: SharRon Wallace

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