Guest Blog: Jemma Kennedy On Adapting MAGGOT MOON For Stage

Early on in the process of workshopping Sally Gardner's dystopian novel Maggot Moon for the stage, I gave the book to my nephew Elliot, who was 15 at the time - the same age as the book's unforgettable narrator, Standish Treadwell.

Elliot read it straight through, and then went back to the beginning and read the whole thing over again. "It's the only time I've ever done that," he told me. Like me, he was utterly transported by Standish's tale, by the novel's episodic, non-linear structure and Sally's unique prose style. "He gets inside your head," Elliot said. The book has that effect on people.

I've adapted several novels for stage and screen, but Maggot Moon was the most formally challenging. Standish is an unusual literary narrator; although possessed of a brilliant imagination, he is dyslexic. In his world, this is actually a life-threatening condition, for the sinister and totalitarian Motherland state sends children with 'mental impurities' away to be euphemistically 're-educated'.

For the reader, however, his dyslexia helps form the hugely enjoyable creative filter through which he views the world. His first-person narrative is peppered with gorgeous Standishisms, as we came to call them - spoonerisms, off-kilter metaphors and linguistic flights of fancy that give the reader a hotline into his sensory experiences. But this, coupled with the book's fragmented narrative and opaque time frame, meant that the material didn't naturally lend itself to a straightforward theatrical adaptation.

The director Jesse Jones and I spent over a year exploring different ways to dramatise the novel. Our first instinct was to try and create an epic piece of theatre that would populate a big main stage with lots of characters, props and stagecraft. I put Standish's narration into dialogue-heavy, multi-character scenes; we ironed out the jigsaw puzzle plot line; we dreamed up ambitious staging ideas featuring a hundred supernumary actors. But somehow, we just couldn't make any it work.

We eventually realised that in trying to turn Standish's subjective, experiential narration into a three-dimensional play that presented an objective reality for the audience, we were losing the very essence of the story. We just weren't able to get inside our audience's heads in the same way that Standish had for Elliot as a reader.

We decided that the play should be a one-man show, with Standish as our sole narrator. (Although we ended up bringing in a second actor into the play for a couple of key two-hander scenes, who also contributes crucial live illustrations which are part of the show's theatrical language.) It was a bold but necessary leap, which allowed us to become both more faithful to the book and more theatrical in our storytelling, albeit on a much smaller canvas.

My job was now to carefully sculpt a 70-minute monologue for a principal actor from Sally's novelistic prose coupled with a few of my own text additions, blending the two together as seamlessly as possible. I'd never done such a literal adaptation before, but I found it immensely pleasurable. Sally's writing style is so distinctive and beguiling that it was a bit like learning a new language.

I read the book over and over again, absorbing the language until I felt fluent, and able to emulate Standish's voice when new narrative links needed writing. "I may not be able to spell, but I collect words," Standish tells us in the novel; "They are sweets in the mouth of sound." I felt the same way about Sally's words.

Meanwhile, Jesse and his team of designers were able to externalise Standish's colourful inner world with stage, sound and lighting design, along with the live drawing and animation. We've ended up with a show that, I hope, allows the audience to live inside the head and heart of Standish Treadwell, a young person living under a brutal authoritarian regime that considers creativity a danger to social order. But we will learn that his so-called social deficiencies are his greatest strength, and his dazzling imagination, empathy and courage are enough to bring down a government.

Maggot Moon is a tale for our times - and perhaps even more relevant today than it was when it was published five years ago. The rise of populism has encouraged political and social tribalism, and we all need to learn to empathise with those we see as 'other'. In this respect, Standish is a wonderful creative role model, as well as a crack storyteller.

Maggot Moon runs at the Unicorn Theatre 26 September-27 October

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