Guest Blog: Shaun McKenna and Lin Coghlan on Adapting THE FORSYTE SAGA at the Park Theatre

John Galsworthy’s classic story The Forsyte Saga has been newly dramatised for the stage in two parts for the Park Theatre, bringing the unheard female voices to the fore for the first time. Spanning 40 years from the last gasp of the Victorian age to the beginning of the roaring 1920s, this is an epic tale of sex, money and power.

Adapters Shaun McKenna and Lin Coghlan write about their Fortsyte Saga experience for BroadwayWorld.

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Lin:  When I’m adapting something, finding a personal way in is the starting point for me – if I don’t connect with the story I can’t find a way to sense the heart of it and then find the courage to take it apart and reassemble it in a meaningful way.

John Galsworthy’s writing is as relevant today as when he first put pen to paper. You might be forgiven for thinking that a series of books written about the upper middle classes in England around the start of the twentieth century might have little to say about how we live today, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

Galsworthy introduces us to an England on the cusp of extraordinary change – just like now. His characters, without exception, are forced to choose between conflicting value systems and to struggle with the notion of what constitutes a good life. The theme of ‘character’, and whether you ‘have one’ or can ‘build one’, or perhaps have even ‘lost one’, is core. By ‘character’ Galsworthy means who we are and what we stand for, whether in power, money or love.

Shaun:  When we were originally approached to do the Radio 4 dramatisations, I initially accepted the prevailing critical opinion that Galsworthy is ‘not quite first rate’.  An opinion that was blown out of the water on that first reading. As our intention was to put the women at the heart of things and not have a man tell their story, we had to decide who could narrate the whole epic sweep.  One of us came up with the idea of Fleur. We quickly realised this would allow the whole saga to be a journey of discovery for Fleur, as for the audience, as she learns about the secrets festering at the heart of her family. 

Lin:  It was daunting when we thought about making the first six novels into two plays but we had Fleur as our narrator and the complexity of Fleur’s journey helped us to weave the different time frames together.

Shaun: About five years ago, I was cleaning up my desktop and I started casually re-reading our radio scripts from 2015.  I had the wild idea of making it a play.  No, two plays – Irene’s story and Fleur’s story. Plays you can watch individually but which become a richer experience when you see both.  I phoned Lin.  We asked the usual questions – “Is this even possible?”  “What do we keep?”  “What do we leave out?”  “Who on earth would produce something so eccentric?” All of which eventually boiled down to one question. “Are we doing this, then?”

Lin:  And suddenly we were. An amazing group of creative collaborators seemed to emerge from thin air.

Shaun: Imagining how we could populate this vast canvas with a handful of actors, how we could structure the story and deal with characters who age twenty years…. Writers like me and Lin love those kinds of challenges.  The craft/jigsaw aspect of structure is catnip to us. And I have a history of adapting big books.

These stories have been reframed for almost every medium – stage, TV, radio, film. We chose to distil them into these two fluid, almost filmic plays.  They are not a reverent dramatisation by any means but an original adaptation, striving to get to the heart of these women and their hard won self-knowledge.

Lin:  I wish I’d met John Galsworthy.  He drew on his own life to make stories which both challenge and empower us. His writing still shines more than a hundred years later.

Shaun:  He was wise and he wrote about important things, things we all still grapple with. 

The Forsyte Saga Parts 1 & 2 run at the Park Theatre from 11 October - 18 December. The shows play across alternate nights and run consecutively on matinee days.

Photo Credits: Mitzi de Margary

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