Female readers are the acknowledged force behind the market in published fiction. Their collective response to a book has decided the fate of many a novelist. And when the book groups of Britain get behind a new title, it makes a big difference to its fortunes.
Now canny theatre producers are harnessing that commercial power with a string of new stage shows based on hit books by female authors that were also enjoyed largely by female readers. Waiting in the wings this spring are plays or musicals based on bestsellers that include Hamnet, The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.
While each book is different in tone, they share a ready-made contingent of devoted fans – not all women, of course, but they dominate the fanbase. And even those theatregoers who have not read them yet will at least have heard of some of the titles.
“It’s fair to say that women are the drivers of the fiction market – certainly they are the crucial buyers,” said novelist Kate Griffin. Her own gothic drama, Fyneshade, out next month, has been hailed as ripe for stage adaptation in enthusiastic early reviews.
“If you look at the covers in a bookshop, you’ll see that so many are gorgeously designed to have an aesthetic and perhaps a specifically female appeal,” said Griffin. “It’s not surprising there’s now a crossover with theatre.”
First in front of audiences was the stage version of Hanya Yanagihara’s cult novel A Little Life, which opened in London last week. The original, divisive book made the Booker prize shortlist in 2015 and is still revered by many. In this production, directed by the maverick Belgian Ivo van Hove, the actor James Norton, who plays the central character, Jude, disrobes.
“It’s interesting to see [the trend] is happening as female artistic directors and producers are starting to call more shots,” said Griffin. “It’s natural that the choices they make, in terms of commissioning and themes, are filtering through. Having said that, I suspect a key appeal of A Little Life for many women theatregoers might be James Norton getting his kit off!”
Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed recent novel, is also poised for a glittering transition to the theatre this month. A stage adaptation written by Lolita Chakrabarti for the Royal Shakespeare Company has already secured a West End run at the Garrick theatre this September before it has even made its premiere in Stratford-upon-Avon, where tickets have all but disappeared. The show, which officially opens on Wednesday, stars Madeleine Mantock as Shakespeare’s wife. Like the book, which has sold 1.5m copies worldwide, it centres on her grief at the death of their only son, Hamnet, and speculates on its impact on the playwright’s later work.
“Hamnet – a beautiful book in every way – was hugely popular with reading groups, often largely female, and there’s clearly an appetite for these much-loved books to be adapted for stage,” said Griffin. “In my – admittedly subjective – experience, women are also usually the buyers of theatre tickets. So, when something like Hamnet comes to the stage, there’s already a receptive audience.”
The co-producers of the stage show, Neal Street, are also behind a new film version of O’Farrell’s book, to be directed by the Oscar winner Chloé Zhao. There is, Griffin suspects, a completist urge among many serious fans of popular novels that will lead them to buy both theatre and cinema tickets, just as they have collected different print editions.
Dave Stewart, once of the Eurythmics, will be hoping the same holds true for his new musical, The Time Traveller’s Wife, adapted from Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 fantasy. Stewart has written the songs for the show, with the singer Joss Stone as his lyricist. The script, by Lauren Gunderson, will tell of the unconventional romance between a time traveller and a sculptor called Clare. Already the subject of a film and a TV series, the book’s stage version opens this autumn at the Apollo theatre in London’s West End.
The many fans of the gripping 2008 bestseller The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale will only have to wait until May, when the fact-based murder story, set in 1860, comes to the Watermill theatre in Berkshire. Adapted by Alexandra Wood, it will pit Jonathan Whicher, the celebrated Scotland Yard detective, against a perplexing and grim country house mystery. And the literary-theatrical trend, which arguably started with the RSC’s staging of Hilary Mantel’s hit Wolf Hall series in 2014, looks set to continue, with Annie Proulx’s influential 1997 story Brokeback Mountain also being developed for the stage.
The new stream of women’s fiction now supplying our stages follows a tide of recent productions based on well-known screen stories. The majority of these shows, such as Back to the Future, Moulin Rouge!, The Great British Bake Off Musical, Pretty Woman and Dirty Dancing, have used popular films or TV series as their source material. Forthcoming productions to do the same include a return for Tim Minchin’s version of Groundhog Day and a new play based on the sci-fi drama Stranger Things. A version of the Robin Williams film comedy Mrs Doubtfire is also on the way to the UK in musical form, although this show surely belongs in the women’s fiction category too, since the original 1987 book, Madame Doubtfire, was written by the English novelist Anne Fine.
