craschworks

Staging the Next Fantasy Blockbuster

January 25, 2004
By SARAH LYALL

LONDON

The unassuming man at the end of the eighth row slipped
quietly from his seat during the final applause for the
sold-out performance of “His Dark Materials” at the
National Theater. But he didn't get far. This was Philip
Pullman, 57, who wrote the thrilling books on which the
play is based, and he was quickly waylaid by a crowd of
young readers who seemed unable to believe their luck.

“His Dark Materials,” which began as a trilogy of
young-adult novels with extravagant themes but humble
commercial expectations, has turned into a serious
international phenomenon and bestowed on its author the
sort of celebrity that prompted him to move to a house with
an unlisted address. The books, luminous adventures that
address life after death, religious faith and the
complicated intermingling of good and evil, have been
translated into 37 languages and sold more than 7 million
copies in Britain and the United States alone.

Anyone who has seen the “Harry Potter” or “Lord of the
Rings” movies, or even just noted their success, can guess
what is happening now: the books are being moved into
position as the next blockbuster fantasy franchise. In
London, the National has staged a lavishly ambitious,
sold-out, $1.4 million, two-part, six-hour adaptation. And
New Line Cinema, which released the “Lord of the Rings”
mega-movies, has bought the rights to Mr. Pullman's trilogy
and hired Tom Stoppard to write the screenplay.

But “His Dark Materials” is a far more challenging
proposition than its cinematic predecessors, and not only
because of the complexity of its philosophical and
scientific underpinnings. The books make a breathtakingly
subversive attack on organized religion and on the notion
of an all-powerful god. The trilogy has already been
criticized by church organizations alarmed at its
preference for humanism and for its depiction of a cruel
fictional church that is obsessed with what it regards as
the sexual purity of children but blinded by its own lust
for power. Among other things, the books feature a
church-sponsored prison camp for kidnapped children, a pair
of renegade male angels who are touchingly in love and a
god who is ancient, weak and exhausted, yearning more than
anything for the merciful release of death.

A movie director will be hired in the next month or so and
filming should start in about a year. With a skittish eye,
perhaps, on the power of religious groups in the United
States, New Line's executives say they will probably insist
that the books' repudiation of religion be softened into
more of a meditation on the corruption of power in general.
Mark Ordesky, executive vice president and chief operating
officer of New Line Productions, said in an interview that
“the real issue is not religion; it's authority – that's
what's really the driving issue here.”

Mr. Ordesky pointed out that the figure who most represents
God in the books is known as “the Authority” and said that
the core of the story is about “people who are striving to
be free and have free will, who are in conflict with forces
of authority and totalitarianism.”

What the studio likes about the trilogy, Mr. Ordesky said,
is the same thing it liked about “The Lord of the Rings”:
the story. “Big-budget, big-spectacle, visual-effects
movies are in themselves of no interest to audiences,” Mr.
Ordesky said. “What resonates is when you take all that and
have a compelling human story beneath it.”

The chances for fabulous effects are pretty good, too. The
books take place in multiple parallel worlds, including
current-day Oxford and a sort-of Oxford from some
undetermined time in the past. For those who care to look
for the references, the books allude to Milton, Blake,
Coleridge, Ruskin, the Bible, Homer, Norse mythology,
quantum physics and string theory, but they are also
suffused with a richly compelling plot and fantastic
characters. There are two beguiling young human
protagonists, Lyra and Will, but there are also armored
bears, scheming academics, terrifying harpies, fierce, tiny
spies that travel by dragonfly, cosmically powerful but
physically wispy angels who long for bodily form, witches
with racy love lives, corrupt clerics, gentle mammals that
travel by wheels and, best of all, daemons, the animal
embodiment of an individual's soul that leaves the person's
side only in death.

Even at a time when books for young people, with their
strong narratives and enthusiastic suspension of
imaginative disbelief, have been taken up eagerly by
grown-ups, Mr. Pullman's work, at its heart a retelling of
Milton's “Paradise Lost,” stands out for its unapologetic
sophistication. In 2002, “The Amber Spyglass,” the final
novel in the trilogy, became the first children's book to
win the $45,000 Whitbread prize for the best book of the
year in Britain. (The first volume in the series, “Northern
Lights” – called “The Golden Compass” in the United States
- was published in 1995. The second, “The Subtle Knife,”
was published in 1997 and “Spyglass” in 2000.) If the Harry
Potter stories succeeded in making grown-ups (and not just
fantasy-genre readers) interested once more in worlds of
endless possibility, “His Dark Materials” reminded them
that the best children's books are literature of the
highest quality.

“Few recent works have succeeded more abundantly than
Philip Pullman's trilogy in achieving the first things we
ask of a work of art,” wrote Alastair Macauley in The
Financial Times. In The Daily Telegraph, the critic Charles
Spencer said that Mr. Pullman's books transcended the
obvious comparison to the Harry Potter series. “While J. K.
Rowling's books about the boy wizard seem increasingly
derivative, formulaic, flatly written and ridiculously
long, Pullman's magnificent `His Dark Materials' trilogy
offers both hours of spellbound wonder and sudden moments
of deep emotion that cut at the heart like the subtlest of
knives,” Mr. Spencer wrote.

Mr. Pullman, a former schoolteacher, has long had an
impressive literary reputation, but none of his earlier
works have had anything like the success of “His Dark
Materials.” Opinionated and outspoken, he has championed
children's literature as a way to express themes and ideas
that, he mischievously argues, are too large to be depicted
in adult fiction. He has also been a forceful proponent of
what he calls the Republic of Heaven, in which life is
lived fully because there is nothing more – no prospect of
an afterlife to wait for. By the same token, he has
criticized C. S. Lewis's “Narnia” books for what he says is
the divisiveness of their Christian message, in which those
who cling too enthusiastically to the physical world are
consigned to hell. (Mr. Pullman may have a chance to face
off, in a way, with Lewis, who died in 1963: next year, the
BBC will begin filming the first of five movies based on
the “Narnia” books, with Andrew Adamson, of “Shrek,”
directing.)

Mr. Pullman's books, in turn, have already been condemned
by a chorus of religious groups here: The Catholic Herald
has pronounced them “truly the stuff of nightmares”; the
Association of Christian Teachers recently said that adults
should think carefully before letting children read them.

“We don't want this book on the bookshelves of primary
schools,” Rupert Kaye, the group's chief executive, said of
the trilogy in an interview. “It's one thing to say, `The
church has got things terribly wrong and I'm going to hold
it up to the light of day,' and it's another thing to have
a book in which every Christian character is evil or
selfish or power-hungry.”

Mr. Pullman said in an interview that although he has
strong feelings about religion, readers should draw their
own conclusions from his books. “If I were to say, `This is
the only way to read it,' I would be putting myself in the
same position as the evangelicals – that is, telling people
how to read and what to think,” he said. “The very last
possible thing on earth I want to be known as – with the
single exception of `pedophile' – is `guru.' I'm not in the
business of doing that. What I'm doing is telling a story.”

Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theater,
came to “His Dark Materials” on a colleague's
recommendation. Impatient with children's theatrical
standards like “The Wind in the Willows” (a production of
which he had directed some years ago), Mr. Hytner was
looking for projects based on contemporary books for young
adults.

“What seemed immediately stageable were the series of
archetypal, highly emotional family conflicts, which I
thought were powerful and dramatic and would hold a theater
full of people,” Mr. Hytner said of the trilogy.

It took 18 months of workshops and rewrites for the
playwright, Nicholas Wright, to whittle the 1,300 pages of
“His Dark Materials” down to a manageable script. One of
the central problems of staging was how to depict the
characters' daemons; the answer was to hire the puppet
designer Michael Curry, who collaborated with Julie Taymor
on “The Lion King.” The resulting daemon puppets – a
treacherous golden monkey for Lyra's mother; a haughty snow
leopard for her father; a collection of birds for the
Oxford professors; reptiles for members of the church
hierarchy – are manipulated, bunraku-style, by actors
dressed in black. The play, directed by Mr. Hytner, uses 30
actors and features a dizzying 110 set changes that make
fine use of the unusual revolving stage in the National's
Olivier Theater.

The production is to return to the National next December
for another four-month run; the complexity of its staging
makes it highly unlikely that “His Dark Materials” will
transfer to another theater, Mr. Hytner said. But when it
does come back it will likely be in a somewhat altered
form. Reviews have been mixed, with many critics praising
Mr. Hytner's ambition but concluding that the play
ultimately fails to capture the magic of the novels. In
general, though, the critical response does not appear to
have dampened the buoyant passion of actual audiences.
Despite its length, the production has attracted a large
number of children, who can be seen earnestly explaining
the fine points of the narrative to their parents during
the intermissions.

Meanwhile, Mr. Pullman is at work on an unrelated
children's book, “The Scarecrow and His Servant,” which he
expects to finish by the end of the year. But he has not
left “His Dark Materials” – the phrase is from “Paradise
Lost” – behind. (He recently published “Lyra's Oxford,” a
small teaser of a book containing a short story about the
trilogy's heroine, and is at work on “The Book of Dust,” a
prequel.) He now gets so much mail that it takes him and
his wife, working together at home in Oxford, two days a
week to answer it all.

Earlier this month, Mr. Pullman was interviewed onstage -
in front of another sell-out crowd that filled every one of
the theater's 1,110 seats – before the curtain rose on the
second part of “His Dark Materials.” He answered the usual
questions about where he gets his ideas and what sort of
daemon he would have (a magpie or a jackdaw, he answered,
“one of those birds that steal bright things”).

He did not talk about death, though it is a central aspect
of his grand vision. Indeed, even critics who didn't like
the production have loved the scenes that take place in the
prison-like World of the Dead, where the downtrodden,
suffering deceased are gently released into the outside
world, where they feel a moment of unspeakable ecstasy
before dissolving gratefully into the earth and the air.

“It's astonishing how uncompromising it is in introducing
kids to an alternative mythology of death,” Mr. Hytner
said, “how it finds a harsh consolation in the notion that
death is death and that the worst possible thing, the most
desperate thing, is that there is some kind of afterlife.
It's thrilling to see kids as young as 9 and 10 sitting,
riveted, by that and feeling perhaps relieved by the notion
of oblivion.”   

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/arts/theater/25LYAL.html?ex=1076055348&ei=1&en=e896eb24fa2636b2