Playwright tackles sci-fi classic Solaris
● Australian tinged adaptation of 1961 novel will be staged at Lyceum
One of Scotland’s leading playwrights is to create an ambitious new science fiction epic based on classic novel Solaris.
David Greig, who has previously adapted Peter Pan and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for the stage, will be adapting Stanisław Lem’s book for the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh more than half a century after it was published.
Special effects will help transform its stage into an eerie space station orbiting an uninhabited planet which seems to be possessed by an alien intelligence.
Greig, the Royal Lyceum’s artistic director, will join forces with Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre to tackle the psychological thriller. The cast will include Australian actor Eamon Farren, who starred in the recent Twin Peaks revival.
It charts the events which unfold when a psychologist – who is changed from a man to woman in the play – arrives at a research station hovering above an oceanic planet which has been studied by scientists in vain for years. It emerges that the oceanic planet is able to create haunting visions of
0 George Clooney and Natascha Mcelhone in 2002’s Solaris film
the past for the human beings who are trying to investigate it.
The adaption has emerged out of a collaboration between the Royal Lyceum and Malthouse of the classic Australian novel Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Greig said: “We took a bit of a punt on Picnic at Hanging Rock and it went very well. I was really interested in how we brought in quite a young audience, which was partly down to the horror aspect of it.
“Matthew and I started to
knock ideas around for doing something else and he said he wanted to do Solaris. I only knew it from Tarkovsky’s film, which I watched as a student. When I saw it again I was really drawn to the strangeness and mysteriousness of it.”
The book has been adapted for cinema three times, most recently for a 2002 Hollywood film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, and starring George Clooney and Natascha Mcelhone. Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Soviet film won the Cannes Film Festival’s jury prize.
Greig will mainly draw on the Polish author’s novel for the script of the play, which will be directed by Malthouse artistic director Matthew Lutton and staged in 2019.
He added: “When I began to read the book I was immediately surprised – it’s not what you think it’s going to be. I had no idea it was so funny, so moving, and such a fascinating philosophical disquisition on the eternal human problem of our relationship with ‘the other’ – whether that is a person, a planet, a lover or a monster.
“I’m a bit afraid of science fiction in theatre. It’s not a common theme at all, which is partly exciting and interesting, but it’s also the most ancient art form we have and doesn’t seem to sit well with spaceships. This play is set in the future, but as we might have imagined it in the early sixties, with mahogany bookcases, smoking cigarettes and spools of tape.”