Descent into Broccoli

From the air, which is of course not how Maia first saw it, it's a pale scar, quivering ragged-edged through thick green fur, splintering off in meandering veins into the horizon. This is a landscape etched through dialogue between land and water, an elemental geography. Whichever dominates this season decides the shape of the map. (Or indeed this millenium, as whole sections of river slice off to become oxbow lakes - is that what they're called? So much for O level Geography - or, further back in geological time, as the Amazon switched its whole oceanic allegiance from West to East, flipping its mouth from the Pacific to the Atlantic. It's nearly the end of the rainy season, so the banks are fuzzy-edged - the water has now covered almost all the land it will take this year.

What landmarks I can make out are not the work of humans. No human endeavour: no building, no pattern of cultivation can be made out as we fly over the forest. I know that's not the case everywhere, however. But such mammothness does make some of the rhetoric about poor, vulnerable Amazonia feel strange. How could something this vast not dominate? What could humans do to something so beyond our scale? Yet of course like other giants, this one is threatened, and seriously. Perhaps that very size is part of the challenge - the Moby Dick effect; the big quiet guy in the bar jumpy little homo sapiens has to pick a fight with to prove itself. Knock this down, nothing is bigger than you. Maybe, although I suspect we'll find out the economics have more to do with it than my airborne species psychology.

It was a good school...

On yesterday's sunny Friday afternoon Michael from Theatre Centre and I went to Hackney in East London to visit Gayhurst School, who we hope will be working with us as we prepare the production. We met a lively and enthusiastic group who had volunteered to stay in school a bit longer (and on a sunny Friday!) to find out what we were up to. We'd not expected so many keen takers - about twenty mainly nine to eleven year olds, although with a couple of younger sisters and brothers.

Michael explained about our planned adaptation of the book, which some of the group had already read. Indeed a couple of Eva Ibbotson fans appeared to have read everything she had written, which was great to hear. We looked at an extract from a documentary about the Amazon [link] which showed both indigenous peoples and those involved in using the land for other purposes. Quite a few of the group already had strong feelings about the environmental questions raised by the video.

We then said that I would be going to visit a school in Brazil - although in Rio, which is as far from the Amazon as Hackney is from Moscow! Michael deftly filmed the group asking questions they would like to ask their contemporaries in Brazil: what music do you listen to? Is it the same as your parents? Do you wear uniform? What do you study? What times do you go to school There was a lot of interest in whether the Rio children have slang, some of the Gayhurst pupils being noticeably proficient in backslang.

And then Michael took his children and their friends off to capoeira (appropriately enough).

The Meeting of the Waters

Today was a chance for the two companies producing Journey to the River Sea to meet each other. Although this project has been planned for ages, this was still the first time some people from Theatre Centre and Unicorn had met. Theatre Centre provided lunch at their offices in Aldgate, East London, just around the corner from the Whitechapel Art Gallery. It wasn't a meeting with lots of business - that's going on anyway. Thomas, Theatre Centre's Administrator and Emma, Unicorn's Marketing Director have already been e-mailing possible images for the show's publicity back and forth. Chris, Unicorn's Executive Director and Charles, Theatre Centre's General Manager, have been making it possible to imagine a show on a challenging scale. The cast size is just one example - Ros and I worked out early on that we would need at least eight performers, which is a large cast by the standards of most British theatre companies at the moment. It's essential to be able to work on that scale at times, but you need the support and expertise of producers like Charles and Chris if that's to be possible. And I bet that isn't the last mention of money in this blog...

The two companies are very different. Theatre Centre is a smaller team: a touring company without a building to build and run as Unicorn has. So Carolyn, Unicorn's new Theatre Manager has no direct counterpart there. Marijke, Theatre Centre's Production and Company Manager, does elements of jobs Andy, Petrus, Ana and as yet unappointed others do for Unicorn. Becky (Theatre Centre's Office Co-ordinator and Tour Booker) and Rhona (Unicorn's Assistant to the Artistic Team) have overlapping but different roles, as do Michael (Theatre Centre's Associate Artist) and Alison (Unicorn's Education and Youth Director). Both companies currently have management placements on a Fast Track scheme from the Independent Theatre Council, Deborah Townsend at Theatre Centre, while Paul Brewster at Unicorn has inherited my formerly script-piled desk there.

Tony from Unicorn talked about the long parallel histories of the companies, both over fifty years old and shaped by charismatic founders, Brian Way (Theatre Centre) and Caryl Jenner (Unicorn). Journey to the River Sea is just one way in which the companies can work together in the new Unicorn Theatre - other Theatre Centre shows will be seen there, at least. But this co-production will be a significant collaboration in the new theatre's opening season. Tony's determined that the Unicorn is not the Children's National Theatre - 'we're all the National Theatre for Children', he said.

For Theatre Centre, Ros talked about what had drawn her to Journey to the River Sea after hearing it recommended by Charlie Lee-Potter at a Literature Festival in Spitalfields in 2002. Ros celebrated that the book was by a living author, and talked about Eva Ibbotson's remarkable writing life. She talked about Eva Ibbotson wanting children to be able to lead 'big lives', and about what an exciting heroine Maia is. She talked about Finn, the child of an English father and Amazonian Indian mother, and Clovis, the boy actor who make up the trio of children at the heart of the adventure. And Miss Minton, the governess whose lost love, like the three children being orphaned, brings out a sense of bereavement which simmers throughout the novel. She talked about the book having the spirit of her favourite childhood stories: The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Little Women, and the many fans it has. A recent article on children's writing called it a classic already.

The Confidence to Make It Up

Now I've started this, I realise one of the things it means is more writing. So maybe that wasn't such a good idea. Will I really want to add to this after a day of writing the play? Not that I'm planning to be doing that while we're in Brazil - although I haven't investigated how I'm actually going to add anything to this while we're away...

Is the research trip really necessary anyway? After all, in an interview on BookSense.com Eva Ibbotson says what she did to write the book:

'I read books, looked at pictures, watched films and videos of wildlife, talked to travelers, and tried to learn some Portuguese. There was a lot of historical research to do on the rubber boom, which brought the settlers to the Amazon at the turn of the century.

I think being married to a naturalist (who kept an ant nest under the bed when I first met him) was more important than my own physiology background -- physiology is more about the insides of animals, not their habitat and habits. Usually I go to the places I write about, but Manaus has changed so much that I decided to keep it in my head.'

If Eva Ibbotson didn't need to go to the Amazon, why do I? Partly I think because her imagination is directly present in the book. As an adaptor, the risk is that because what I'm writing is at one further remove, the world of the play won't be sufficiently rich. It's also a way to bring the rest of the team closer to the place in which most of the play is set. Hence this blog.

What novelist Jim Crace said in The Guardian about researching his novel Quarantine also rang true:

'I only spent a couple of nights in the Judean desert, and those were only to give me the confidence to make it up.'

The Journey So Far

I'm writing a play based on Eva Ibbotson's wonderful novel Journey to the River Sea.

The book was published in 2001 and has many admirers of all ages. Among them are me, Rosamunde Hutt, Artistic Director of Theatre Centre and Tony Graham, Artistic Director of Unicorn. In 2002, Tony and Ros discovered they shared the feeling that the book could work on stage, and started to plan a co-production for the new Unicorn Theatre, due to open in London later this year. I joined as writer early in 2003 and Ros and I have been working together to create the piece since then.

In May 2004 we worked on the piece for a week with a group of third year student actors at Drama Centre London , along with the project's designer, Nettie Scriven, and its composer, Matthew Bailey. Next month we'll be working together again for a week with another group of actors and the rest of the creative team. We then start rehearsals next January and open in early February 2006.

In about two weeks I'm going to Brazil on a trip which is in part to research the writing of the play. I thought I'd try out this blog as a way to share that process with the rest of the team working on the piece. It may have other effects as well - let's see what happens.