From the trenches to the stalls

The writer Sebastian Faulks exudes a sense of calm accomplishment. But even he seems tense about the stage adaptation of his bestselling novel Birdsong

‘I’m not excited. I don’t do excitement,’ says Sebastian Faulks. Which is probably just as well. Four years have elapsed since the project he’s currently involved with, a dramatisation of his bestselling novel Birdsong, was first suggested to him by the playwright Rachel Wagstaff. I meet them both in Faulks’s Holland Park flat, where he writes every day on a huge Apple Mac overlooked by miniature portraits of two deceased colleagues. A picture of Dickens, which belonged to his mother, hangs on the wall beside a relief of Tolstoy reproduced on what looks like the bottom of an ashtray. ‘From his house in Moscow,’ Faulks explains. ‘You nicked it?’ ‘No,’ he mutters, ‘it’s from the gift shop, I’m afraid. The gift shop, yes, along with the Anna Karenina tea cosy.’

He admits he was ‘pretty discouraging’ when Wagstaff first offered to write a stage version of his Great War bestseller. ‘Adaptations of long novels seldom work. And you put something into one form because that’s the right form for it. Birdsong is a novel and it uses a lot of novelistic resources, changes of time, variations of scale. It can go very big and very wide. It can go very narrow and very intimate. That’s hard to do on stage. But then it’s not really my work. It’s what Rachel and the cast and Trevor Nunn [the director] have created.’

Faulks is at pains to stress the boundaries of artistic ownership – it’s his novel but their play – and as if to underline this he leaves me chatting with Wagstaff for a few moments while he makes coffee next door. She tactfully reinterprets his avowed lack of enthusiasm as self-deprecation.