Lolita Chakrabarti is one of theatre’s most sought-after adaptors

IN RECENT MONTHS Lolita Chakrabarti has been shuttling between the hustle and bustle of New York and the bucolic English town of Stratford-upon-Avon. Previews of her adaptation of “Life of Pi”, Yann Martel’s fantasy adventure novel, began on Broadway last month. (Its West End run earned a slew of British theatre prizes, including the Olivier Award for Best New Play.) On April 1st her take on Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet”—in which William Shakespeare’s family wrestles with the loss that inspired his great, grief-filled tragedy—will open at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Though the prizewinning novels differ in genre and tone, Ms Chakrabarti says both are “stories of survival”.

She has earned a reputation as one of theatre’s most thoughtful and skilled adaptors. She is also among its most industrious dramatists. She was the dramaturg for “Sylvia”, a new hip-hop musical about the life of Sylvia Pankhurst, an English suffragette. (The role is akin to a script editor in film or television, and involves collaborating with the writer on plot and structure.) She is currently developing two feature films and a project with the National Theatre; two further stage adaptations are in the works with major producers in London and New York.

Given the riskiness of live theatre—it is estimated that four out of five shows lose money—adaptations are appealing to producers, as they come with a ready-made audience. Yet they are a reflection of theatre’s successes, too, as recent developments in technology and stagecraft have made tricksy stories stageable. The 200-kilogram Bengal tiger in “Life of Pi”, for example, takes the form of a fearsome puppet. In an adaptation of “Invisible Cities”, Italo Calvino’s fragmented, conceptual novel, for Rambert, a dance company, Ms Chakrabarti incorporated movement and multimedia design alongside text.

Ms Chakrabarti excels at locating “the guts of somebody else’s story”, says Caro Newling of Neal Street Productions, co-producers of “Hamnet”. The dramatist says she starts by deconstructing the text as written. With “Life of Pi”—a work she describes as “a delicious conundrum”—she began by highlighting quotations she felt held theatrical possibility, and then grouping them under different themes such as “hunger”, “God”, “family” and “loss”.

This process enables her to restructure the narrative, too. Mr Martel’s novel ends with Pi telling his story to officials in a hospital in Mexico; Ms Chakrabarti’s adaptation starts at that point, then tracks back. The narrative of “Hamnet”, in Ms O’Farrell’s telling, is non-linear; Ms Chakrabarti reordered the story so that she could see “how each event affected the following one”. The finished play retains this structure.

Ms Chakrabarti, who writes original dramas as well as adaptations, first established herself as a playwright with another project of immense scope. “Red Velvet” tells the story of Ira Aldridge, an African-American actor who toured Europe extensively in the 19th century to great acclaim. It took Ms Chakrabarti 30 drafts—and 15 years between original idea and first production—to condense the epic story into a two-act play. The resulting taut drama impressed a producer, Simon Friend, who asked her to tackle “Life of Pi”.

She was electrified by theatre as a teenager; school trips to the West End made a deep impression on her. She went on to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she met her regular collaborator and husband, Adrian Lester, an acclaimed actor. She graduated in 1990 and began a successful career as a performer, which she has maintained alongside her writing. Yet “the roles for women, and for women of colour, were limited,” she says. “So I thought, ‘Let me write something that includes me’.”

The situation has improved since then, she says. The range of stories being staged lets audiences look “at the world from so many perspectives, like looking through a prism.” Shows such as “Hamilton” have demonstrated that the theatre is a place where the past, as well as the present, can be interrogated. “Hamnet”, too, looks at history anew: it focuses not on Shakespeare, but on his wife, here called Agnes Hathaway. And England in the 1580s and 1590s was far more diverse than common assumptions allow, says the show’s director, Erica Whyman, a complexity that the cast reflects.

At the heart of Ms Chakrabarti’s success is her ability to balance “a powerfully clear style and artistic vision” with “being open to collaboration and discovery”, says Max Webster, the director of “Life of Pi”. Rehearsals, according to Ms Chakrabarti, are a “kind of alchemy”. The same could be said of adaptation. ■

“Life of Pi” is playing at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, New York, until September 3rd. “Hamnet” is playing at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until June 17th. It will play at the Garrick Theatre, London, from September 30th until January 6th 2024