Host (Luke)

Welcome to In Conversation With Writers, the podcast where we dive into the minds of composers to uncover the stories behind their stories. I'm your host and today we're in for a special treat. Instead of our usual one-on-one conversation, we have not one, not 2, but 3 guests joining us to talk about adapting novels for the stage. Our guests today are Eva Di Cesare, Sandra Eldridge and Tim McGarry, the creative team who adapted Jackie French's novel, Hitler's Daughter, into a play. Having all 3 composers here gives us a unique opportunity to explore the creative process behind this challenging project. Welcome to the show, Eva, Sandra and Tim.

Tim

Thanks, Luke.

Host

Before we dive into the questions, could each of you briefly introduce yourself and tell us about your specific role in adapting Jackie French's novel, Hitler's Daughter, from the page to the stage. Tim, we might start with you.

Tim

Yeah, my name is Tim McGarry and I was at the time one of the creative directors of Monkey Baa Theatre Company and I was one of the co-adapters.

Host

Sandy.

Sandra

Hello, Sandy Eldridge. I also at the time was one of the co-directors of Monkey Baa Theatre Company and I was also the director of the show.

Host

Eva.

Eva

And for the third time, yeah, so I was also at the time the co-creative director with Tim and Sandy and one of the co-adapters of the work.

Host

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Let's dive straight into it then. Eva, we'll start with you. Can you tell me, well, can you answer for me the big question, that is why did you choose to adapt Hitler's Daughter for the stage? What made you feel this particular novel had literary value and by literary value I mean what makes Hitler's Daughter an important text and how is it relevant now?

Eva

Okay, that's a really big question. [laughs]

Host

It is.

Eva

Um, and it's a great question. At the time, which would have been in about 2004, the 3 of us were actually looking for a novel to adapt that was specifically catered and focused for the 9 to 13 age range of young people because there was a lot of work out there for the very young. There was quite a few bits, works for sort of older teenagers, but that middle age range, that crossing over from … you know, childhood into becoming teenagers and looking towards adulthood, not a lot of work. So we did set about looking for that and we read about 60 to 70 novels a year. That's what we were doing at the time. And we were having some really great meetings with Noel Jordan, who at the time was the head of young audiences over at the Sydney Opera House, and he presented us with several novels and Hitler's Daughter was one of those. And we read them all. And we just stopped at Hitler's Daughter. It-it, look, I have to say, and I know I'm speaking for Tim and Sandy, that we were captivated right from the beginning, and we just felt compelled to go for it and to approach Jackie French for the rights. And then Noel actually commissioned us to create the stage adaptation and it was presented at the Opera House for its first production, which was really exciting.

Host

Fantastic. We'll jump into the next question then, Tim, I might throw this one to you. Let's talk about intertextuality, the way texts can reference and relate to each other. In adapting Hitler's Daughter, you created a new text that's closely connected to Jackie French's novel, but it's also separate from it. Did you assume your audience would be familiar with the novel and how did this influence your choices in adapting the novel?

Tim

It's another great question, Luke. I think that in any adaptation we do, and we have done, we have never assumed that the audience has read the novel. I mean, many will have. Many will have seen it. Often novels are made into TV shows, so they've seen the TV show or the movie. But we would assume from the very get-go that they haven't actually read the novel. So the choices we make in terms of um exposition and information given just assumes immediately that an audience will be seeing the story afresh for the very first time. And it will be afresh because it's going to be completely different to the – could be very different from the existing novel.

Host

Okay. So it has to stand on its own merits.

Tim

It has to stand on its own merits. It's its own piece of art.

Host

Okay. Well, I might follow up with a question then, Tim. As we know and as Eva just mentioned, Hitler's Daughter is such an award-winning and a really well-loved novel. How do you decide what parts of Jackie French's story to keep and what parts to change for the play? And can you give examples of where you stay close to the novel and when you change things?

Tim

Another great question. It is really interesting working on a novel that has um so much incredible history and a writer who is so revered amongst all audiences worldwide. But I think our task is always, with any piece of literature, is to maintain the spirit of the novel and that's what we aim to always do. Um but before we actually develop it, we always ask ourselves, there's a list of questions we ask ourselves and I'll just go through them. One is, what themes of the novel are important to us? What do we want to extrapolate from the book that's important to the story we want to tell on stage? Um, what thread of the novel do we want to follow? Which character's journey? Ah, most novels will often not have a single protagonist. They'll have many, many different characters and none of them may take the lead. But within a play, it's different. A play generally has one specific character that all the entire journey kind of follows their journey. For example, many Shakespeare plays, like, I'll say the dreaded Macbeth – we’re not in a theatre so I can say it – but that very much focuses on one character, and it is about power. So often a novel, a play will focus on just that one specific character, um. Novels will have many subplots, and with a play you kind of have to excise those subplots because they are all not going to um tell the story that we want to tell, in the given time that we have. And um, the other issue is around um how much stage time, how much stage time do we have on stage. Often because we’re a touring theatre company. How many actors are we going to tour with? So how many actors can actually create this work. We know now from the body of work we've done, you could have 3 or 4 actors on stage and they can play 30 characters. One actor can play 20 characters. So that kind of doesn't hold us to any kind of parameter, but they're the questions we ask ourselves. And then, of course, who is our audience? What is the age of our audience? Um, and what do we want to tell that audience from this particular story? And once we do that in developing the adaptation, particularly with Hitler's Daughter, we've stayed fairly closely to the structure of the novel, but of course, you know, the novel is not the play and the play is not the novel, so it's going to be different. Um, one of the early questions we grappled with in developing it as a script was, who is the protagonist?

Because in Hitler's Daughter, Anna tells the story, Anna leads the story along, but actually if we were to apply the principles of drama as we know them as actors, the protagonist is the character that changes the most throughout the piece. So that could be Heidi in that world, or it could be Mark. In our play, we chose it to be Mark. Mark was the one who asked all the questions. Mark is the one who grapples with the themes the most. So, for our story, Mark was the protagonist. Um, as I said, Anna's the storyteller. She appears to lead the narrative, but actually for us, we chose Mark to do that. Jackie –

Host

Can I jump in?

Tim

Yeah, sure.

Host

I just want to tie back to what Eva was saying before about finding theatre for young people, Mark is also the most immediately relatable I think of all of the characters –

Tim

That’s right – absolutely.

Host

For a young person. I mean, yes, obviously you could go with other characters, but he's the one that I think you can most identify with.

Sandra

That's why we chose him as well. Because Mark asks the questions that we felt the audience would be asking at a certain point in the play, and he asks different people at different points in different ways, and that was one of the things that attracted us to the work, because it's a work that provokes dialogue, and that's something that is incredibly important to circle back to what you're saying about how important the work is today, it's about dialogue.

Host

Yes.

Sandra

So, but Mark's journey is the one that the audience goes on as well.

Tim

And universal. I mean, we toured this play, was it once or twice to America?

Sandra

Once to America.

Tim

We toured it around America, and um exactly the same response, if not stronger, if not more vocally, more vocal around the themes. And around the issues, particularly around the political situation, and that was back in 2000 and ...

Sandra

12, 13.

Tim

Yes, so very, very relevant. That's so true.

Host

And maybe increasingly more so now.

Tim

Sadly, yes.

Host

Sorry, I interrupted you.

Tim

No, but no – just going back to what you were saying, the … I guess in terms of what we use specifically for those who've read the actual novel, they may think, why did we choose certain bits and why didn't we? You know, the characters in the play have to support the themes of the play and the story that we want to tell as adapters. So there was a character called Johnny Torbett, who I had forgotten about until I read the novel again the other day.

Eva

[laughs] Same.

Tim

He was a motorcyclist who roars past the bus stop and he bips his horn and they go, it's Johnny Torbett. Um, Johnny was not really important to the play. There was another character called Bonzo, who I'd forgotten about. It was Mark's best friend at school who catches the bus out to the country every day and back into school. And Bonzo, in one particular chapter, I think it's chapter ten, Bonzo just talks about, what are you doing for the weekend, what's your homework? That wasn't relevant to the play, so Bonzo wasn't actually a part of our play. In fact, chapter ten was about the only chapter we didn't use anything from the novel in. Every other chapter of the novel we included in some way.

One of the characters I loved was Frau Leib, Frau Leib's the older lady, who takes Heidi under her wing and gives her the rabbit to eat and to grow. Frau Leib has a very big part in the novel itself. She talks about her family and she talks about the war. So a lot of what Frau Leib said wasn't necessarily going to add to the narrative of Mark's journey, so we were very judicious in what we used in Frau Leib's story. But all the other characters, I have to say, we really stuck pretty true to. We really have stuck closely to the ah, to Jackie's original um novel, words.

Host

I was impressed with what you were actually able to get onto the stage because when you look at the novel and you look at the script for the play side by side, most of the scenes are one for one with the chapters and you can see that with very few exceptions as you just mentioned there Tim and that's a big thing to be able to do, to be able to bring that much across but as you said some very judicious editing to get it down onto the stage.

Tim

And then of course we hand it over to the director and the creative team and Sandy won't say this but Sandy directed the piece and I have to say she and the creative team did a magnificent job in interpreting the script that we wrote for the stage. It was quite, it's one of the most special experiences of me seeing a work for any work that was extraordinary as a piece of theatre.

Host

What a great time to turn to you now Sandy because Tim was talking about the constraints of theatre. You've got the constraints of time and space there which as a novelist Jackie French doesn't have. She can jump around easily. She can expand characters out. The characterisation can be flexible, far more wide-ranging, but you don't have that luxury when you move to the stage. So let's talk about one of those aspects now. Jackie French's novel has 2 settings, as we know. There's both modern Australia and World War II Germany. How did you handle representing those 2 very different worlds on a single stage, and what techniques helped your audience to separate those things?

Sandra

Well, basically, we had a most magnificent design team. Imogen Ross was a set and costume designer, Jed Silver, sound design, and Luis Pampala, lighting designer. So we'd spend a lot of time meeting up and discussing ideas, and, you know, a good 6 months before we actually even go into rehearsal, coming up with the different ideas. And it was through the design decisions that we were able to deliberately separate and also entwine the worlds on stage. So every item on the stage had to be separate. you know, not only has to serve the story, it has to serve the play, it must, we don't want any Chekhov's guns, that's for something for people to look up later.

Host

We will explain Chekov’s gun and mention of Macbeth later for our listeners. [Sandra laughs]

Sandra

But because it's a touring production and also because we're looking at the concept of worlds immersing, with one another, it had to be multifunctional, so the set had to be multifunctional. So Imogen and I began with the bus stop because that's the primary place where they meet and where the story's told, and we decided for it to have a yellow roof because it's described as a yellow bus stop, but we thought it'd be interesting to have a yellow roof because it's kind of a bit like a gingerbread house then, and we were looking at, because we were researching into German woods, the woods in Germany, because we're so, detail is everything, when you're designing and directing and Imogen and I wanted to make sure that the trees that we had on the set reflected both the Australian bush but also the trees in Germany that could double up with different lighting states. So um, so we had this, we'd researched into German fairytales, so we had that as a sort of concept as well with this bus stop. And then on either side of the bus stop, we had panels that opened up and both of those panels, one was for to represent Mark's home and the other was to represent Heidi's home in Berchtesgaden. But both of those panels, they had to reflect and talk to one another, the objects that were there on the panel. So we had pictures up and we had a corresponding picture of what's important to the scene. We also had objects on it on a little shelf that were important to not only the scene, but also spoke to one another. I can waffle on all day, but then the objects, a big thing for us as well is that how objects from the past, how we use them and they inform where we are now, yeah um. So the lighting and the sound played an enormous part in separating the playing spaces, but also in merging the worlds. So for example, in the script, we've written down that when Mark turns on the radio, the sound he hears at one point in the play, the sound he hears is that of some music and then it goes into static and then he starts to hear a Hitler rally, a rally from the Third Reich. And that's to show that how immersed he's becoming in the actual story that Anna has been telling. And then when with the lighting, you know, it's like. The bus stop became a bunker for Hitler's bunker and we had just a light bulb come down for the lighting and that was Hitler's bunker then and the benches inside the bus stop become the bench, they become the beds in the bunker. And then Luís did this marvellous thing with strobes with the lighting so that when they were running through the bombing of Berlin, the lights would make the trees almost dance. It was quite extraordinary what Luís managed to do. And the sound was of the thunder which then merged into the sound of the bombs. So as, Mark gets more and more um into the story and how it starts to affect him deeper and deeper, the worlds start to merge and that was always um our idea that the world started to merge.

Host

I love - you talk about separate and merge –

Sandra

Yeah.

Host

and I think that for me is the genius of course of the story is that we see them as 2 very separate things to begin with and as the story moves along we start to understand that one informs the other worlds.

Sandra

Yes.

Host

And that merging is so wonderful on the stage because we physically see it.

Sandra

Yeah.

Host

I think it takes longer in the novel to get us to that point. We take a little bit longer to start to make that connection but on the stage you can do it so much more quickly, and that’s one of the things that I think stage can do wonderfully because it’s such a visual medium.

Sandra

Well we were provoked as well by Jacquie’s book in a sense that you read about the dreams that Mark has. And so we can't write that, but we can show it in a certain way. And because in the book, you know, as you mentioned, he's getting more and more involved. And so he starts to dream about the story that he's hearing. But with the idea of the radio turning into something and him thinking that he, at one point in the play, we have him and Heidi meeting. And that was based on the Johnny Motorcycle when he thinks he sees Johnny go by and he thinks it's it's you know the Third Reich. And but it's not it's his imagination he's starting to embed things onto everyday life so that's what we decided to do with Heidi and Mark meeting in the woods. She's meeting a stranger and she's vulnerable and she's meeting who she thinks might be a soldier to kill her. She doesn't know she's and he's meeting her and so that's why we staged that.

Host

I'm trying to imagine how you did all this. I'm picturing lots of paper on the desk and you're trying to map out all the exact moments that correlate and all of these sorts of ideas that want to come together so naturally in the story um yeah.

Sandra

It's one of the most rewarding and exciting things I think, for us isn't it, to adapt and then as a director to, because as adaptors we all come up with ideas of how we think we see it, how we're seeing it with the 3 of us. So we've got all those seeds then and so as a director you've got those seeds. You can go away and go, oh this, yeah we'll use that idea or we'll use that idea.

Tim

And it's hard for people to realise how much work goes on before the first day of rehearsal. Yeah. I mean all of that work Sandy's talking about, the actors aren't even in the room yet, and it's quite incredible. It's extraordinary, isn't it? The interesting thing for us working as adapters, too, with Sandy directing it was as we were getting more and more into knowing the work as we went into a second draft, Sandy would say I've got an idea, a staging idea here and we often, adaptors will write to a director's vision as well. You start to work together with the director, and you write to their vision because they start to visualise it, and we go, we can support that more with the words and then when the actors get in they say ‘we don’t need to say that we can act it with a look’.

Host

It is a very dynamic process.

Tim

It moves – it’s ever changing. It's not linear, it’s alive. The script is alive. I always say the theatre script is alive, it never stops changing. Never.

Host

Sandy, I want to follow up because you talk about some wonderful aspects of theatre, and all the different techniques that theatre has, you talked about sound, and lightning, and costume and all of those things. But setting aside what were the other significant challenges to bringing Hitler’s Daughter to life on the stage and what specific dramatic techniques, and you mentioned some already, or theatrical conventions did you use to overcome these.

Sandra

Well. The big challenge to start with, was we had 4 actors to play 14 characters, um so one of the things in directing a piece um like this is to, or any piece of theatre. Because theatre is fundamentally, we go to it with our imaginations, don't we, as an audience? Like Shakespeare says, imagine castles in Henry V you know. So we go with our imagination switched on. So you have to … not teach the audience, because I think that's the wrong word, but instruct the audience at the very beginning, in the very early stages of staging the work, of the language. This is the theatrical language we are going to tell this story, how we're going to do it. And with Hitler's Daughter, we decided, because we only had a small number of actors, that the actors, some of the actors, and there was a reasoning behind this, some of the actors will change characters in front of you. So, for example, Anna, who's our primary storyteller, she in front of the audience, changes; into Fräulein Gelber, and then she changes Tracy, who she's telling the story. She actually physically manipulates her and changes her, puts on different shoes on her and things like that, and changes her into Heidi. So Mark's sitting at the bus stop, and then we have a lighting change and a sound change, and we go into the story. So we start that off at the very beginning, not the first scene, but by the second scene when they really start, when Anna really starts to tell the story. So then, of course, that means that we can go in and out of these 2 characters for the rest of the play because the audience knows that, and they're happy with that.

Host

So you were able to lean into the constraints of theatre that you only had so many actors to work with and it can be confusing sometimes for an audience when you see an actor playing multiple roles, but here it actually worked for you.

Sandra

Yes, yes.

Host

Oh what an interesting way to think about it. And so that constraint actually became part of the genius of how it was portrayed on the stage.

Sandra

Yes. Yes, it was. It was very exciting because then what it meant, it was the fact that she owned the story to the point that she became the story. And that's what metaphorically she actually did. And then with Mark, Mark as he listens to the story more and more, eventually he also enters the story and plays the guard at the end of the play. He's the guard in Berlin. Because, and that again becomes a metaphor then of the fact that he is so immersed in the story. That he actually steps into it himself. But some of the other characters who were characters of the story and the mum and dad, they all changed offstage. And so in a sense, when I think about it now, and I've never thought about this before, in a sense, that most of the characters, all of the characters, that Mark asks about the story.to, that Mark asks questions to, and that Heidi asks questions to, you know, as she's trying to work out what's going on in her world, none of, they all come from offstage. None of them are actually created in the space. I've just realised that. Oh, how exciting.

Host

Now I have to ask the question, you're talking about characters that never appear on the stage, and Eva, I'm going to chuck it over to you now, because I think this is one of the biggest decisions you must have made in creating this particular adaptation. We know that obviously Hitler's Daughter deals with some very heavy topics, but it also deals with arguably one of the most infamous characters of modern history. That's no small thing to do. How did you balance addressing that with still making the play engaging and appropriate for young audiences because, Eva, you started by talking about a play for young audiences and we're dealing with Hitler here. What were the decisions that went around that?

Eva

Before I answer the themes question, I'll just talk about the decision around Hitler, himself, the character of Hitler. We made a decision very quickly with Sandy's instigation that Hitler would not be seen as a human character on the stage and would only be depicted as a shadow on the stage. We made that decision very, very clearly for many reasons, but, Sandy, did you want to say. Why we felt that, that it was important?

Sandra

It was sort of, yeah, it was multiple reasons, but we didn't want to have an actor walking around the stage with a little moustache on and slicked hair, you know, and that's just silly. And, and also, he, we wanted him to represent the evil, the black, the shadow, is a better word, the shadow over Europe, as he was depicted in the 1940s, as fascism was depicted in the 1940s, and also, you know, again back to these fairytales as well, the bogeyman, you can't quite, he's a monster, he's a monster, and we wanted to depict it that way, and we didn't want him to have his voice, we only hear him in speaking in German, and in this, we had a wonderful actor who came in to do the voiceover, and he, this high-pitched maniacal, so there was, there was a, yeah, and he's the darkness, the depths, the evil, that are within us all as well.

Eva

We don't often put rules in our plays about things, but one thing that we do have very clearly in the playscript is that Hitler must be depicted as a shadow, not as a ah, because this play does get performed by lots of schools, and of course sometimes we want to do all the characters to give as many young people and other actors a go, but that is one character that we don't want, and it's really important.

Tim

You want to avoid it becoming comical.

Eva

Yeah.

Tim

Yeah, it can become comical if someone walks around pretending to be Hitler, and that's absolutely not funny.

Eva

It's not funny.

Host

It’s not the right note.

Tim

It’s not the right note at all.

Host

I've got to say, that's probably my favourite choice that you've made in the whole of the play, because it's so clever, and Sandy, I hadn't even thought about that idea of connecting back to fairytale and I love that idea very much and for me, it's probably like all things, you know, why are we afraid of the dark? We're most afraid of the things we cannot see, and it makes the Hitler character that much more intimidating, that much more frightening again. So it really does a great characterisation in absentia. I love it.

Tim

And it did do that –

Eva

It did do that.

Tim

I got that feeling, that sense of, you know, that sense when you sit. It's very hard to describe that feeling, but what you want as theatre makers to give an audience is a sense of, euphoria is not quite the right word, but it's a sense of [deep inhale] they breathe in or you want the audience to stop breathing for a moment and that moment made the audience stop breathing. The other moment is when the Anna character changes into another character. You want the audience to go, [inhale] they breathe in, they go, I know what's happening. I know the rule you've set up and when you were describing and you were talking about, Luke. Describing it, I had that feeling, I had a feeling of euphoria and I thought that's what we try and capture, that feeling, there's not a word for it, but there's a feeling you want an audience to feel and that's our job as theatre makers, to give an audience that feel, they've got to feel, that's what theatre is, it's feeling.

Host

I love that idea, Tim, that you start from where you want people to feel and then you go backwards from there.

Tim

How do you do that? It's feeling.

Host

It's interesting. The subtext of what we've discussed so much is not just what we include, but what we exclude. That's part of the craft.

Eva

Yes, yes.

Host

And I think that's really one of the things that, as a composer, you think about deeply, what goes in, but also what is left out and that can be just as powerful and sometimes more so.

Tim

What can the actors act?

Eva

And answers. It's something that was very important to us and Jackie does as well in the novel is to not give answers, is to actually pose all the questions.

Host

Yes.

Eva

Through the work, and you don't want to tie everything up in a nice, neat little bow because these themes are so deep and so strong that you want your audience, out of respect, to make up their own minds of how to live their lives and to maybe pose more questions rather.

Host

Yes.

Eva

Than go, oh, they've answered it, I'm going to go home now. It’s really important to us.

Host

It's interesting.

Eva

To not answer.

Tim

We were discussing this on the train this morning on the way here, Luke, and we were saying it's interesting that every theme will mean something different to every person.

Eva

That's right.

Tim

So if you've come from a country where you've experienced what has been experienced, you'll take that. If you come from a family where they have certain ideas, you'll take that idea from the play. Everyone will come at it from their own experience and their own life experience.

Eva

And so, back to the theme. which are, you know, racism, genocide, what's right and wrong, xenophobia, personal responsibility, they are very, very deep themes. And for us, it was just really important to tell the story as authentically as we can. Um we never pander to audiences and we don't adapt work to, you know … this is the story that Jackie created for that audience, for 9 to 13-year-olds, and we have carried on that respectful way of creating this work for young people to come and take from it what they need to take into their lives and um, yeah, and develop their own moral compass, which they already have. Young people are dealing with these themes right now.

Host

Yes!

Eva

You know, always have. It's not like we're showing it to them, you know, they're already coming, like, Tim said, with their own lived experience of a lot of this.

Host

It's interesting in Jackie's work, and I think you've absolutely stayed true to it, Mark never gets the answers to the questions that he asks.

Eva and Tim

No.

Host

They're never given to him. There's never a simplistic template answer provided. They're left hanging.

Tim

We're watching him develop his, as Eva said, moral compass. We're watching him go through the process of it, and when do we ever get to the end of that? Even as adults.

Eva

Still going.

Host

Oh, indeed. Let's come back to Jackie for a minute, Eva. I understand that initially Jackie French wasn't sure the novel could be adapted for stage, and I could certainly see why.

Eva

We've had lots of giggles with Jackie about this too. Yeah, look, she was. She was very hesitant at the beginning when we approached her about it because she just couldn't see how we were going to put these 2 very diverse worlds on stage at the same time, and do, you know, not do justice to her novel, you know, she was so respectful in that, but she did think we were a little over-ambitious at the time. And you know, we just had, we had to have lots of conversations with her and bring her with us on the journey. And you know, for me, watching her be speechless after her first experience of the production, is really still one highlight of my career and, you know, and for us as writers, it was, it's so joyous to watch an author go, Oh my God, you did it. And you know, she was really moved and really teary and for all the right reasons. And her statement, I remember her very strong statement she made at the time, which was that we had made what she thought was impossible, possible. and that's so humbling.

Host

That's got to be the greatest compliment you've ever had.

Eva

It was, it really was, and you know she is a dear friend to the 3 of us and a patron of Monkey Baa still and you know she's just. I just think one of the best best humans.

Host

And aren't we lucky that she's Australian as well?

Eva

Oh my goodness.

Host

Isn’t it wonderful?

Tim

A great heart, an amazing amazing human being.

Eva

Yeah, generous.

Tim

We love her.

Host

We've covered so much today. Thank you all for your time. Um you've shared so many insights into this fascinating process of adaptation. To our listeners, join us next time on In Conversation With Writers, when we'll be talking about all things film and how it uniquely positions us as viewers. Until then, keep exploring the world of words and ideas.

[End of transcript]