A Dark Star Under The Lights

(2 of 2)

Dust — a metaphor for self-knowledge or experience — is just one of many powerful symbolic inventions Pullman uses to hook his readers. Lyra, for example, is armed with an alethiometer, a truth-telling machine, while Will lays claim to a Subtle Knife with a blade so sharp it can slice windows into other worlds. And there can be few more intriguing inventions in modern literature than the idea that everyone in Lyra's world is accompanied through life by a talking daemon, the external embodiment of the human soul in the form of an animal that changes species through childhood, becoming fixed only at puberty.

To bring the daemons to life onstage, Hytner uses glowing, gossamer puppets operated by black-clad puppeteers. Passing perils like cliff-ghasts and soul-eating specters — along with clans of lusty and vengeful witches and troops of armor-clad polar bears — are artfully conjured. "When you conceive something for the stage it has to be metaphorical rather than literal," says Pullman. His metaphors survive the transition intact, as do Will and Lyra, played by Dominic Cooper and Anna Maxwell Martin. Both match seasoned veterans like Timothy Dalton and Patricia Hodge (who play Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter) in their deft handling of the characters' many ambiguities. But the machinery under the National Theatre's Olivier stage labors all too literally to keep pace with the plot's quicksilver shifts of place and perception — the kind of magic tricks that the computer-generated imagery of modern cinema was born to perform.

The film rights to His Dark Materials were bought last year by New Line Cinema, producers of Lord of the Rings. Playwright Tom Stoppard has recently completed a screenplay of the first book, Northern Lights, and shooting will begin for a 2005-06 release. The director hasn't been chosen. "I hope it's somebody who will take the story seriously and not just go for lots of action," says Pullman. "At the center of the story is a very simple thing: a girl and a boy growing up who realize they love each other."

The U.K.'s Association of Christian Teachers likened the Christmas showings to staging Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses during Ramadan

That's one way of looking at it. But if you read into His Dark Materials, as some do, undercurrents of prepubescent sexuality, a subversive retelling of the Adam and Eve myth in which the fruit is no longer forbidden, and a naked antipathy to the Christian church, then the staging of the ultimate battle for Middle-earth begins to look like a walkover by comparison. In Tolkien's epic, there is no mistaking the forces of good and evil. In Pullman's otherworld, moral confusion is everywhere. Lord Asriel, for example, seeks to destroy God but risks letting Dust seep out of the world; Lyra's mother, Mrs. Coulter, is in league with the church but cannot bear that the price is her daughter's life.

Some Christian groups in the U.S. have already taken Pullman to task for what they say is his irreligious message, while the U.K.'s Association of Christian Teachers last month likened the play's Christmas season run to staging Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses during Ramadan. Pullman, an atheist who was raised an Anglican, remains fascinated by the stories of the creation, fall and redemption. "I just happen to think they're not true," he says. "It's people who think they're literally true who cause the trouble."

Moreover, his writing is motivated by "the instinct to feel awe and wonder at the universe, to have a sense of moral relations with other conscious and unconscious beings." That impulse, and the imperative to act that comes with it, are what make His Dark Materials such a compelling, popular morality tale for our times. "We can't disclaim responsibility," he says. "If we want things to be right, to be good, we have to make them so." In other words, adapt.