A Dark Star Under The Lights

For an author, adaptation can be the sincerest — and most lucrative — form of flattery. J.M. Barrie wrote a lousy novelization of his own play, Peter Pan, long before Disney's defanged version sent its royalties into orbit; L. Frank Baum was quick to write a musical of his Wizard of Oz, but it took Judy Garland and MGM to make his prose really sing; the secret of Harry Potter's transfiguration to the screen is that J. K. Rowling's books are screenplays-in-waiting; and in film director Peter Jackson, J.R.R. Tolkien has at long last got the editor he needed. Adaptation can also keep an author's work in the public eye. Jackson's movies helped Tolkien's Lord of the Rings top a recent U.K. poll by the BBC of the nation's best-loved books. In third place — separated nobly by Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice — was the trilogy His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, whom many regard as Tolkien's successor as the lord of fantasy fiction.

Now Pullman, 57, is reaping the benefits of adaptation. A stage version of his trilogy opened in London's National Theatre this month, and a film of the first installment is due in a couple of years. Some authors quail at the prospect of having their work worked over for another medium. Pullman was flattered, but had no desire to spend precious writing time pulling apart and reassembling His Dark Materials for the stage, though he was happy to prompt the process from the wings. "The main thing was to make sure it got into the best hands," he says. So he dropped His Dark Materials into the capable clutches of Nicholas Hytner, the director of the National Theatre, who set playwright Nicholas Wright to work on boiling the 1,300 pages down to two three-hour-long plays which run through March 20.

So popular is Pullman's trilogy — 6.5 million books sold in English and translations into 37 other languages — that the entire run was sold out long before the critics got a chance to see the plays. Most agreed they make a triumphant entertainment and are sure to be revived, though some wondered whether this sort of epic fantasy — with its multiple dimensions of reality, shape-shifting creatures, visions of Hell and hot-air balloons — could ever be contained within the confines of theater.

The sprawling plot of His Dark Materials defies easy summary. It begins in a parallel version of Oxford, England, where cars and telephones remain uninvented, air travel is by zeppelin and ultimate authority lies with the church. In the halls of the university's Jordan College, 12-year-old orphan Lyra Belacqua — an ill-mannered, feisty and resourceful child — overhears her adventurer uncle, Lord Asriel, talk about his plans for an expedition to the Arctic to locate the source of a mysterious substance called Dust. Lyra follows on a quest of her own, but she stumbles through a tear in time and space into another world, where she befriends Will Parry, a boy from present-day Oxford who's on the run for murder and searching for his lost father. The two zigzag through parallel worlds, fight seen and unseen enemies, and fall in love. To save the world, though, they realize they must each return to their separate realities.