Charlotte Higgins was thrilled that her history book about Roman Britain was being adapted for the stage – until she realised it was being reimagined – and she and her partner were the romantic leads
I have recently had to stop myself from watching one of my favourite films – Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, which dramatises a screenwriter’s struggle to turn Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief into a script. It is a clever, hilarious film about writer’s block, the crazy demands of Hollywood, and the traumas of transforming one kind of narrative into another. In the end the film – and thus the adaptation – becomes a kind of spoof thriller, with sex, crime, drugs and a character being eaten alive by an alligator.
The reason I can’t watch it just at the moment is that one of my books – Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain – has just been adapted by the brilliant Scottish playwright David Greig. It premieres this week at the Pitlochry Festival theatre in Perthshire. But it also turns out that I have been adapted. So has my partner, Matthew. As has, indeed, Matthew’s 1974 VW campervan. The last is “probably the only character that is accurately depicted”, Greig concedes.
