WRITER Rachel Wagstaff has a message for anyone who has read and admired the Sebastian Faulks novel Birdsong and think they’ll be disappointed by a stage adaptation. “Tell your friends that the people adapting it feel just as strongly about the book,” she says to those suspicious of her stage version, which is embarking on another UK tour that takes in York and Durham.

“I think very strongly that Sebastian liked it, was behind it and that we’d done something right. The fact that he’s sitting here today means at least he’s with us.”

Faulks is indeed sitting with her and director Alastair Whatley at the tour’s launch. He reminds people that whatever he, or they, think of the stage production, the book is always there.

“It’s never going away,” he says. “Even if your friend goes to the theatre and the actors have an off night, forget their lines and your friend don’t enjoy it, don’t worry – the book’s always there.”

His novel tells of young Englishman Stephen Wraysford’s passionate and dangerous affair with a Frenchwoman that’s interrupted by the outbreak of First World War. His journey takes him to the battlefield and the Battle of the Somme through the tunnels that lie deep underground.

This isn’t an obvious choice to put on stage, but Wagstaff’s adaptation was first seen on the London stage in 2010. Since then there’s been a BBC-TV version, two years ago, starring Eddie Redmayne, while the play toured last year, but in a different version – again by Wagstaff – to the West End staging.

“I read Birdsong 17 years ago and fell in love with the book.

When I first read it, I could very much see it working on the stage,” she explains.

“People thought I was mad and were puzzled by this. But I could very much see the power of the tunnel scenes and the claustrophobic relationships. I thought this is something very interesting to play in a very dark room with lots of people watching, an unconnected audience sitting there in the dark.

I could visualise it strongly.”

She approached Faulks, a meeting was set up and he gave permission for a theatre version. Eight years after writing the first draft, Birdsong the play is into its third production.

“The first was very faithful to the book and told it chronologically.

It was a good production and we were happy enough with it, but it didn’t quite work and I thought the reason lay in the script.

So, I revised it and turned it into a memory play, starting in 1916 and going backwards and forwards.”

Enter director Alastair Whatley, who runs The Original Theatre Company. He too loved the book, but came out of the original production at the Comedy Theatre feeling “it hadn’t quite satisfied what I’d wanted”.

He wanted to tour the play and met Wagstaff to talk about his worries about the first production only to discover that she’d already rewritten the script in almost precisely the way he hoped.

“Sometimes it’s the most bold, daring, stupid ideas that theatrically work the best and are most theatrically exciting,” says Whatley. “The original show was told chronologically and it was a big step for her to go against the narrative-style Sebastian has in his novel.

“Rachel has taken ownership in some ways and made a piece of work in its own right. It lives now freshly and independently from the novel. She has distilled the essence of it.”

Faulks obviously still takes a keen interest in what happens to his novel. There was “much to admire” about the TV version, he says adding, “It was a very honourable piece of work, but there were things that didn’t work really”.

Moving something from one medium to another is extremely difficult. When Wagstaff first asked about writing a play based on the book his comment was, “Why would you want to make an oil painting from a sculpture?”.

Film adaptations are “usually an excuse for a completely illiterate screenwriter to misunderstand your novel and declare their ownership of it like a tomcat marking out the territory”, he says. “So I’m quite suspicious of that. Underneath there is a certain truth, which is that these media are completely different.

“The way the novel works is by taking the reader very, very intimately inside the thoughts and feelings of all the characters.

The taste in their mouth, the feeling of the earth under their fingernails, what they did when they were having sex, what they feel like when they’re eating breakfast as well as the deep memories of their childhood and their parents.

“All those things you can describe and that’s how a novel like Birdsong works. Obviously, it doesn’t work like that at all on stage.”

AS the adaptation has changed over the three productions, it has got further and further from the book in the sense that it’s become more dramatic and an event that could only be on a wooden stage, he continues.

“I’ve encouraged all the time for Rachel to push on and use theatrical language and the resources of the theatre. One of the ways it’s got further from the novel is that fewer actual lines are taken from the book, really hardly any now.

“That’s good because originally there were chunks of dialogue chopped up and taken almost word for word. What works on the page doesn’t really work in a room full of people sucking sweets and thinking of their train home.

“What we’re trying to get in this final version is something even more theatrical, even less novelistic.”

‘I felt I was there’

THERE are parts that are fun and parts that are interesting.

And then, says actor George Banks, there are parts that will never leave you. Stephen Wraysford in Birdsong is one of those roles.

“The story is so touching and moving and brilliantly written, and the characters so amazingly created, that Stephen Wraysford will be one that stays with me forever,” says the actor about the stage adaptation.

Banks hadn’t read the book before the audition. He was aware of the London production, a few years ago, but couldn’t get tickets to see it. “I heard from all of my friends it was an incredible story and that it was well-respected book, so the audition was lovely to have an excuse to read it,” he says.

“To read the book and the depth of how it’s all described is incredible. You feel like you were in the trenches and it’s heart-wrenching and horrible and despicable what they went through. But it’s a story of love and humanity, that’s at the heart of it,” he says.

“So it’s a very exciting play to take on because he’s a very complex character and it’s a piece of history that should never be forgotten.”

He did “a bit of military stuff” for a play he was in ten years ago, but otherwise the training the actors are doing is all new to him. Shooting the trailer for the tour was helpful as military advisor Tony Green was there. “We had quite extensive chats about what would be correct thing to do. The military side is something we want to represent faithfully and accurately because it should be done well in a story like this.

And there will be people, military people coming to see it, who know about this stuff and it’s an important part of who these people were,” he says.

Banks hasn’t taken a role set in this period before. “I studied a little bit about the First World War at school but for some reason it always seems to be the second world war that people end up studying in greater detail,” he says.

“As well as being a wonderful opportunity to put on a play of this calibre it’s also an opportunity for people to find out more about that war and how it did affect those people.”

He left drama school three or four years ago and has had “a decent career so far” doing parts he’s really wanted to play, including a production and tour of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys.

He also lent his voice to several Harry Potter computer games while attending the Sylvia Young stage school. “I was one of shall we say the posher boys in my year,” says Hertfordshire- born Banks.

“If voiceover parts came up I would often be put forward for them. I was lucky to be able to do that.”