Arts unravelled: How do you adapt a novel for the stage? with Kevin Barry

Kevin Barry is the multi-award-winning author of novels City of Bahone, Beatlebone, Night Boat to Tangier, and the short story collections There Are Little Kingdoms, Dark Lies the Island and That Old Country Music.

Barry’s fourth novel The Heart In Winter was released in the summer of 2024 and is already an Irish Times bestseller. The novel is set in Butte, Montana, a city rich with copper mines and the vices that come with them, with the hard winter of 1891 approaching. Here we find young degenerate poet and ballad-maker Tom O’Rourke whose life in Butte takes a dramatic turn with the arrival of Polly Gillespie, bride of the mine’s captain.

As part of our 2024 London Literature Festival, Barry presented a staged abridged reading of The Heart In Winter in our Purcell Room. But how do you adapt a novel for the stage? Where do you start? How do you bring characters from the page to life? Well who better to answer this than Barry himself.

For an adaptation like this, the first thing is to decide how much of the story to give away. I felt that the early chapters of the novel gave me plenty to work with and I should concentrate there. We get in quick strokes a vivid world – the hard-scrabble frontier of the American West as we ride a stolen palomino through Montana and Idaho in the 1890s – and a pair of memorable characters – our runaway lovers, Polly Gillespie and Tom Rourke – and in this early part of the book, all the apparatus of a classic Western is quickly assembling itself for action. I felt that there was plenty enough here to give us a resonant and entertaining hour, and of course to leave the audience gasping desperately for more.

The characters of Tom and Polly have always felt truly alive to me. The technical challenge of the novel was to initially give Tom’s point-of view in a very close-in, third-person voice, and then to give Polly’s point-of-view, just as close-in, and then to somehow forge a common viewpoint for the lovers as their dangerous escapade gets going and they light out for the territory in a fever dream of love and lust. It felt very natural for the adaptation to allow their voices to be sprung from third-person to first, and thus allow the actors to take hold and incarnate them.

Tom’s persona is initially tricky to get a grasp of because he really has no idea who he is. He’s trying on roles in life – poet, outlaw, troubadour – and seeing what might fix, and so as a character he’s quite slippery. Polly, by contrast, is very sure of who she is – she’s confident in her own skin – and her voice came through to me clean as a bell struck the first day I started to write her. I knew at once she was going to earth the story, and that Tom’s character at last would find definition in his love for her.

I feel blessed to have got both Faoileann Cunningham and Eanna Hardwicke for this performance. I’m always watching for the gifted actors who are coming through and I’ve been aware of their work in recent years. They both have the great good fortune to be from Cork, and so they have no bother at all tuning into this particular story. The great gift of the research I did for the book, many years ago, was finding out that Cork people made up a third of the population of Butte, Montana in the 1890s, and realising then I could write a Western in a Cork accent.

Like all my fiction, The Heart In Winter is driven by the music I’m listening to daily. And the playlists were positively drenched in romance as I wrote this love story. I was listening to old Count John McCormack ballads, country love songs by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Tom Waits doing ‘Somewhere’, and much more – I was really up to my eyes in it. I’ve seen Larry Beau perform many times in Dublin over the years – he’s one of our finest singers, and a troubadour himself in the proper, poetical sense of the word – and it’s a thrill that Larry’s going to bring his wonderful voice to this performance, and that we’ll hear some of the songs that inspired the book’s own music.