CityLife

World Premiere of Secret Thoughts at Bolton Octagon

David Lodge

Bolton Octagon - until June 4

In Bolton Octagon’s World Premiere of Secret Thoughts, a stage adaptation of David Lodge’s critically acclaimed novel Thinks... married university professor Ralph Messenger has a reputation as a ground-breaking cognitive scientist and a notorious philanderer.

When he meets the recently bereaved novelist Helen Reed, sparks fly and battle commences.
 
It is science against art and morality against indulgence in an exploration of love and deception, as well as the connection between the brain and the heart.
 
But as their passionate and argumentative relationship develops into sexual attraction, their intellectual foreplay looks like it could become a full blown physical affair.

Directed by the theatre’s artistic director David Thacker, this is stimulating and provocative material.

“I think the story will appeal to a lot of people,” Thacker believes. “It is an intelligent play that examines human relationships, as well as the relationship between the body and the mind.”

But its path to the stage has been a strange one, admits Lodge, the award-winning writer of Small World and Nice Work, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize, as well as such novels as Changing Places; How Far Can You Go? (which was Whitbread Book of the Year in 1980); Paradise News; and Therapy. He has also adapted both his own work and other writers’ novels for television.

Small World was adapted as a television serial, produced by Granada TV in 1988, and Lodge adapted Nice Work as a four-part TV serial for the BBC, broadcast in 1989.

It went on to win the Royal Television Society Award for Best Drama Serial.

“Briefly, the story is that I published the book in 2001 and it never even occurred to me that it could be adapted for the stage,” he remembers.

“But I did do some work with David Thacker, whose TV and stage work I greatly admire, on perhaps adapting it for TV. As so often happens in that world, that didn’t happen.

“Then, completely out of the blue two or three years ago, I was contacted by a Belgian theatre director who asked me for permission to adapt Thinks..., for two actors for a run in Brussels. I was intrigued by this notion and gave him permission.

“I went to see this production, and although it did fairly well in a not-very big subsidised theatre there, I didn’t, to be honest, think it was that good!
 
“But I’m glad it happened because it made me realise that you could make it into a stage play by stripping it down to the two main characters, who carried the themes I wanted to investigate.

“So I began writing it for the theatre myself, working closely with David.

“There was a period when it might have been a co-production with a theatre in London but David and I had enough confidence in what we were doing to just go ahead and have its world premiere here.”

Thacker, who enjoyed a close working relationship with Arthur Miller – who was known to attend rehearsals of his productions – adds: “I have admired David’s work for a long time now and we have enjoyed working together before on a possible film adaptation of his book Therapy.

“He’s been able to continue working on the play whilst we rehearse which has been a great privilege for all of us.”

Secret Thoughts is at Bolton Octagon until June 4.

David Lodge is at Manchester Literature Festival, which this year takes place at various venues from October 13-23.