His Dark Materials - The Play

In 2003, His Dark Materials was turned into a stageplay, starring Anna Maxwell Martin (who has appeared in Doctor Who but I best know from Bleak House). When I found this out, I decided to hunt down the script, as I wanted to know how a 25-year-old could play Lyra and how things like dæmons and armored bears would work on stage. I didn't really get an answer to the latter, but the former was well-addressed: the play is a flashback from the point-of-view of Lyra and Will ten years on.

The play was actually done as two two-act plays, shown over subsequent nights, and even at such a length, it still struggles to fit everything into its running time. It positively rockets through the events of the novels at some points, scene changes coming with unrelenting alacrity. This occasionally serves to undercut what's going on; at least as scripted, the discovery of the dæmon-less boy (changed to Billy Costa here, just as the film version would later do) has almost no impact, when in the novels it's one of the most traumatic things I've ever read. The play also struggled to deliver the needed exposition to fit someone into Lyra's world; there are some incredibly awkward lines, especially a part where Lyra walks past a university class learning about dæmons, which is rather like attending a university class where you learn that everyone has hair and girls wear it long. I hate to be the sort of person who cries out "it's different from the book", but I think cutting Mary Malone really does hurt the story a lot; it is Serafina Pekkala who performs the role of the serpent instead, but that totally changes the significance of the act. In the novel, what Will and Lyra do is merely natural, but here it's a calculated act in Lord Asriel's war against the Authority. Indeed, I also have a problem with how the stageplay figures Asriel; at the end of the novel, you realize that he's just as misguided as any of the other characters, as his side has the right idea no more than anyone else's. But here, it seems as though he's on the same side as Lyra and Will, which isn't right at all (even aside from the fact that he murders children!).

Of course, it's impossible to judge any stageplay merely from the script, and I still really wish that I could see this in performance, but it's hard to see how this could have worked successfully from what I read here. (Though the excellent cast it had in London would have done a lot to sell it, I'm sure: Anna Maxwell Martin, Russell Tovey, and Timothy Dalton!)

Excellent abridgement - cut out a lot of the boring stuff from HDM III. I wish I'd seen this at the theatre - I would love to see how they did the daemons! ( )