Theatre
Interview
Meet the man daring to adapt The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
We chat to the co-creator and writer of London’s most exciting new immersive theatre experience
There are many sci-fi classics that have been considered unadaptable for decades, until one insightful – and brave – individual finds the right angle. Frank Herbert’s Dune was one such text, until Denis Villeneuve swooped in. Of a different tone but similar intimidating scale is The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams’ five-book ‘trilogy’ of comedy misadventures in space. Writer Arvind Ethan David believes that the code to adapting Adams’ expertly chaotic world lies in an atypical direction – immersive theatre.
Created by an award-winning creative team and armed with more surprises than you can shake a stick at, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy lands at London’s Riverside Studios this November. The new production promises to fully embrace Adams’ weird imaginings and bring guests on an adventure they’ll never forget. For David, who has worked on countless major productions for stage and screen, this one is particularly special.
“It’s Hitchhiker’s,” he says. “This is the white whale, right? This is the great, terrifying one. I cannot mess this up for myself, for my teenage self, for Douglas, for all the fans out there. There’s a certain amount of fear, but I think fear is healthy in the creative process. Fear can inspire you to take risks, to try things. But I come to it from the inside – I have lived in this text and inside Douglas’ mind since I was a teenager, and so it’s enormously fulfilling and absurd to come back to it as a grown man and go, “Oh, I get to do this now.””
We caught up with David to find out what it takes to take a develop a story from page to full-blown immersive production.
What’s your role in this production?
I’m writing The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, I’m adapting it, and I’m co creating it with Jason Ardizzone-West, who is our production designer, and that is a slightly odd pairing, but in the world of immersive theatre, where narrative and physical space are sort of very closely conjoined, that made sense. Jason and I are old friends and came together out of a shared love of doing this, of trying to both adapt an unadaptable text and also solve some of the problems of immersive theatre.
Why did you choose immersive theatre?
For a few reasons. Firstly, for anyone who knows Hitchhiker’s, it famously doesn’t do a linear plot. This is not John Grisham. This is not a tightly plotted thriller. This is a wild collection of characters and ideas and incidents that work in the five-book trilogy, because Douglas’ unique genius sort of knitted them together. And every time someone who’s not him tries to make Hitchhiker’s, it doesn’t go quite right, because what everyone has tried to do historically is sort of force it into a linear three act structure, which is what a Hollywood film demands. Hitchhiker’s doesn’t conform to that. The only real way to adapt Douglas Adams is not to adapt Douglas Adams. You have to be inspired by him and sort of become a tribute band to him. Immersive is a form that lets you experience things, that builds on mood and ideas and characters more than it builds on plot. It just seemed a perfect collision of source material and medium, that we invite the audience to be hitchhikers and they get to go on adventures. There’s no right way to do an adventure. There’s only your way. There’s no right way to be a hitchhiker, as long as you stick your thumb out and are open to adventure, whatever the universe may throw at you.
This isn’t your first time adapting Douglas Adams. How have your previous experiences with his work and your personal relationship with him informed how you’ve approached this project?
The first time I adapted Douglas, and the first time I met him, was 30 years ago. I was a student, and at Oxford we did a production of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which he came to see. Now, if you are a 18-year-old adapting your hero’s work and he turns up, that is a scary moment, but I would recommend it to everybody, because it’s the sort of scare that changes your life. I remember very clearly asking him, very sweaty, after having watched him watch the show, “Was it okay? Because, you know, we changed some things in the plot…” He sort of laughed, and he went, “Changed it? No, you fixed it.”
I’m sure he was being nice, but it was the most wonderful license, because you sort of have to do that, with Douglas. To go back to what I was saying earlier, if you try and follow him slavishly, you’re going to get tied in knots, because only he could do that. I felt a certain freedom from having done that and having got his blessing. Then, much later, about six, seven years ago, we did Dirk Gently again as a series for Netflix, and there we very much wrote sequels to his books. We took the books as canon but we didn’t try to adapt them with each season. It was a new volume in the Dirk Gently adventures, and we had great fun with that, and the fans loved it, and we brought millions of new fans to the Holistic Detective Agency. I also did the comic books for Dirk Gently, so having done a few times, I guess I come to it with a little bit of confidence, but also a lot of love.
What first drew you to him as a teenager?
I think for a certain type of teenager – perhaps slightly awkward, slightly lonely, slightly too clever for their own good type – he speaks to us, and he says, “You are my tribe. Come to me”. And you feel less alone, and you feel smarter and more connected and less strange. Or rather, you feel that strange is okay, that strange might actually be special, that strange may actually be the best way to be. He invites you on this… not just the adventure, the adventure is amazing, but what he mainly invites you to do is to come inside his mind and to look at the world differently. Once you see the universe the way Douglas Adams sees the universe, it’s never the same again. It’s a masterclass in thinking differently. That’s what pulled me in, and that’s what has really maintained me, and I think that’s what the show is trying to do. What the show will try and do for the audience is, yes, you’ll have a great time, you’ll drink cocktails, you’ll flirt with aliens, you’ll carry a towel if that’s what you want, you’ll argue with Zaphod, but hopefully you’ll start to look at the world differently.
What the show invites you to do is to imagine what it might be like if your planet was destroyed, and you lost everything you loved and had to go into a wild and uncaring universe and start again. What would you keep with you? What memories, what rules, what philosophy, what principles, where would you turn for meaning? To religion, to love, to power, to bureaucracy? It invites you to investigate the question that Douglas famously posed, which is: what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? And it suggests that if the answer is 42, maybe the answer isn’t the point. Maybe it’s how you ask the question that matters.
At the moment, what does a typical day of work look like for you?
The thing about a show like this is it’s incredibly complicated. I have made a lot of television. I’ve made nine feature films. I have made musicals on Broadway and in London. This is the most complex and hardest thing I’ve ever done, because it is in every medium. We have music, we have songs, we have dance, we have magic, we have special effects and screens and recordings and AI, and we have robots and puppets. There’s a lot of incredibly talented people in every department, top of game drawn from Broadway, the West End, TV, gaming – we have this extraordinary team, and my job is to be the glue and make sure everybody’s singing from the same hymnal, that everyone’s signed up for the same adventure and is pulling in the same direction, and that that direction is sufficiently weird. My job a lot of the time is to go, “Yeah, that’s good, but can it be stranger? That’s good, but can we turn it on its head and do it backwards?” Because I’m in California, and a lot of the team is in New York and London, I wake up very early. The calls start very early. I’ve just delivered a new draft. We’re doing a big reading next week in London, and then I will probably have to rewrite. We are casting and auditioning. We’ve also already cast, and I can’t tell you who yet, but some famous people who are going to be pre-recorded, and so we are recording and filming them. There’s a lot going on. Not to mention, I also have another show that’s on the road and I’m on deadline for a novel. So my days are silly at the moment.
How do you organise that time?
I carve out a chunk of every day to write. I think writing has to be protected. So I have about three hours every day where I don’t do calls and I don’t do emails and I just write, and then the rest of the time, you take it as it comes, and you make your priority list, and it laughs at you.
If someone wanted to go about adapting something they were passionate about for the stage, what advice would you give?
So when I wrote to Douglas’ agents and asked them for permission to do Dirk Gently when I was a student, the letter that we got back – I wish I still had a copy of it, but I sort of don’t need it, because it’s emblazoned on my memory. The phrase was, “Douglas Adams does not believe that his novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, can be adapted for the stage or, indeed, for any other medium. However, he will not stop you from trying.” I think I could not have got better advice or better permission. I think that’s the best advice I’d give everyone – just leap into it. Just try it, and don’t be scared of it, and do it. But immerse yourself in it first. I do a lot of adaptation. As well as Douglas. I’ve adapted Raymond Chandler, PG Woodhouse, Neil Gaiman, Lenny Henry, Oscar Wilde, and the first thing to do, if you haven’t already done it, is to read everything they ever wrote. You know, read every book, every play, but go deeper – every letter, every journal entry. Read everything about them, watch all the existing adaptations… Particularly if you’re dealing with a genius. And everyone I just mentioned is a genius. Most people aren’t, but you have to at least get to the table where they played, and you have to earn your in. The way you earn your in is to read everything they’ve ever done. Normally my first step after that is I will literally just type out all the dialogue from the novel or whatever it is, and put all the dialog in a Final Draft file, and then you have the muscle memory, then you have a shot at writing stuff that can stand alongside it, assuming you have half a year and a little bit of luck and talent.
A lot of the names you just mentioned are very funny people – people who write about serious things, sometimes, but with a lot of wit. Are those the kind of texts you’re usually drawn to?
I think that’s just how I see the world. I think the world is a dark, uncaring, difficult, sharp-ended place. The only way to navigate it is with wit and joy and laughter. If you navigate it any other way, you’re going to slit your wrists pretty quickly. As you say, Raymond Chandler saw the world pretty bleakly, but he also wrote some of the funniest descriptions and one liners about it that any man has ever done. I think Douglas was the same. Douglas was a depressive. Douglas was a compulsive worrior and an obsessive, but that didn’t stop him seeing the funny side of anything.
Is that what you’re hoping people take away from this production – that ability to find joy even whilst your planet’s being obliterated?
We better, because our planet is pretty close to being obliterated. I think I want them to take away a mix of things. I think that’s definitely one thing, but I think also: a call to action. I think the thing about Arthur Dent is he didn’t stay lying in the mud outside his house. Slightly reluctantly at first, but with increasing agency and courage, he took the universe on and fought his way back to Earth and fought his way to love with Fenchurch. He’s often portrayed as a sort of bumbling idiot. He’s not. Douglas definitely saw a chunk of himself in Arthur, and Arthur was someone who maybe took his time to figure things out, because he didn’t accept stuff as given, but he worked at stuff, and he figured stuff out, and then he figured out the direction of travel, and he stuck his thumb out, and he got there in the end. I think that’s what we have to be today. I think it’s so easy today to throw your hands up in the air and give up, because the world’s too hard, and politics is too hard, and conservation and the climate crisis is too hard, and it’s all too hard, so we all just go back into our little boroughs. But I don’t think that’s the message of Hitchhiker’s. I don’t think it’s how Douglas lived his life. It’s not how I live mine. Of course, the show’s a good night out – come and drink cocktails and dance and flirt with aliens. But it’s also a call for understanding and for quest, and to make your own quest of your life. If even Arthur Dent can have an adventure of galactic scale than what excuse do the rest of us have?
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opens at Riverside Studios on 15 November – find tickets here
