‘Epic with a capital E’: inside Elmet, a tale of violence and greed on haunted Yorkshire heath

Elmet, a novel that was shortlisted for the Booker, is a lyrical, richly written tale of a woodland family on a collision course with an avaricious landowner. Can it work onstage in Bradford?Novelist Fiona Mozley and theatre-maker Javaad Alipoor are not an obvious match. Elmet, Mozley’s Booker prize-shortlisted 2017 novel, is a lyrical and violent tale of land, family and revenge in semi-rural Yorkshire. Alipoor is best known for complex multimedia performances exploring digital technology, internet culture and geopolitics. But the contrast is what energises them about working on a stage adaptation for Bradford’s year as City of Culture. “I couldn’t see how it was going to come together,” says Mozley. “But that excited me.”Alipoor read Elmet during the pandemic and was struck by its “gut-punch story”. As fans of his company’s work might expect, this is not what he calls a “route one” adaptation. Instead of focusing on plot and dialogue, he is maintaining the novel’s evocative narrative mode and underlining the show’s theatricality, with actors stepping in and out of character. Everything is refracted through the perspective of teenage Danny, who lives in the woods with his quietly seething sister Cathy and the hulking, almost superhuman Daddy, whose sense of right and hunger for violence sets them on a collision course with the avaricious local landowner. Continue reading...

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