A few months ago the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) acquired the stage rights to my novel The Hope Fault from my Australian publisher Fremantle Press (there was a quiet announcement in Books+Publishing’s rights round-up in early July).
I’m thrilled that The Hope Fault is being adapted for the stage by writer, director and actor Andrew Hale. Andrew most recently adapted Patrick White’s short story ‘The Cockatoos’ for the stage, and he talked about that process in an interview in October 2015 with ABC (for the record, I fall into the ‘I love Patrick White’ camp).
The Hope Fault will be staged by second year theatre students at WAAPA in the second half of 2019. Andrew Hale is already at work on the adaptation and, just recently, Fremantle Press CEO Jane Fraser went along to WAAPA for the very first workshop. Jane wrote about it here.
As Jane says:
This was a chance for the talented first year WAAPA students to explore the text and a chance for Andrew to glean some feedback on his next draft.
It’s extraordinary to know that a writer of Andrew’s talent and experience, a talented group of young actors, and the crew who’ll be involved in the staging – all these people – are ‘exploring the text’ and working to bring my words and characters to a new medium, and a new audience.
I’ve talked a little (in this interview, for example) about seeing this novel in filmic, staged terms as I wrote it. I thought of the house in the novel – each of its rooms – as a stage set, and I was aware of who was on stage (on page) in any scene, who was off-stage/off-page, waiting in the wings of the other rooms of the house. I can’t wait to see the novel come to life on the actual stage.
It’s also particularly sweet to know that The Hope Fault is being adapted for stage, because I have a short-lived, long-ago background in theatre. It was mostly festival fringe and student theatre (I did theatre studies as part of my late-1980s arts degree at UWA), but there it was, an important part of my life for a time in my twenties, while I was still living and studying in Perth. That The Hope Fault will be brought to the stage by students in Perth feels like a beautiful return home.
Read more: CEO Jane Fraser gets first glimpse of the stage play version of Tracy Farr’s latest novel
