Pip Williams, author of The Dictionary of Lost Words, chats to Merrigong Theatre director Simon Hinton about turning it into a theatrical performance. Footage by Kate McIlwain
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00:00I'm really excited that Dictionary of Lost Words is here in Wollongong.
00:05So are we.
00:07I think though, as an author, you don't ever, ever expect to see your story on stage.
00:14Yeah, I wondered about that, whether you ever imagined that it would be.
00:17No, no, not in a million years.
00:19My biggest hope was that it would get published.
00:23And then it got published into a COVID lockdown.
00:28Literally, it was published two days after the whole world went into lockdown.
00:32And so all of my dreams and aspirations faded.
00:36But people got out there and read it.
00:38And one of the people who read it was Mitchell Battelle at the Theatre Company in South Australia.
00:45And then Verity Lawton, a South Australian playwright.
00:49And I, you know, I couldn't have had a better person translate this story that I loved so much.
00:58to the stage.
01:00And it was like handing over the baby.
01:02Yeah, there's a lot of trust involved in that, isn't there?
01:04Enormous amount of trust.
01:06And we met for coffee.
01:08And I knew immediately that she understood what I had been trying to explore in the book.
01:13And it just went from there.
01:16And I had very little to do with it.
01:18It's all her work, what you see up on stage.
01:21And I have sat in the audience next to people who have cried in all the right places.
01:27And it's the strangest phenomenon because, as a writer, you never see someone reading your book, ever.
01:36And suddenly I'm in a dark theatre and there are people responding to the story, the characters, the ideas that I had sat with for three years.
01:47And they're responding with emotion, which is all you want as a writer, that you engage people at an emotional level.
01:54And Verity made that happen.
01:57And it's a delight to experience that, but it was completely unexpected.
02:06Incredible.
02:07Yeah, you talk about the book being released during COVID.
02:10And obviously that was a time where we couldn't gather people in the theatre.
02:14Yeah.
02:15And so, you know, the fact that people were at home reading books, I guess they were watching Netflix as well, but they were reading some books.
02:22You know, and in many ways having these experiences, not collectively.
02:27But, you know, and there's something amazing, I think, about the literary sort of adaptation to the stage,
02:33which is everybody's experienced this book in their own heads.
02:36Oh, yes.
02:37With their own imagination of what, you know, the characters.
02:42And then they have a collective experience, which is, I guess, a version of the book.
02:48It might be different to what they had in their heads.
02:51But there's something really powerful, I think, about taking that thing that has been a sort of, you know, you read on your own.
02:58And then you come together in the theatre and you experience this thing, which you loved as a book.
03:03And then you experience it together as a community, you know, and there's something really powerful about that.
03:09So it fascinates me that it's a time where sort of literary adaptations for the stage are incredibly popular.
03:17And maybe it is a little bit of full circle, you know, from the thing of, you know, the thing that we couldn't do was gather.
03:23But we've, you know, read and heard these amazing stories and now we want to see them together.
03:28I think, yeah, I think you're right.
03:29And COVID was a particular time which has made coming together more important than it's ever been.
03:35But you said something really interesting, which I say all the time.
03:38A book isn't finished until someone reads it.
03:41The book I publish, I think, is 75% done and the reader finishes it and they'll all have their own experience of the story.
03:50Yeah.
03:51But the theatre does the same thing.
03:52Yeah.
03:53Verity read this book slightly differently to the way I might have written it.
03:57She's interpreted it in a way that is a reflection of her experience and who she is as a person and what she thinks is important.
04:07And it has just struck a chord with audience members, people who come to see it.
04:15And we do see it together but we still focus on some of those things that are more important to us or resonate more with our own experience and our own lives.
04:24But we do it sitting beside each other and it's a really beautiful experience.
04:28Absolutely.