Playwright Eoghan Quinn teams up once again with Hatch Theatre for his latest work, The Jesus Trilogy, which premieres at this year's Dublin Theatre Festival.
Based on a trilogy of novels by Nobel Prize recipient and double Booker Prize winner, JM Coetzee, Quinn introduces The Jesus Trilogy below.
The Jesus Trilogy is a stage adaptation by Hatch Theatre Company of three novels: The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), and The Death of Jesus (2019). These books are the most recent by the South African and Australian novelist JM Coetzee, who is often considered one of our greatest living writers. He's won the Booker Prize twice and is a recipient of a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Director Annabelle Comyn read the books as they were released and, as Coetzee’s work has a habit of doing, they got under her skin. Annabelle became convinced that they would make compelling theatre, that they would resonate with live audiences in profound and exciting ways. She invited me to adapt them with her.
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At this point, I had never adapted a novel for the stage before. I had never really adapted anything for anything before. I regularly forget to bring an adapter on holidays. But despite my quiet terror at the scale of the project, I said yes, without blinking. I knew from working with Annabelle what a deep thinker she was about language and text, and I knew that whatever she saw in these books was worth exploring.
I soon saw it too. These are mysterious, beautiful, bewildering, and addictive books. They are genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, yet viscerally sad; utterly strange, yet deeply relatable; easy to read, yet hard to interpret.
All together, they form an epic saga which takes in the richest of themes like memory, language, death, art, sex, passion, parenting, illness, and reincarnation.
We follow the journey of a middle-aged man (Simon) and a young boy (David) as they emerge from a long journey across the ocean at a city called 'Novilla.’ It’s a hazy, undefined place, perhaps South American, perhaps socialist. To Simon, everyone here seems very content, and yet somehow alien.
If we neglect to tell and hear our stories - to confront our individual and collective history in an honest and inquisitive way - then we are doomed to forget...
Simon, David, and everyone else here have arrived ‘washed clean’ of their memories - there has been a great ‘forgetting’ across this world. Only ‘shadows’ of the old life remain. Coetzee uses this beginning point, and the epic journey that follows, to pose a lot of questions, like:
What stories do we tell about ourselves, as individuals? As societies? What do we add in or leave out? Are these stories ever the ‘truth’, or just one perspective?
These are particularly live questions in the current political climate, as technology changes our relationship with history, and with one another. Society-wide, we are experiencing new reckonings with the past, as well as the emergence of new forms of identity and self-expression.
But we are also seeing the reaction: a re-emergence of the global right-wing, sectors of society romanticising the past, old ways of thinking, violence, and even ethno-nationalist "nostalgia".
I had never really adapted anything for anything before.'
Among many (many!) other things, Coetzee’s novels suggest to us that the opposite of ‘storytelling’ is ‘forgetting’. If we neglect to tell and hear our stories - to confront our individual and collective history in an honest and inquisitive way - then we are doomed to forget... And perhaps to replay humanity’s worst failings.
For me, the theatre is the most exciting place to see and to tell stories about the world because of the diversity of its resources, and The Jesus Trilogy uses realism, poetry, comedy, tragedy, song, and even dance to tell the story of Simon and David, as performed by our outstanding cast.
This all takes the work of dozens of amazing artists, producers, and crew over a long period. And that has been a collaborative and immensely rewarding journey, one I feel very lucky to be a part of. We can’t wait for people to enter the world of these books with us, at Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, and at Project Arts Centre in Dublin as part of Dublin Theatre Festival.
Chaos reigns.
The Jesus Trilogy previews at Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray on 5th Oct and premieres at Project Arts Centre from 9th – 19th Oct, as part of this year's Dublin Theatre Festival - find out more here.
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