ADAPTATIONS

In 1991 Hannan was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company to
adapt Henrik Ibsen's The Pretenders, which was directed by Danny Boyle
(pre-Trainspotting) and performed at the Barbican in London (The Pit).

In 1987 he prepared a version of the Gogol play Gamblers for the Tron
Theatre in Glasgow, which received another production at the Tricycle
Theatre in London in 1992.

"It's a very eerie play," Hannan says. "It was Hamish Glen who talked
me into doing it. To me, reading other translations that were
available, it looked like a very slight one-act piece but Hamish had a feeling
there was more to it than that. He and I and a Russian scholar
called Christopher Rathbone sat around a table and tried to think our way
inside it. Hamish's instinct was absolutely right, it's a very
special piece of theatre. It's wonderful and perfect, like the delicate
skull of a long-dead cat. Myself and Hamish both got two shots at doing
it. After the success of the first production at the Tron, Hamish was
invited to work with Eimuntas Nekrosius' company of actors at the (at
that time) world-leading Lithuanian State Theatre in Vilnius, and I got a
chance to re-think the translation for a production at the Tricycle in
London which had the awesome Mark Rylance and Phil Daniels in it, as
well as the Russian star Oleg Menshikov. It's a piece about con-men
rather than gamblers - in Russian the title touches on both meanings - and
the play is really one long con. It's hypnotic. One reviewer
described it as a satanic comedy and that's about right. It's very funny but
it's as close to hell as you will ever want to get."

In 1984 Hannan adapted a novel by Maxim Gorky which in English is
usually entitled The Life of a Useless Man. Hannan's adaptation was called
Klimkov: Life of a Tsarist Agent. It's about a young man who has the
bad luck to become a Tsarist spy right on the eve of the 1905
Revolution. It was first produced at the Traverse Theatre in 1985, in a
beautiful production by Jenny Killick.