In 1991 Hannan was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company to adapt Henrik Ibsen's The Pretenders, which was directed by Danny Boyle of Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire fame.  It was performed at the Barbican in London (The Pit) and starred David Calder and Paterson Joseph.
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 director 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.  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."

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. Hamish Glen went on to do another production of Gamblers in the early 90s with Eimuntas Nekrosius' company of actors at the Lithuanian State Theatre in Vilnius.

Hannan's translation was revived by Lithuanian Dahlia Ibelhauptaite at the Tricycle Theatre in London in a show which featured Mark Rylance and Phil Daniels, as well as the star Russian actor Oleg Menshikov.
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 production by Jenny Killick.