THE woman who has turned Brian Moore's best known novel into a new play was unaware the author wrote a stage version himself.
And had she realised The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne had already been transformed for theatre, Vittoria Cafolla says she might not have bothered at all.
In any event Moore's script - once performed at the old Arts Theatre on Belfast's Botanic Avenue - is now buried somewhere within a hard-to-access archive in Montreal.
The new play had been due to be the centrepiece of the festival – which reached its finale last Wednesday on the centenary of the birth of Belfast-born Moore – but could not be completed in time.
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is a bleak portrayal of a woman's descent into isolation through a Belfast boarding house. Most of its characters have few redeeming qualities.
When audiences do eventually get to see Cafolla's treatment on stage, they will find she has taken a radical approach which could prove controversial with Moore fans by foregrounding one of the minor figures in the book, Judith's cousin Edie, a figure some readers will even struggle to remember.
"I wrestled for a long time about how to dramatise Judith's inner voice, which is so vibrant and dynamic and distinctive," she says.
"So much of the book's power lies in those monologues and it was finding a way to make sure that that vibrancy and her depth as a character found its way on stage without extremely long monologues - which are notoriously hard to stage.
"I decided in the first draft to voice Judith's inner monologue through her old school friend Edie who is the first woman to introduce her to alcohol.
"We then workshopped the script with actors and a director to see that it worked. This is a departure from the novel in that sense."
Yet Caffola says she felt she did not need to update the book - written in the early 1950s - for a modern audience and believes it still has much to say.
"I think there are still enough similarities between the life of a 40-year-old woman in 1950s' Belfast and the life of older women now that we can connect with her and the themes of the novel," she explains.
"This is particularly so coming out of a pandemic - loneliness and alcohol overuse are both in the news at the moment.
"I think Moore writes so well about the human condition, so that even if the era is different or if society's attitude to certain things - marriage, spinsterhood, masculinity - has changed, the feelings and desires of the characters are so well drawn that is doesn't matter if the books seem dated."
The Lonely Passion was the first of Moore's novels that Cafolla read, before going on to his many other books where a female is the main protagonist. These include the introspective I Am Mary Dunne, one of his best-sellers The Doctors' Wife - in which a Belfast woman deserts her husband - and his final, historical novel The Magician's Wife.
The strength of Moore's female characters are a huge part of what attracted her to the stage project, says Cafolla.
She decided, however, not to rewatch the movie version of The Lonely Passion, filmed in Dublin in the early 1980s starring Dame Maggie Smith as Miss Hearne and Bob Hoskins as James Madden.
"I enjoyed the film - the performances were amazing, especially Maggie Smith's - but in saying that, it's really a long time since I watched it," she explains.
"I didn't want it to influence me when I was adapting the book but I do remember thinking that it lost something by being set in Dublin and not Belfast.
"And also the poignancy and pathos of the ending of the book was obscured by the slightly more upbeat ending that the film decided on."
It was a major blow when Cafolla and her co-producer Mary Lindsay realised there was not going to be time to complete the adaptation for the week-long festival, to which they had actually given the title 'Lonely Passions'.
Cafolla pored over the text of the debut novel in great detail. "I started to mark out what was both dramatic and memorable," she says.
"Deciding what to cut was very hard but otherwise it would be the length of The Book of Mormon. I started with the really arresting monologues and went from there.
"It took about a year to get it on paper then another couple of months to draft once we had done a development week on it."
Cafolla and Lindsay had a meeting with a couple of academics, Dr Sinéad Moynihan of the University of Exeter and Dr Alison Garden of Queen's University Belfast, who were working on their own ideas of how to mark Moore's centenary. (Their Twitter account, @brianmoore100, has included readings of one of the novels each month as well as other events).
And it was they who made Cafolla aware that Moore himself had dramatised his own debut novel.
"His adaptation is held in an archive in Canada and to be honest it would have been extremely hard to access. I'm not sure if we had known that it existed we would have adapted it," says Cafolla.
But the process of actually obtaining the rights to adapt the novel proved arduous, with intermittent contact with representatives and lawyers in New York, though finally even Moore's widow, Jean, gave her blessing to the entire festival.
"The process to get the rights to adapt was long and slow and it might have been simpler to request the rights to stage his version instead," explains Cafolla.
She thinks her version might reflect a more cynical worldview but believes strongly that the story still holds up and has a relevant message.
"I think that the play's message - like the book - is that people are driven to desperate measures to deal with desperate circumstances. Sometimes life doesn't work out as you would like, and the things that you would expect to be there to support you - like the community around you, religion - aren't to be depended on," she says.
"In Judith's case, she turns to alcohol when her fantasies turn out to be just that - fantasies.
"That's probably a pretty cynical take on it, but I feel really strongly that the story still holds up, especially since we are facing all of these issues of loneliness and alcoholism, having just come through a pandemic."
- paradossotheatre.com
