The new National Theatre of Scotland has no official home. So it doesn’t have doors. But if it did, it might be expected to be opening them with a play by one of any number of young Scottish playwrights. Or at least something with a Scottish theme. Macbeth, perhaps. Mary Stuart might have suited (which David Harrower is indeed adapting for a future production). But what you would never have expected it to announce itself with is The Wolves in the Wall, a musical adapted from a children’s book written by someone who, despite copious credits in an array of literary genres, has actually never written a play or indeed song lyrics. And who happens to be English. And lives in Minnesota.
Neil Gaiman is, in the words of Forbes magazine, “the most famous author you’ve never heard of”. His 25-year career has always been of a decidedly strange hue, taking in comics, graphic novels and children’s fiction — many of them produced in collaboration with the graphic artist Dave McKean — plus fantasy fiction for adults and screenplays (MirrorMask, which has just been released, and Robert Zemeckis’s long-awaited Beowulf). There is even an unauthorised biography of Duran Duran with Gaiman’s name on it. Supplying the source material for the new National Theatre of Scotland is only the latest feint from a writer more or less impossible to pin down.
The Wolves in the Wall is a book for children that does exactly what it says on the cover. It tells of a child who imagines a pack of wolves within the walls of her home. It takes an unusually febrile imagination to come up with such a bizarre idea, except that this story was not his own.
“It began with my daughter,” he says, “who is now 11 and was then 4, having a nightmare. I went upstairs and heard her crying and she said: ‘Wolves came out of the wall. They took over the house. It was real. I can show you the place in the wallpaper they came out from.’ She spent a couple of days rather worried about this. I would tell her little stories about wolves just to try to stop her worrying. I started thinking, it’s a proper story. It took me about three goes to get it right, mostly because I knew what would make it would be the tone of voice rather than the story itself.”
So the National Theatre of Scotland’s inaugural production was literally dreamt up by a four-year-old. The company could not announce any more boldly that it means to provide challenging theatre for everyone. “The idea was that it would always be a children’s opera,” says Gaiman, “but we decided that the word was incredibly intimidating. It sounds like something you are going to have to endure rather than enjoy, so I decided to call it ‘a musical pandemonium’ instead.” This makes sense. Gaiman has spent an entire career scaring the bejesus out of his audience, but using the “O” word might have scared them off altogether.
The Wolves in the Wall is a co-production with Improbable Theatre, whose best known show is the award-winning ghoulish family entertainment, Shockheaded Peter. It is Improbable’s Julian Crouch, who also designed the family unfriendly Jerry Springer: The Opera, who will supply the silhouettes of wolves stalking the luminous walls. Nick Powell provides the songs, and the show is directed by Vicky Featherstone, the NTS’s artistic director.
As for Gaiman, apart from turning his hand to writing lyrics wherever the show requires them, his has been what he calls “a lurching in-and-out involvement: 50 per cent approving observer and 50 per cent instant collaborator”. Indeed his initial contribution was an act of selflessness very rare among writers, even the nicest of whom have egos to nurse. “Very very early on in the process when we were putting the contract together and getting Improbable the rights to Wolves, I actually wound up having to fight for their right to fire me, which was very strange. I discovered that my agents were insisting I was going to be the writer. I had to phone up and say, ‘Absolutely not, I want them to be able to fire me at any point if this isn’t working.’ ”
He doesn’t sound like it, but Gaiman is one of the most successful British authors alive. His website has a mindboggling half a million hits a month, mostly from people who have no idea how many pies he has his fingers in. “It’s the curse of being ubiquitous. If you’re going to have the kind of career that people take seriously it would probably be much better to go back in time and advise myself not to be all over the place. You have that weird Jonathan Miller scenario. What is he really?” What is Gaiman really? Where do we start? The common denominator of his generic roaming is fantasy. Before his imagination was fertilised by the study of mythology, theology and other arcana, it had its first proper stimulus in the theatre, and in the most unlikely corner of it. “As a nine-year-old I somehow managed to talk my parents into taking me up to Sadler’s Wells a lot to go to see Gilbert and Sullivan. I was lucky in getting to bump into people such as Gilbert and strange forgotten authors and discovering a real love of words and what they could do.”
Later, at school in Croydon, he vividly recalls a meeting with the careers adviser. “He said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to write American comics.’ He stared at me and said, ‘How do you do that then?’ I said, ‘I have no idea; you’re the careers adviser.’ He said, ‘Have you ever thought about accountancy?’ ” Once Gaiman had got a career in journalism out of the way, he kicked off in comics, the presiding monument being the Sandman series he drip-fed to DC Comics over eight years. He “discovered very rapidly the amazing power of serial narrative, of giving people a little bit of story at a time”.
He branched out into comic fantasy fiction with Good Omens, written with Terry Pratchett. When Neverwhere didn’t work as a BBC drama, he turned it into his first novel “as a director’s cut — to go, ‘No, this is what I meant’.” American Gods was his first novel proper. And then he turned to children’s fiction.
As those in the audience for The Wolves in the Wall will discover, he tends to give no quarter when writing for children. He was delighted and surprised by a review for Anansie Boys which said, “This is one of Gaiman’s novels for adults which means it’s far less threatening”: “I felt that’s very perceptive. I hadn’t realised that. I tend to talk up to kids. I tend to assume that they are smart and perfectly capable of coping with whatever I’m throwing in their direction.”
