WHEN IT FIRST APPEARED in 1981, Salman Rushdie’s epic novel Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize, became a bestseller and was sold to more than 20 countries. It was also optioned for television adaptation, but by 1993, when Midnight’s Children won the “Booker of Bookers” marking the prize’s 25th anniversary, initial attempts to transfer Rushdie’s sweeping allegorical vision of Indo-Pakistani history to the screen had come to nothing.

Ten years later, after abortive adaptations by the BBC and a leading West End producer, it has taken the combined efforts of Rushdie, the Royal Shakespeare Company and two American universities to end the wait, with a stage version of Midnight’s Children that previews in London from next week. It is directed by the former Young Vic boss Tim Supple, renowned for his theatrical adaptations, including Grimm Tales, The Jungle Book and Tales from Ovid.

We are promised Brechtian realism, an Apocalypse Now-style jungle sequence, songs, archive footage of Nehru, Indira Gandhi and 1960s Bombay and specially filmed sequences that Supple hopes will transport the audience “to the extra reaches of magical realism”.

“I read Midnight’s Children in the 1980s,” he says, “and it had a very great impact on me as a big, complicated and rich book.” The idea of directing it for the theatre, however, occurred to Supple only in 1998, when he was directing his and David Tushingham’s adaptation of Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories at the National, and the novelist recounted Midnight’s Children’s bumpy road to adaptation.

“Salman had done a five-part, five-hour script for the BBC that was accepted in the mid-1990s. It was all set up and ready to go and was then cancelled for political reasons to do with filming in Sri Lanka. A leading theatrical impresario, who shall remain nameless, had also talked to Salman about a big West End production — eight hours performed on successive nights. I’m sure this person would have done a good job but their style of work was not quite what Salman wanted.

“He showed me his BBC script and asked me if I wanted to do something with it for theatre. I immediately wanted to do a stage adaptation absolutely inspired by the screenplay because Salman had already done the critical job, which was to make the characters live in another form. He’d created dialogue. He’d remoulded the playful language of the book into another, cinematic language. He’d taken out the literary dead weight that an adaptation of a novel like this can have.”

In July 2001, in partnership with the RSC dramaturg Simon Reade (Supple’s co-adapter on Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid), Supple and Rushdie began to cut, reshape and rewrite the TV script. “Initially, Simon and I took the screenplay, went back to the book and reworked them into a stage adaptation,” explains the director. “We presented a first draft to Salman, he reacted, we redrafted, then we did a reading with actors and redrafted again. Then there was a long thinking period in which Melly Still, our designer, and I worked on getting the production together and as a result of that work we did another draft, which Salman reacted to, before we produced the rehearsal draft of the script.

“There was a natural hierarchy in our relationship because it’s Salman’s piece and so we would defer to him to have final say on what in the end characterises the story of Midnight’¹s Children. So if we suggested a particular cut he might say no, because imposing it would make the stage version no longer Midnight’s Children at that point. But he would allow us final say if we said, ‘This will not be good theatre, we have to do it differently.’

“He was entirely open to our suggestions and has a very good awareness of what works on stage. When you work collaboratively it can be a good thing or a bad thing, and the only way it can work is if you yield to the most passionate argument — and that’s what we did.”

The end result of their collaboration is a three-and-a-half-hour stage version with a cast of 20, led by Zubin Varla (who has played Romeo and serial killer Roberto Zucco for the RSC) as Saleem Sinai, one of 1,001 telepathically linked children born on the night of Partition in 1947. The dramatisation of the magical and violent events in which Saleem and his family are caught up emulates Rushdie’s prose, Supple suggests, because both involve “the purposeful bombarding of reader/audience with different genres and approaches”.

“The narrative voice in the novel uses high art, low art, myth, Bollywood, Hollywood, jokes, colour, black-and-white — and we’re using every theatrical trick you can imagine.”

None of this comes cheap, and just as the RSC’s triumphant “This England” cycle of eight Shakespeare history plays in 2000 was only possible because its budget included around £1 million from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, so Midnight’s Children depends on sizeable financial assistance from Michigan and from Columbia University. The deal will see the production follow its London run with visits to Ann Arbor’s Power Centre and Harlem’s Apollo Theatre in March.

Indeed, if the American investment had not been forthcoming, Midnight’s Children might still be confined to the page, because when the RSC first agreed to produce the show, the company assumed that Supple would be content to employ the same brand of spare, low-budget storytelling that was so effective in his Grimm compilations and Tales from Ovid.

“When I told them what I had in mind they were very up for it, but without the Michigan and Columbia dollars the show couldn’t have happened in this way,” he explains.

“We would have been looking at a much more low-key, Swan Theatre-style show, and then it might not have happened at all, because I wouldn’t have wanted to do Midnight’s Children like that. Simon, Melly and I all felt that the book needed a bigger, more expensive approach.”

• Midnight’s Children previews at the Barbican Theatre, EC1, from January 18 and opens on January 29 (020-7638 8891/0870-609 1110)