How do you adapt for the stage a novel whose sentences are so electric with mischief that you get a little shock of pleasure as you read each one? It’s easy to see how author DBC Pierre won the Man Booker Prize with such lines as ‘I leave my flesh and bones at the northern edge of Mexico City, and just the noodles of my nervous system drive with me south.’
Yet when stripped naked of its prose, how does ‘Vernon God Little’ keep the gaggle-of-monkeys energy that makes it leap off the page? The answer, in Tanya Ronder’s adaptation and Rufus Norris’ production is to channel its irreverence into characters whose rebellion against the monotonous and monochrome leads to some grotesque tickling of the funny-bone.
For the politically hot – some would say too hot – narrative deals with a fifteen-year-old, Vernon God Little, who’s hauled up for police questioning in the aftermath of a school shooting. In his professional debut as Vernon, Colin Morgan cuts a compelling figure as he flounders in the face of accusations of drug-taking and having sex with Jesus (the name ironically given to the school gunman).
In Ian MacNeil’s wittily simple design, sofas transform into manically driven cars, while walls and doorframes are continually mobile. Sometimes the hyperactivity becomes a strain, as if the production’s trying too hard to compensate for the absence of the prose: and the characters veer dangerously towards caricature.
But it’s undeniably entertaining, not least in such performances as Mark Lockyer’s conman Lally, or Mariah Gale’s hilarious switching between the roles of sex-siren Taylor and gawky Ella. A bold engaging experiment, where the vivacity outweighs the flaws.
