One of the book festival's hottest tickets is a nightly promenade performance of four epistolary short stories, which have been adapted by Edinburgh's Grid Iron theatre company into two stage plays, a film installation and a play for voices, performed in rooms around Charlotte Square.
At a session to discuss the project, three of the writers – Kamila Shamsie, Kei Miller and Christos Tsiolkas – met their collaborators for the first time. (The fourth, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, was in Nigeria, where her two‑hander about the aftermath of a holiday romance between two women is set.) None of the writers had yet seen the show and it would be hard to say which contingent was more nervous. As Grid Iron's Ben Harrison explained, no text is more sacred than the responsibility to keep an audience entertained. The four stories had duly been "shaped" to 20 minutes each.
Tsiolkas challenged the very premise of the project by choosing a subject from a pre-literate era. "I wanted to write something about the great questions of our age: what is a stateless person, a refugee? Because I was doing research for a classical novel I thought I'd go back to the Bible. It's a correspondence between Eve and Cain. How do this mother and son communicate? They do it through slave messengers who become the body of the message." He beamed with delight when Harrison described it as a feminist text that gave Eve back her voice. "I wanted it to be a feminist piece because I've had so much criticism on that front in the past," said the author of The Slap and Barracuda.
"I carved Genesis off from the rest of the Bible because it has a very punishing, patriarchal god. This is a world where slavery and patriarchy and so many ugly things are taken as inherent and immutable and just, and that was a good reminder that whatever the messages of faith are in the holy texts [whether the Bible, the Qur'an or the Torah], it's really dangerous if they're taken literally. I really needed to concentrate on a language that was true to the myth. If I were to teach creative writing today I'd say to students don't write anything until you've had time to read Homer and the Bible."
Those who are unable to blag tickets for the show, or believe short stories are made to be read, can buy them in their unexpurgated form in a booklet available at the festival bookshop.
