Twenty-five years after it was made into an Oscar-nominated film, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day is to be adapted for the stage. Ishiguro will collaborate on the adaptation, by playwright and novelist Barney Norris. It will tour the UK after its world premiere at Northampton’s Royal & Derngate in February next year.

Ishiguro won the Booker prize in 1989 for his poignant novel about a journey undertaken by an English butler, Stevens, who looks back over his life in service at Darlington Hall. It became a film in 1993, produced by Merchant Ivory, and earned eight Oscar nominations. Anthony Hopkins starred as the butler and Emma Thompson played Miss Kenton, Darlington Hall’s former housekeeper, with whom Stevens is reunited. The novel was inspired by PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and, more surprisingly, as Ishiguro explained in an article for the Guardian, by Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and the Tom Waits song Ruby’s Arms.

The stage version will be directed by Christopher Haydon, who said “Norris has exactly the right theatrical understanding and delicate sensibility to turn this engaging and highly political love story into a moving and dynamic piece of theatre.” Norris said The Remains of the Day is: “One of those stories that appear every now and again which seem, almost as soon as they’re written, to belong to the world. It has entered the bloodstream of our culture. To work with such extraordinary material is a great gift.”

The Remains of the Day is produced by Royal & Derngate and the touring company Out of Joint, in association with Oxford Playhouse. It opens in Northampton on 23 February 2019. Later this year, the Royal & Derngate will stage the world premiere of another bestseller, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.