The final words of Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing With Feathers are “Unfinished. Beautiful. Everything”. So it has been for the slender novella, about a father and his sons grieving the loss of their wife and mother. Somewhat improbably for an experimental hybrid of poem and prose featuring a giant talking crow, Porter’s debut has not only been a massive success, but has continued to evolve. Since it was published a decade ago, it’s been translated into 36 languages and adapted for stage and screen, including a theatre show starring Oscar winner Cillian Murphy and a film starring Benedict Cumberbatch, due for release later this year.
The book’s latest evolution is an Australian stage adaptation, premiering at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre this month. There have already been five stage productions, and a dance adaptation and Slovenian puppet version are on the way; an opera is in development.
All this seems remarkable to Porter. “You know, Grief was not even a publishable proposition to most people that looked at it first,” he says.
Porter was more aware than most debut writers of the odds stacked against his novel: he was working in publishing when he wrote it, and keenly aware how his book’s fragmentary narrative and experimental prose – which the Guardian described at the time as “a freewheeling hybrid of novella, poem, essay and play-for-voices” – was risky. Then there’s its dense threading of literary references and allusions – and the anthropomorphic crow, inspired by Ted Hughes’ 1970 poem cycle Crow.
Porter wrote Grief in the gaps of a busy life working in publishing and fathering two young boys, inspired by his experience of losing his father as a child and by his relationship with his brother. In the story, a writer and his two young sons grappling with fresh grief are visited by a human-sized talking crow, who takes up residence in their flat and assumes the role of therapist and babysitter – or as Porter has described him, “Lady in Black and Mary Poppins, analyst and vandal”.
The story chimed with readers, finding an audience as much through personal recommendations as through rave reviews and awards (including the £30,000 International Dylan Thomas prize). Dua Lipa, introducing the novel to her book club audience in April, described it as a “lyrical, surreal meditation on loss” that simultaneously broke her heart and made her laugh.
Reflecting on the enduring appeal and many adaptations, Porter says: “I guess the imaginary crow and, you know, the everlasting conundrum of human grief, is enough for people to want to play around with still.”
Most authors are happy to leave adaptations to others, approving the parameters of the project and then stepping away. Not Porter: he likes to muck in. “I’m 98% collaboration,” he says – perhaps surprisingly, given he’s published four books in the last decade, and just finished his fifth. “Like, occasionally I will find myself on my own, needing to get some work done, but generally I want to be working with others.”
He sat in on early workshops of the Irish stage version with Cillian Murphy and director Enda Walsh, attended a work-in-progress showing of the dance version premiering in Birmingham next year, and has had several chats with the Belvoir team over the show’s long gestation.
That’s not to say he’s proscriptive about adaptations: “I always say this: the book is yours. It’s supposed to be fluid and pull-apart-able,” he says. “It’s a book with lots of white space so that the reader can do that work, anyway. You know, it’s your flat, it’s your sibling relationship. It’s your crow.”
But for Porter – a 43-year-old who converses with the enthusiasm of a preteen boy – discussing his work with other artists and storytellers is energising. “I had a Zoom chat with [Australian director Simon Phillips] the other day, and it was like, right into the belly of the thing – right into the syntax of it, and the meaning behind some of Crow’s language and some of the dad’s material. And I was like, this is right back to being interesting again for me,” he says.
The Belvoir production, co-adapted by Phillips with lighting and set designer Nick Schlieper and actor Toby Schmitz, will feature video, illustrations and a live cellist on stage. Schmitz, playing both Dad and Crow, says the production is infused with the make-believe spirit of theatre and child’s play. “Sleight of hand, misdirection, all the old theatre magic tricks come into play. Can a blanket be not just a blanket? What can a feather be? … There’s something incredible about the suspension of disbelief in theatre.”
Schmitz, who also works part-time in his family’s bookstore in Newtown, heard about Porter’s novel from customers long before he read it: “People are always asking for it,” he says. “The book is so magnificent, the text is so unique and delicious … I think it lends itself wonderfully – quite effortlessly – to performance.”
He relates to the character of Dad, a “literary boffin type figure”, as both an author (his novel The Empress Murders was published in May) and a father – at time of speaking, juggling rehearsals with the whirlwind of school holidays. Crow is something more mysterious, however – “full of infinite possibility,” he says. ”I’ve been swinging from Mary Poppins to Tom Hardy thuggery.”
Porter, who will visit Sydney for the play’s opening, says he’s excited to see what the Australian team have made of his novel.
“I think I find something different every time,” he says of the story’s various iterations. “It’s still interesting – it’s not like a piece of dead, old, early work. For me, it feels like a living, breathing proposition still, that keeps moving.”
Grief is the Thing with Feathers is on at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, 26 July to 24 August
