No one thought his metaphysical thriller could work as a play. But technology has made it possible. We meet Paul Auster as he takes a VR trip inside his own head – and recalls what he learned from Beckett while penniless in Paris

Paul Auster looks perturbed. We are standing in the foyer of Home in Manchester, where the author has just encountered a virtual reality presentation that accompanies the theatrical adaptation of his novel, City of Glass. The foyer installation transports you to a freakishly realistic 3D environment, in which you sit at Paul Auster’s desk, in front of Paul Auster’s typewriter, producing passages from Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy while snow gently falls indoors.

He peels off the VR headset and whistles. “Now that, as we say in New York, is some pretty weird shit.” Weird shit that he dreamed up in the first place, it’s worth pointing out. “Oh no,” he replies. “These guys have taken it way beyond the realms of my imagination.”

The guys he is referring to are 59 Productions, a team of designers, animators and videographers who were responsible for delivering the video content for the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. The company is renowned for its theatre collaborations with director Katie Mitchell in the development of “live cinema” performances, in which actors are filmed by on-stage camera crews in real time. Yet City of Glass, which has been developed with Home and the Lyric Hammersmith, is the first theatrical project that 59 has conceived from the ground up.

City of Glass review – Paul Auster's meta-mystery gets a stunning staging Read more

Leo Warner, the play’s director and 59 co-founder, explains that it was a longheld ambition to bring Auster’s oblique, metaphysical thriller to the stage – it was simply a case of waiting for technology to catch up. “What appealed to us was the fact that it couldn’t be done,” Warner says, “at least, not within a conventional theatrical framework. But, as videographers, we have arrived at a point where we can transform a stage environment to reflect the pace of Paul Auster’s ideas.”

Originally published in 1985 as the first volume of the New York Trilogy, City of Glass begins with one of the most potent opening lines of late-20th-century literature: “It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.” The scenario was inspired by a genuine crossed wire, in which someone phoned the author’s apartment, trying to contact a detective agency. Auster developed the narrative into a beguilingly original piece of pulp existentialism about a writer of cheap thrillers called Quinn, who is mistaken for a private eye named Paul Auster.

“The curious thing about Paul is that he doesn’t have an email address and communicates exclusively by telephone,” says Warner. “So I called him up and he invited me over to his apartment – which was weird because then I began to wonder if I had just spoken to Paul Auster on the same telephone that started it all.”

Auster gives his own recollection of that initial meeting: “It wouldn’t have been exactly the same telephone because I’ve moved to a different place,” he says. “But it was probably the same phone on which I received a call, some 10 years after I’d finished the book, from a complete stranger with a Spanish accent, asking if he could speak to a Mr Quinn. It just goes to show how books are never finished. They continue to write themselves in spite of their authors.”

Auster was impressed by the scope of Warner’s ideas but still considered City of Glass “an unlikely candidate” for the stage. As an occasional film director whose screenplays include Smoke, Blue in the Face and Lulu on the Bridge, it’s worth noting that Auster has never attempted to turn the New York Trilogy into a film. “People have tried,” he says, “but I think that – unless it’s science fiction – it’s almost impossible to escape the expectations of realism that a movie almost automatically establishes. It would take a remarkable director to do it justice. The strangeness of the everyday is very hard to capture.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The strangeness of the everyday is very hard to capture’ … City of Glass. Photograph: 59 Productions

The task of adapting the text has been undertaken by Duncan Macmillan. When we meet during rehearsals, the playwright is hollow-eyed with exhaustion and has begun to vanish behind an unruly beard that seems to have been grown in sympathy for Quinn’s increasing state of dishevelment in the novel.

A poorly two-year old is partly to account for his present lack of sleep, but that in itself has a significant bearing on his adaptation. “I first read the trilogy as a teenager in a very teenage way, as a cool, post-modern detective story,” he says. “But the way I interpret it now has very much been coloured by the experience of becoming a father. I’m struck by the fact that almost the first thing you learn about Quinn is that he has lost his wife and three-year-old son through some nameless accident, and has been practically sleepwalking through life ever since. The existential crisis he suffers takes the form of an almost trance-like state of grief.”



Does Auster recognise this interpretation of his book? “I’m certainly interested in how people’s response to it deepens over time,” he replies. “Losing a young child is probably the worst tragedy that can befall anybody. When my son was two, he nearly died of pneumonia. I found myself facing that reality just a year or so before I commenced writing City of Glass. I partly conceived the book as a kind of alternative biography of what might have become of me – if my son had died or I had never met my present wife.” (Auster married writer Siri Hustvedt in 1981).

I didn’t have the talent for playwriting. But to my eternal shame, Laurel and Hardy Go to Heaven did get staged

Before finding his metier as a novelist, Auster wrote poems and tried his hand at short plays. So is it possible to imagine an alternative universe in which Auster made his mark as an experimental New York playwright? “Oh I don’t think so,” he laughs. “I didn’t have the talent for it. But one of those plays did get produced, to my eternal shame and embarrassment: Laurel and Hardy Go to Heaven. It was about Stan and Ollie in the afterlife, piling up stones until they’ve built a wall between themselves and the audience. It was very heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett, of course.”

Auster has considered every dot and comma written by Beckett, as he edited 2006’s definitive, four-volume centenary edition of Beckett’s complete works. He even managed to meet the master at his Paris apartment in the early 70s, when Auster was scratching a living as a penniless translator of French poetry.

“We talked about the problems he was having translating his novel Mercier and Camier into English,” Auster recalls. “I told him how much I admired it before the conversation moved on to other things. Then, about 10 minutes later, he suddenly leaned forward and said, ‘Did you really think it was good?’ It seemed astonishing that my literary idol was genuinely anxious to know what this American kid thought of his work. But it proved to me that even Samuel Beckett suffered self-doubt as a writer, which was an incredible thing to learn.”

Is it possible, therefore, to perceive the stage version of City of Glass as a Beckettian parable governed by the absurdities of fate? Auster doesn’t seem convinced. “See – I’m not sure whether Quinn actually dies at the end,” he says. “In my mind, he kind of evaporates from the story.” But could it be that the ringing telephone sets in train the kind of uncontrollable, chance events that classical tragedians might have attributed to fate?

“I think I created a bit of a rod for my own back when, in the the very first paragraph, I wrote, ‘Later he would conclude that nothing was real except chance.’ Since then, the concept of chance has come to dominate discussions of my work in a way I don’t feel is entirely justified. So I have a new term for that now, which I would like to throw into the ring – the unexpected. This is really what I’m talking about: the infinite number of divergent possibilities that are pregnant at every moment of our waking lives.”

Such as walking into a theatre in Britain and being presented with a digital simulacrum of one’s own New York apartment? “Exactly.”

• City of Glass is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, from 21 April to 20 May. Box office: 020-8741 6850.