City of Glass, Paul Auster’s meta-detective novel about a thriller writer who finds himself playing sleuth, will be staged in Manchester and London next year in a new hi-tech adaptation. It is the first theatre show originated by 59 Productions, whose projects have included the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, the V&A exhibition David Bowie Is and the sound-and-light spectacular Deep Time at this year’s Edinburgh international festival.

The book has been adapted by Duncan Macmillan, who says he first read it as a teenager and was “dazzled by its formal innovation and sheer weight of ideas. For such a short novella, it buzzes with thoughts about literature and authorship, about identity and time and death and faith, all within a mystery story that deconstructs itself as if it’s been corrupted by a virus.” City of Glass, published in 1985, became part of Auster’s New York Trilogy, hailed as a sophisticated take on the genres of both crime and city fiction. Auster himself appears as a character – believed by the narrator to have “behaved badly” throughout the novel – and it is stuffed with references to Cervantes and Edgar Allan Poe.

Although another version of City of Glass was performed off-Broadway earlier this year, in a show by Untitled Theater Company No 61, the American author’s novels have been seldom adapted for stage or screen. The look of 59 Productions’ version has been inspired by a graphic novel based on City of Glass, by David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik.



Leo Warner, the founding director of 59 Productions, says the company has become used to “combining projection with architecture in a series of increasingly visible public commissions, designed to communicate grand narratives to audiences, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands. Now we are bringing the same techniques and the same grand themes back inside the theatre, at a human scale, building a production in which text, performance, technology and design are developed and interwoven around a single, lonely human figure.”

Macmillan says that Warner’s vision for the production uses “technology that has, as far as I’m aware, never been used on stage before, and has meant that I can write stage directions that would otherwise be impossible to achieve. That’s really freeing as a writer. Many of my stage directions start with the word ‘impossibly’. And then Leo reads it and says, ‘Great!’”

City of Glass is at Home in Manchester from 4-18 March 2017 and then at the Lyric Hammersmith in London, from 20 April-13 May. An international tour will follow. Next year marks Auster’s 70th birthday and the publication of his novel 4 3 2 1.