And he was not interested in the gender issue. His musical concept was to break up the text between three performers who take all the roles between them, turning the book's narrative monologue into dialogues. Luckily, Frost had already solved the first two problems in his mind before I started. Again, something that could be a lot of fun on film is too miniaturised to be viable on stage. It is an intricate, macabre machine, like a perverted notion of a doll's house, with its little pots of urine, burning match boxes, and labyrinthine mechanisms. Third, the wasp factory itself is bound to be a disappointment on any stage. Second, there are complicated issues of gender in the book that might work fine in a film, but as soon as someone sings, their gender is hardly in question. The Wasp Factory is about 95% first-person narrative in the head of the disturbed child protagonist, Frank. For a start, whereas novels frequently have a single narrative voice, a libretto needs dialogue between characters who exist in their own right. That was all the encouragement I needed to have a go. When composer Ben Frost was asked by the Bregenz festival to create a music theatre piece, he replied that he had always wanted to set the late Iain Banks's stunning 1984 debut novel, The Wasp Factory, but that it was impossible to make a libretto out of the book.
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