Here’s the conclusion of my conversation with The Talented Mr. Ripley playwright Phyllis Nagy.
Photo of Karl Miller by Clinton Brandhagen
Jacqueline Lawton: The Talented Mr. Ripley, adapted from the novel written by Patricia Highsmith, is a brilliant psychological thriller set in lush Italy in the 1950s. What compelled you to write this play?
Phyllis Nagy: I was commissioned to the write the play by Giles Croft at the Watford Palace Theatre (UK) in the late 1990s, after he’d been appointed artistic director there upon leaving the National Theatre’s literary office. Giles had been a friend for some years, and as such he knew of my friendship with Pat Highsmith, whom I’d met in New York in the late 1980s. I almost did not take on the adaptation because of that friendship. I had already written drafts of two Highsmith adaptations, both for film, both of which were undertaken with Pat’s blessing. Those were easy. Ripley, on the other hand, was as daunting a challenge as anything I’ll ever undertake. I kept hearing Pat’s complaints about Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train as I adapted Ripley. In retrospect, I’m pretty happy that I ignored her voice but was still pleased to have its malevolent joy in my ear while I wrote.
JL: Throughout the play, we see Tom – a charming, amoral, sexually ambiguous conman and occasional murderer – constantly re-invent himself/his past and attempt to control his dreams. Ultimately, he is confronted by his past, the truth of who he really is, and learns that he can never return home to America. With all of this, why do you feel that audiences/readers root for Tom?
PN: Tom Ripley gives an acceptable voice to the transgressor in us all. He does this in an under-the-radar way that naturally appeals to that big closet within which we all hide our most awful impulses. He “passes” for all the things he is not, right out there under clear skies, bright sunshine. He’s urbane, good looking, sexually undetectable to the naked eye. What’s not to root for? But when the dust of his actions settle, do we still root for him? Should we? That these questions largely remain unanswered accounts for Highsmith’s brilliance in charting the course of this darkest heart. Keep them guessing always works.
JL: Which aspect of Tom’s character do you most relate to? What aspect of Rickie’s character do you most relate to? Then, of course, there’s Marge, who loves Rickie, unrequitedly, do you see yourself in her at all?
PN: I most relate to Tom’s lack of genuine insight into his true calling. The quest for insight keeps him a murderer in the same way it keeps me a writer. Rickie has a superficial social effortlessness that I’ve always envied for about ten minutes at the start of every party I’ve attended. He’s a person who gravitates to the center of each circle. I’m a person who gravitates to each corner I encounter. Marge presents a pleasant, deceptive surface and has more balls than any other character, including Tom. Because she understands her own heart and follows it, however reckless or headlong, into potential oblivion. Marge is a natural gambler. Gamblers don’t care about losing, they care about playing. That’s what I most relate to in her. Would that I had her ability to swim canals and climb psychological blocks in order to communicate the purity and intensity of her feelings for those she loves.
JL: What was the most challenging part of adapting The Talented Mr. Ripley into a play? Which character’s voice or situation was the most difficult to capture?
PN: Several things. The trickiest was translating Pat’s structural obsessions in a way that did not take me outside of my own structural obsessions. For as interested in psychological progressions as Highsmith was, as a novelist, she’s far more interested in linear progression than I am as a playwright. More “natural” adaptation fits for me would be novelists like Nabokov, Amis, Hawthorne – The Rhapsodics, as I dub them. So this was difficult. But as soon as I understood that Pat’s odd literal interests were as fluid as they were, as watery as they are, this became much easier. I could then approach the composition of this piece of writing as I approach every other piece of writing – as a sort of symphonic mess for multiple instruments.
Then there was the excavation of the novel’s subtext – Tom’s relationship to his kin, to his sexual identity, to his own self-hatred – all of these things are what truly make theatrical adaptations work. The stuff that’s written yet not explicit in the source material. In this case, for instance, there are casual mentions of his childhood rearing – fascinating, tantalizing. And that is where Aunt Dottie came from. Tom is very much the product of his genes, though his narcissism would never allow for that thought to emerge in the forefront of his mind.
And lastly, I endeavored for the dialogue of the play to allow an audience of Highsmith fanatics to believe that they are hearing her voice whilst hearing mine. (Yet another instance of “doubling” surrounding this play) In a rare display of immodest behavior, I’ll step out on that limb and say that I think I’ve succeeded in this. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single line from the novel in my adaptation, yet I believe Pat’s voice is everywhere, like a virus or a spreading infection. And I think she’d laugh and raise a glass to me for comparing her to a virus.
JL: You handle the element of time in a very exciting way in this play. There are moments when Tom is placed in two different timeframes at once. Can you talk about how this developed for you?
PN: As I struggled with how best to make theatrical the absolute void of a personality schism that is Tom Ripley, the simplest idea – rendering the metaphor of duality in literal, visceral terms – became the best and only choice. So often, writers complicate things in an attempt to complicate their writing. The easiest way to build complexity is to choose simplicity. This is something composers understand much better than writers. You build a song, a sonata, note by note. Not idea by idea. Same with plays.
JL: The play is performed by seven actors, with five actors playing all of the characters in Tom and Rickie’s world. How did you decide which roles would be doubled? Was this something you knew would happen at the very beginning of your writing process?
PN: This was always the plan, in keeping with the doppelganger imagery (people and places– complex geography, indeed) that runs right through the novel. The doubling in the play is purposeful, not random, and this is precisely how Tom Ripley himself would “see” these characters merging, becoming a blur of white noise in his fractured mind. And remember, Rickie is Tom’s double, too. In Tom’s mind. The entire cast of characters is duplicated in one way or another. I also tend to “see” things in duplicate. So it’s a natural state of being for me.
JL: What surprised (continues to surprise you) you about The Talented Mr. Ripley? Whether it’s the audience response or your own response when you see it?
PN: The honest answer to this is that it is a constant surprise to me that I am as fond of this play as I am. I have a complicated relationship to my adaptations, which includes an unhealthy dose of Tom Ripley’s own barely suppressed self-loathing. But Ripley is very much my own, and in this way, it honors Pat Highsmith’s blazing talent and memory in a way that I never feel the other adaptations quite manage. This is the closest I will get to living in another human being’s mind.
JL: What next for you as a writer?
PN: I’d like to take a break from writing in the next two years and focus on directing. But that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen, with two original screenplays and a screen adaptation of a non-fiction book I’ve just optioned filling my mind with images of not meeting deadlines so that I can then go on to direct the damned scripts. That’s always the way, though. Fear of not doing something keeps me doing it. I’m also finally ready to write a new play, which fills me with both dread and optimism.
- Jacqueline Lawton
The Talented Mr. Ripley is onstage at Round House Theatre Bethesda September 8 through 26, 2010.
Jacqueline Lawton is a member of Round House’s Artists’ Roundtable
