Boy Swallows Universe Playscript

By Trent Dalton and Tim McGarry

The bestselling novel, which has taken Australia and the world by storm, now comes alive onstage.

Brisbane, 1985: A lost father, a mute brother, a mum in jail, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious crim for a babysitter. It's not as if Eli Bell's life isn't complicated enough already. He's just trying to follow his heart and learn what it takes to be a good man, but life keeps throwing obstacles in his way - not the least of which is Tytus Broz, legendary Brisbane drug dealer.

Soon Eli is beset by chaos on all sides, and a run-in with the local crime king and his henchman launches the 13-year-old with the old soul on a journey to find out what kind of man he is going to be.

Adapted by Tim McGarry from Trent Dalton's smash-hit novel, Boy Swallows Universe is an exhilarating story of magic and madness, of beauty and brutality, of joy and heartbreak, and of the power of love to triumph over the darkest of circumstances.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: May 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781460715017

Trent Dalton

Trent Dalton is a two-time Walkley Award-winning journalist and the international bestselling author of Boy Swallows Universe, All Our Shimmering Skies, and Lola in the MIrror. His books have sold over 1.3 million copies in Australia alone. He lives in Brisbane, Australia, with his wife and two daughters.

Book preview

CONTENTS

Foreword by Sam Strong

Writer’s Note

Characters

Prologue

Act I

Act II

About the Authors

Praise

Copyright

FOREWORD

by Sam Strong

A published version of a dramatic text is both a beautiful and a strange thing. It’s beautiful because it gives permanence to something that might otherwise remain ephemeral. The worldpremiere production of Boy Swallows Universe closed in Brisbane in October 2021. Since then, it lives most vividly in the memories of the forty-odd thousand people who saw that initial sold-out season. Thanks to this publication of Tim McGarry’s adaptation of Trent Dalton’s novel, it now lives on for others to read.

A published text is also a strange thing because, in the theatre, words on a page are a starting point rather than an end. For a director, texts are something to be transformed into shows through all the means at the theatre’s disposal: actors, sets, costumes, lighting, sound and music, video design, fight choreography, movement direction and, of course, audience involvement.

Recognising this duality, I want to try here to bridge the gap between the published text and the show and give readers a sense of the theatrical choices that were inextricably linked to the development and realisation of the script they’re about to read. Happily, this also involves telling the story behind the adaptation, taking readers inside the process of how Trent Dalton’s novel ended up on stage.

The story of the adaptation begins in mid-2018. At the time I was the artistic director of Queensland Theatre, entrusted with the privilege of deciding which shows the state theatre company would produce each year. Tim McGarry, an artist I knew to be an astute adaptor of texts for theatre, had got in touch to talk about adapting a novel called Boy Swallows Universe. Tim had read the book before it was published, spotting its potential and falling in love with it in the rarefied air before it became a smash hit.

Like Tim, I devoured the book quickly and loved it immediately. It helped that the story had particular resonance for me. Like Eli Bell, I came of age in the late 1980s and early ’90s, including spending summers in Brisbane as that city was coming of age. The work also sat squarely within my directorial wheelhouse. Adaptations of Australian coming-of-age novels had emerged as a de facto specialisation, with theatrical versions of Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones and Colin Thiele’s Storm Boy among my more cherished shows.

Given that I was reading the novel with one eye on a stage adaptation, it’s not surprising that what struck me most forcefully was how theatrical Boy Swallows Universe already was. Trent’s larger-than-life characters felt like they belonged on a stage. His talent for creating memorable set pieces (like Tytus’s eightieth birthday) or retina-burning images (such as Eli and Frankie on either side of the prison door) also lent themselves to threedimensional realisation. Finally, Trent’s ear for dialogue meant that lines could be lifted directly from the novel. Not only that, but his lyrical flair would sit comfortably on the stage, a medium more accommodating of the poetic than the screen.

In November 2018, Tim, Trent and I met for the first time. So began the nearly three-year process of creative development on the text published here. In the first instance, this involved Tim and myself (and occasionally Trent) working through multiple drafts, exploring what to include and exclude from the five-hundred-page novel. As you might imagine, this was a little like trying to decide which child to abandon. How could deftly intertwined subplots be unthreaded? How could cherished characters be excised? How could favourite turns of phrase or delicious period details such as Gray-Nicolls scoops or Dunlop KT-26s be left out? Notwithstanding Tim’s peerless sense of the essential and Trent’s generous licence, an early draft clocked in at two hundred pages and took five hours to read with actors.

Over the next two years, the adaptation was pared down to the version you see here. This became an increasingly collaborative process. As more and more artists took up the storytelling load, Tim weaved his adaptation around their contributions. So, moments that had previously been embedded in the text or stage directions were left to other members of the creative team – actors, set designer, movement director, video designer – to shape. A case in point was the use of ‘direct address’, when Eli talks to the audience. In more exhaustive versions of the script, much more of the first-person narration was included. As it became clear that Joe Klocek and the rest of the cast and creatives could tell the story in other ways, it was pared back. This process accelerated during workshops with the cast. Finally and crucially, due to the restrictions on interstate travel we were blessed to have Tim as a full-time presence throughout the rehearsal and preview period. The process of evolving the text continued even beyond the opening night of the show. Not only that, but it will continue after this publication, when the production tours the rest of the country.

What I hope is clear by now is that the whole adaptation process was guided by one unifying idea: to add theatrical value. Naturally, fidelity to the source material was vital. It goes without saying that we saw ourselves as channelling the spirit of, and doing justice to, a novel that we all loved. But that wasn’t the end of the matter. Our job was also to transpose the novel into the key of theatre. That meant embracing the unique possibilities of the medium in which we were working. If we weren’t telling the story in a way that only the theatre could, then we weren’t doing our job.

The first way we added theatrical value was in our approach to casting. A critical through-line in the novel is Eli’s preoccupation with what makes someone – including himself – a good or bad person. We wanted to sharpen this theme by embodying it in the actors themselves. Hence, from the earliest workshops, Anthony Phelan played both Slim Halliday and Tytus Broz, and Joss McWilliam played both Alex Bermudez and Iwan Krol.

Another means of transposing the novel into the key of theatre lay in our treatment of trauma. At its core, Boy Swallows Universe is a novel about love’s capacity to heal damage. To bring this preoccupation into sharper focus, we set about creating a theatrical vocabulary – a visual, aural and physical style – for the experience of trauma. As we were building the show, this came to be known as the ‘trauma arc’. The trauma arc unified and stretched across Eli’s past and present, from the childhood experience in Robert’s car (as reflected in the magic car dreams), to his conversations with the voice on the red telephone, to his finding Lyle’s head in the bunker, and to what happens when he loses consciousness after his finger is amputated and after he is stabbed by Iwan Krol.

Moreover, the progression of the trauma arc is from innocence to understanding to transcendence. When we first encounter the magic car dream, it is not necessarily disturbing, and its geography