I’d wanted to write a play for a long time. When I write, I enjoy trapping my characters somewhere – inside a confession box, in a letter from which the letter-writer never escapes, in the prison of a fragmenting mind, in a spacecraft. So writing for the stage made sense to me and felt seductive; this small bit of super-charged square-footage. No room for slack or fluff. But a play about what? I needed an idea that had beautiful, elegant stage-worthiness. 

Then I read Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym – a novel of four characters set largely in a London office. A strange, delicate, sad, funny novel with an inherently stripped-back theatrical quality, because there’s something staged and caged about the quartet of the title – four lonely 60-somethings stuck at their desks. I saw them vividly, their office a stage set, becalmed still point in a fast-moving world. And, though adaptation hadn’t been on my mind, I thought: maybe this? 

Quartet in Autumn is Pym’s seventh novel, published in 1977 after a 16-year period in which Pym was deemed unpublishable. Its four characters, Letty, Marcia, Edwin and Norman, are on the cusp of retirement. In the course of the novel Letty and Marcia will retire, and this enforced change propels the story. It’s the mid-to-late 70s in London. All four are lonely, their lives are small, their jobs are meaningless but the prospect of retirement is worse, because then what? How to fill the time, and what of their relationships with one another, which are scrappy and uneasy and contingent on work but still, the most steady and robust relationships they have?   

Quartet had never been adapted for the stage and I had never adapted for the stage, so I found myself with complete imaginative freedom and complete beginner-ish cluelessness. It’s a crackling, funny novel and at one level joyful and natural to adapt – the crisp, fresh, funny dialogue, characters written with graphic clarity, simple but crafted scenes that mostly happen in one location (the office), the perfect specifics of time and place – luncheon vouchers, Cyprus sherry, Marcia’s ‘twenty thousand semi’, and an acute sense of 1970s London. There’s much office banter, in which everyone submits to the absurd, mildly offensive and passive-aggressive English habit of not ever saying quite what they mean. Jane Austen meets Philip Larkin meets Mike Leigh. Pym hands her scenes to you on a plate, and though the demands of the stage meant I had to rework, compress and reorder them, I used almost every one.  

At the same time, Quartet is introspective, delicate, melancholic and quiet, with no explosive plotting. It flows to a rhythm of scene/exposition/scene/exposition, where the exposition fills and deepens each of the characters and does so much heavy lifting. But what to do with it on stage? When Letty thinks Marcia looks like ‘a potto’ (a primate, sloth-like and huge-eyed), and in turn Marcia thinks Letty looks like ‘an old sheep’, and all the while they’re talking about tea, how to convey it?  When so much of the novel’s rocket fuel is the comedy and poignancy, the tragedy and redemption, that arises in these gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, how to traverse these gaps? It’s easy in a novel, you just say it. In a play you have to be far cleverer, and I’ve learned through multiple redrafts to have huge respect for this form and to disregard a lot of what I thought I knew about writing.  

In the first few drafts I went heavy on monologues and relied on them as an interiority hack, a novelist clinging for dear life to the tricks she knows. I knew this was unsatisfactory; it felt like cheating. I also knew there was something in the monologues that was an apt expression of the novel. I chopped them back and learned to rest more on gesture, tone, silence, costume, lighting, music, movement, to embrace the possibilities a play can offer and a novel can’t.  

The monologues we’re left with aren’t designed to be a sneaky chance for the characters to tell us the truth about themselves – this isn’t how Pym’s novel works. The characters don’t really reveal depth of feeling or being. They dance close to what looks like a truth, and then evade, avoid. The glimpses we get of their inner lives are of a kind of performance, and this is what I want the monologues to convey – the often-eccentric performance of self. The layers of appearances and manners we live by, the role-playing, the fear of leaving these roles. There are times in the play in which the characters speak over each other in monologue, or all speak at once in an indecipherable babble.  

One of the striking things about the novel is that all four characters live in the present with barely any back story or memories, which is part of what makes them so immediate on the page and so stage-ready. There they are, my four characters; the stage set, conjured by the play’s director Dominic Dromgoole and set designer Ellie Wintour, is an almost dreamlike sunken soft carpeted office with a beautiful background doll-house-like model of a London Street. There they are in all their tender, human, relatable ridiculousness. We can laugh, but not at them exactly - instead at the whole social context that’s brought them into being.  

In rehearsals recently someone commented that the play is, in a sense, four one-person shows which interact and overlap – I like that characterisation. Even in dialogue with one another, each of the four is enclosed. But they all want a way out. They blink baffled at their lostness in a world that rushes on without them. Pym’s novel leaves it for her characters to decide what freedom means to them, and in turn the play occurred to me as a kind of challenge to the characters – which of you will free yourselves of this set? Who will be defined by its confines, and who will take the exits offered?

Quartet in Autumn plays at the Arcola Theatre, London from 7 May to 20 June 2026.