Samantha Harvey on Quartet in Autumn: ‘It’s a crackling, funny novel and joyful to adapt’

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.