Drowning by numbers

centrepiece

"I'm surprised when people say how well we've captured the book because that's not what tried to do." A strange thing to say about an adaptation of a classic but Nancy Meckler, artistic director of Shared Experience and co-director (with Polly Teale) of a triumphant staging of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss is bracingly unrepentant.

Neither this nor Shared Experience's previous award-winning adaptation, Anna Karenina, immediately springs to mind as ideal stage material, but the great strength of both productions is their genuine theatricality. The opening image of death by drowning is enough to banish preconceptions that theatre companies shouldn't meddle with novels.

Meckler understands that slavishly trying to act out every idea and moment of a novel is fruitless and bound to fail. They are two very different forms. For this company, irreverence is the key. "Our adaptations are pieces of theatre inspired by the original books. It's not a case of trying to decide which bits to take out and which to leave in, instead we go for dramatising one central theme. Other themes or ideas, however much you love them, if they don't fit with it then they can't be in there. Everything else falls by the wayside."

One of the more obvious problems with adapting this novel for the stage is the Floss itself. Rivers, drowning... how do you deal with that? Cynics have been happily surprised by the inventiveness of the staging which captures Eliot's powerful imagery underpinning the narrative. Helen Edmundson's adaptation focuses on the character of Maggie. To emphasise the character's complex emotional journey, Maggie is played by three different actresses. The production, first seen at the Tricycle, returns to London partly recast. The good news is that Helen Schlesinger, outstanding as the eldest incarnation of Maggie, is still there.

`The Mill on the Floss' , Lyric Hammersmith, from Tues (0181-741 2311)