How screenwriter Sarah Phelps adapted JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy for TV
“I was very straight with Jo and told her that I needed to write a different ending,” says the former EastEnders writer. "What works in a novel doesn’t always work on screen"
The three-part television drama is a co-production between the BBC and HBO. Rowling took an executive-producing role, but was, says Phelps, “exceptionally generous” when it came to surrendering her story for adaptation to the small screen (by contrast, she was known for her hands-on approach with the Harry Potter films). “I know that when I hand over a script to a director, it’s a bit like watching your kid go off to school and hoping nobody’s going to beat them up in the sandpit, and it must be the same for an author.
“I met up with Jo in Edinburgh to talk about the book, writer to writer. I told her what I thought the book was about, which characters really leapt out at me, and how I might shape the series and she just said, ‘Great. That’s your job.’ She read the scripts as they came in and commented appropriately, but I had a great deal of freedom. I suppose, having seen Harry Potter adapted, she must be used to it, but it still meant a lot that she trusted me just to get on with it.”
It’s easy to see how Phelps would win Rowling’s confidence. Down to earth and hyper-articulate, she shares the writer’s passion for social justice and, like Rowling, found professional success relatively late in life: “I came to scriptwriting in my mid-30s. Before that I looked after polo ponies at Ham Polo Club, worked in pubs, worked in kitchens, went to university and worked in telesales, which I was crap at – I used to ring up and pitch to my own answer machine 20 times a day.”
While working as a dresser at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Phelps responded to a BBC initiative to find new writers and went on to write more than 50 episodes of EastEnders (including the return of Dirty Den and his final demise) and the First World War drama The Crimson Field.
“There’s always an excitement about finding that shining thread that runs through a story,” says Phelps. “In the case of The Casual Vacancy, I think it’s the character of Krystal. She’s a 16-year-old who’s doing the job of 20 people. She’s the carer for her heroin-addicted mother and her infant brother and she’s really bright and really damaged.”
If Krystal is the poster girl for marginalised youth, Pagford is an unlikely microcosm for all society’s ills. “I love Jo for speaking up when people need to be spoken for, and sometimes, when you think about things in microcosm, they become more true,” says Phelps. “If you try to be universal, you’re going to miss every target you aim at, but by focusing on a tiny community you can sometimes land the bigger punch, just by letting the characters talk for you.
“We think a lot about the problems affecting urban communities, but there is a really important story in what is happening in the countryside. Once upon a time, it was where food got grown, but its whole function and purpose has changed. Who is it there for? Who lives in it? How are they to live, when there is no industry? People have become nasty to the vulnerable, to those living in a precipitous situation, and we need to think about these things."
As you might expect from Cranford-meets-EastEnders the opening episode is a slow run-in: “You’ve got to meet everybody and there’s a hell of a lot of information to take in,” Phelps points out. “You’ve got to let the thing breathe; it can’t be like the beginning of Star Wars, where you read pages and pages of setup.”
We meet the Pagford community reeling from the sudden death of a town councillor – the empty seat on the council is the casual vacancy of the title. But it’s not a murder mystery; the councillor died of an aneurysm. The plot turns on the ramifications of what that loss means to every single person who knew him. “Of course,” says Phelps, “the real ‘vacancy’ is death itself, and that remains the deepest mystery there is.”
