The unassuming man at the end of the eighth row slipped quietly from his seat during the final applause for the sold-out performance of "His Dark Materials" at the National Theater. But he didn't get far. This was Philip Pullman, 57, who wrote the thrilling books on which the play is based, and he was quickly waylaid by a crowd of young readers who seemed unable to believe their luck.
"His Dark Materials," which began as a trilogy of young-adult novels with extravagant themes but humble commercial expectations, has turned into a serious international phenomenon and bestowed on its author the sort of celebrity that prompted him to move to a house with an unlisted address. The books, luminous adventures that address life after death, religious faith and the complicated intermingling of good and evil, have been translated into 37 languages and sold more than 7 million copies in Britain and the United States alone.
Anyone who has seen the "Harry Potter" or "Lord of the Rings" movies, or even just noted their success, can guess what is happening now: the books are being moved into position as the next blockbuster fantasy franchise. In London, the National has staged a lavishly ambitious, sold-out, $1.4 million, two-part, six-hour adaptation. And New Line Cinema, which released the "Lord of the Rings" mega-movies, has bought the rights to Mr. Pullman's trilogy and hired Tom Stoppard to write the screenplay.
But "His Dark Materials" is a far more challenging proposition than its cinematic predecessors, and not only because of the complexity of its philosophical and scientific underpinnings. The books make a breathtakingly subversive attack on organized religion and on the notion of an all-powerful god. The trilogy has already been criticized by church organizations alarmed at its preference for humanism and for its depiction of a cruel fictional church that is obsessed with what it regards as the sexual purity of children but blinded by its own lust for power. Among other things, the books feature a church-sponsored prison camp for kidnapped children, a pair of renegade male angels who are touchingly in love and a god who is ancient, weak and exhausted, yearning more than anything for the merciful release of death.
A movie director will be hired in the next month or so and filming should start in about a year. With a skittish eye, perhaps, on the power of religious groups in the United States, New Line's executives say they will probably insist that the books' repudiation of religion be softened into more of a meditation on the corruption of power in general. Mark Ordesky, executive vice president and chief operating officer of New Line Productions, said in an interview that "the real issue is not religion; it's authority - that's what's really the driving issue here." . . .
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/arts/theater/25LYAL.html> ***** -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>