The next interview in our stagey chat series is with Mark Giesser. Mark is the director and writer of The Devil May Care, which opens 8th January at Southwark Playhouse Borough. You can book tickets here.

Hi Mark, how are you doing today? Thanks so much for chatting to Stage to Page! Would you mind introducing yourself to our readers and telling us how you first got into the theatre industry?

Hi. I’m a British-American writer, director and producer, born in Texas and raised in various parts of the United States. After I completed a Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting, my wife and I found ourselves back in New York, and I decided to start producing and directing shows, first in Off-Off Broadway theatres. In a business that the Texan in me likens in its capriciousness to drilling for oil, this was the equivalent to picking up a shovel, digging a hole in your back garden and keeping your fingers crossed. Luckily, I progressed to larger-scale Off-Broadway productions. When we were able to relocate to London a number of years ago, I took up producing and directing Off-West End shows.

You're the director and writer of show, The Devil May Care, coming to the Southwark Playhouse Borough in January. Can you tell us about the story?

I based the story on George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, which debuted in 1897, and was Shaw’s first major financial success. Shaw set his play during the American Revolution, and essentially borrowed the core premise of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: a disreputable man decides to sacrifice his life in order to save the life of another, more virtuous man. In Shaw’s play, the virtuous man is a minister, and the rogue is mistakenly arrested in his place on a charge of treason. The minister’s wife is faced with the agonising choice of whether to reveal the rogue’s true identity and thus risk her husband’s execution. I’ve kept that core story, but set it in another time and place, consolidating and expanding on Shaw’s characters.

Can you describe your vision when writing and directing The Devil May Care?

Shaw’s original requires a large cast and can be economically challenging to stage in proper Equity productions in mid-size professional theatres. So as a practical matter, I wanted to explore how it could be streamlined in production terms. I also thought that the story could do well applied to a setting perhaps a bit more pertinent to the state of affairs in the modern world. Shaw used an historical mirror to explore the uses and abuses of British imperial power in his day. I wanted to find a different historical parallel, and did so in the pivotal turning point at the dawn of the 20 th century when the United States decided to become an imperial power. That decision played out most acutely in a war against Philippine independence, now referred to as ‘America’s First Vietnam’. Thus, The Devil May Care takes Shaw’s story from 18th century New England to the Philippines in 1899, and instead of being the underdogs of Shaw’s original, the Americans are the aggressors.

The show is adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. Is there an additional layer of pressure when adapting a book to both honour the original, while also making it your own?

Most definitely. Shaw is one of the greatest playwrights in the English language, and, as a New Yorker might say, it takes some chutzpah to tinker with his work. I’ve followed his story as closely as possible, and tried to preserve its dramatic/ironic tone. But translating his play into a very different setting inevitably required finding different slants in my equivalents for Shaw’s characters, and rewriting dialogue to fit accordingly. I haven’t yet been hit with a thunderbolt from the beyond, so I’d like to think that the iconoclastic and forward-thinking Shaw would be pleased with the re-purposing of his story for a different social and political era.

My blog is called Stage to Page. But if you could turn any book, from page to stage, what would it be and why?

There’s a beautiful short novel by Colette, The Cat. It’s a poignant, haunting story involving a promising marriage compromised by a relationship with a cat. This would be a tricky one to adapt seriously for the stage as opposed to, say, A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia, a romantic comedy about a couple and their poodle (played onstage by a human) or a musical spectacle like The Lion King. But the challenge in dealing with the dramatic and bittersweet nature of the Colette without turning the cat into an object of amusement is appealing. I did a successful stage translation of Chekhov’s short story The Lady With a Dog, so maybe it’s time to look at a companion species!

And finally, why should people book tickets to The Devil May Care?

It’s a fresh approach to a Shaw classic, and our top-notch cast, headed by rising television star Callum Woodhouse, will be more than worth the price of admission.

You can book tickets to The Devil May Care, here.