Adaptations from literature are thriving in theatre, but how do you stage Flann O'Brien's 'The Third Policeman', a world where none of the rules holds good? Blue Raincoat takes its own route into the cult novel, writes PETER CRAWLEY.

EARLY IN 1940, Brian O'Nolan, a man of many pseudonyms, had an idea for "a crazy play". It was a comic tale of murder, philosophy, molecular theory, eternal damnation and rampant bicycle crime. Sufficiently pleased with the plot, the writer began to pitch it in earnest in 1942, telling Hilton Edwards, then director of the Gate Theatre, about a piece of theatre involving "horrible concepts of time and death that would put plays like Berkeley Square into the halfpenny place".

As it turned out, Berkeley Square's position would remain unchallenged. The writer better known as Flann O'Brien or Myles na gCopaleen never got around to his crazy play and so The Third Policemanfound no more success on the stage than it had as a book. Rejected by Longman's, the publisher of his debut novel At Swim Two Birds, The Third Policemanwent back into his drawer and
O'Brien later claimed that the manuscript had been lost. Though it now holds a special place for fans of cult literature (and lately for bewildered viewers of the TV series Lost) he never saw it published in his lifetime. It's sad to reflect that, when The Third Policemanwas faced with the axiom "adapt or die", O'Brien chose the latter.

Lately, however, the revivifying potential of theatrical adaptation has become a thriving industry. In recent months, the Irish stage has abounded with transpositions, translations and versions, with prose works by Roddy Doyle funnelled into performance pieces; Nicolai Gogol's short story The Noseblown into a full stage version by Performance Corporation; the Beckett Estate loosening the taboo of transposition to allow Gare St Lazare Players to enact First Loveand The End, while the Dublin Theatre Festival was so alive to the trend that it featured a programming strand dedicated to adaptation entitled Off Book, where Gavin Kostick's recitation of Heart of Darknesscould sit alongside Elevator Repair Service's astonishing, marathon F Scott Fitzgerald adaptation, Gatz.

As the Blue Raincoat ensemble gathered in the sepulchral Factory Performance Space in Sligo to rehearse Jocelyn Clarke's fittingly dark and disorienting adaptation of The Third Policeman, they settled into a wide phenomenon with a growing army of adherents. Theirs is not the first adaptation of The Third Policeman, an honour that fell to Eamonn Morrissey in 1974, but Blue Raincoat has taken its own distinct route into the world Flann O'Brien created – a world, he wrote, "where none of the rules and laws (not even the law of gravity) holds good", and "there is any amount of scope for backchat and funny cracks". A world, in short, that sounds like an adapter's playground.

A VISITOR TO The Factory could be forgiven for thinking that Blue Raincoat’s production, first staged late in 2007 and toured last year, required little more than a warm-up before it arrives in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre next week. But as director Niall Henry halts scene after scene, and Sandra O’Malley’s hobbling narrator and Ciarán McCauley’s wounded Old Matthers repeat the precise gestures and rigorously controlled movements which are the company’s stock-in-trade, everything becomes a study in minute detail.

Some rules may not hold good – time still bends into improbable shapes, scientific principles are stretched towards absurdity and somebody somewhere is doing unspeakable things to a bicycle – but here the rules of adaptation are carefully fathomed and meticulously obeyed. “We don’t need to see every thought,” Henry cautions at one point during the narration, occupying a position somewhere between watcher and reader. “We’ll make our own minds up about it. Let me imagine it.”

Blue Raincoat is no stranger to seeing literary words made flesh. Nearly 10 years ago, in the company's earliest collaboration with Jocelyn Clarke, highly physical adaptations of Lewis Carroll's novels Alice in Wonderlandand Alice Through The Looking Glasswere created – productions that provided their bold physicality with an invigorating textual underpinning.

"There are certain texts that suit going slightly off piste, if you like," says Niall Henry, on a break from rehearsal. "Fantastical texts that give you an umbrella. [Eugene Ionesco's] The Chairsis fantastic. Alice in Wonderlandis fantastic. And Flann O'Brien is like that. They all have complications where they seem to be normal at the outset, then they all go off into their own wonderlands. Straightaway it demands more than a normal narrative: you have to go somewhere else."

There are, Henry agrees, certain liberties that an adaptation allows. “With a dead white guy, you can do what you want with the book,” he says. But the process of transposition goes beyond merely circumventing authoritarians (a dead white guy’s estate can be equally protective) and sets up more stimulating challenges, one that ask theatre-makers to think differently.

When I asked Jocelyn Clarke how Blue Raincoat settled on the idea of adapting The Third Policeman, he said, "Niall and I were looking for something that would be really, really hard. Something that would really test our mettle." The Third Policeman, in other words, demands problem solving. "It's a very tricky book and it veers off in all kinds of different directions," says Clarke. "It's wilful and errant and falls apart and remakes itself."

Yet, as Flann O’Brien recognised, there is something inherently theatrical about it: a gallery of striking, absurd figures; a startling vision of an existential eternity that is still somehow recognisably Irish; and a nameless narrator who, though putatively a man, is played here by Sandra O’Malley. “For some strange reason it seemed right,” says Henry recalling a breakthrough in an original workshop when O’Malley donned the hat of the protagonist. “It hit a balance between light comedy and impending tragedy. It caught the oddity of the world.” With a man in the role, he recalls, “it all seemed so bloody real. And the tone of that book is what you want to get. There’s something theatrical in the tone.”

Clarke, who has adapted a series of works from literature, interviews and documentary sources (most notably for Anne Bogart's SITI company in New York) sees both theatre in O'Brien's book and a corresponding demand for theatrical ingenuity in its staging. Yet some texts he finds almost dramatically inert and he seizes an initially surprising example. "The story of Emmais not interesting [on stage]," he says of Jane Austen's much-adapted novel, which, in the theatre, tends to result in scenes transplanted from dances and carriages directly onto the stage. "You have to find another story to tell," he contends. "The book is a metaphor for something else. Once you make those sorts of decisions, adaptation becomes about something else. It's translation, transposition and ultimately transformation."

IT'S A SCHOOL of thought echoed in Gatz(on which Clarke was "dramaturg by phone") or Katie Mitchell's Waves, in which a book's literary qualities are not only the least interesting thing to an adapter; they can also be a hindrance. "It has to engage in three dimensions," says Clarke. "One doesn't want the sense of seeing a book on stage."

It is a little jarring, then, that this is precisely what you see in Blue Raincoat’s production: a giant book, positioned centre stage, which Jamie Vartan’s design has rendered as both a dais for the performance and an oracle to be consulted. Although there to accommodate what both Clarke and Henry described as “the de Selby issue” – namely the inclusion of O’Brien’s ludic philosophical footnotes, so beloved by fans of the novel — it is a clever concession not only to the play’s provenance, but also to the phenomenon of adaptation which the production furthers.

“Ireland at the moment is going through a period of adaptation and translation,” says Clarke, “either of European works or works that are not originally for performance. And what that really is about, I would argue, is a process of orientation: How do we figure out where we’re going next with the theatre?”

For the Blue Raincoats, who are already developing a new adaptation of O'Brien's At Swim Two Birdswith Clarke (which will be "completely unlike The Third Policemanin every way," he assures) they are soon returning to the library and its rich world of possibility. "Apparently there is no limit," as one of Flann O'Brien's characters puts it. "Anything can be said in this place and it will be true and will have to be believed." That sure sounds like theatre to me.

The Third Policemanruns from Feb 16-28 in the Project Arts Centre, Dublin. There will be a post-show discussion with Jocelyn Clarke, Niall Henry and members of the cast on Feb 24.