A huge cast of characters moving between two different worlds makes The Crock of Gold an adventure to adapt for the stage, director Fiona Buffini tells Sara Keating.

'A leprechaun has to have a crock of gold so that if he's captured by men-folk he may be able to ransom himself," reasons the leader of a band of leprechauns in James Stephens's novel The Crock of Gold.

The disappearance of their personal crock initiates a spiralling plot, in which Stephens illustrates a prophetic understanding of some of the central problems of contemporary life. As Storytellers Theatre Company marks its 20th anniversary with a stage-adaptation of the book, the contemporary timeliness of Stephens's forgotten classic is at the centre of the production's mind.

A combination of superficial whimsy and allegorical fable, The Crock of Gold is a highly theatrical, superbly visual book. However, with a cast of characters that includes a pair of philosophers, three massive naked men, four inept policemen, six clans of fairies and 200 Shee, imagining the story being played out on stage seems almost as big a task as putting it there.

The possibilities for staging the book have been unfolding in British director/adaptor Fiona Buffini's mind for almost 15 years, and as The Crock of Gold opens at the Olympia Theatre this week, she waits to see if her seemingly impossible vision will succeed on the modern stage.

For Buffini, the whole process of bringing the book to the stage has hinged on a central question: 'What do we need to tell this story?' The densely plotted novel needed to be pared back to its essence. "I tried to do a synopsis for the actors and I got as far as page two, but it was just a job of editing, really. Seventy per cent of the dialogue is Stephens. He writes quite exquisite dramatic scenes, and all the characters are articulate, so that everyone from the philosopher down to the tinker woman can express what they think of the world and how you should live."

Essentially, however, The Crock of Gold "is a book of journeys, the two big journeys being the Philosopher's journey and Caitlin's journey, two journeys of self-discovery and self-realisation, with the plot of the crock of gold itself woven into that. They are the main threads and I've tightened up the structure so that the storyline becomes very clear."

Even so, "in the first five minutes of the play there is a double marriage, a double birth and a double suicide, which is death by gyration. It's an adventure from beginning to end."

Sitting down with the design team for an initial consultation, Buffini was confronted with the same set of questions all over again, namely, "this is unstageable; how are we going to stage it? How are we going to find a set that facilitates a really fast-moving narrative that goes from enclosed spaces [the cave, the cottage in the wood, the prison] to the wide open spaces of the hills? How can we create the sense of the Philosopher's journeying? How will we get to the city at the end? How can we stage Gods? How can we stage leprechauns? How can we create the sense that the characters are moving between two worlds?"

THERE WERE NUMEROUS danger zones too. "You can't do children falling down a hole into a new world under the ground. You amass a crowd of 200 on stage for the play's finale." Then there was the issue of stage nudity, which "only ever takes an audience out of the play".

And, most particularly, there were those leprechauns again: "when Stephens wrote the book in 1912, leprechauns had a meaning which has totally changed now. Now they're a Carroll's-giftshop-thing, little clowns, little gnomes. But they're quite malevolent in the story; they are elemental beings, beings of the earth. We had to think very hard about that and find a way to bring them back to a place where the audience can see them and their world afresh."

Although Stephens describes them dancing "with tall green hats that wobbled when they moved", Buffini believes that including such detail "would actually stop people from receiving the story". The question, then, was "How much do we need to give the audience for this to work?"

The answer was more simple than the numerous potential problems would suggest. Like Buffini's adaptation, it involved scaling the story back to its simplest possibility on the stage.

Here, the intrepid ingenuity of Kathy Strachan's costume and design, Ian Scott's lighting and Conor Linehan's evocative score, proved crucial.

"The design has no walls at all but there's this huge walkway at the back so that you get this idea of journeying. It's a static set in which everything can take place, depending on how you light it. There's going to be sunset, sunrise, twilight, daytime, the interior places and wide open spaces suggested. We wanted to leave something to the audience's imagination, so they'll be filling in the gaps.

"Really great theatre has the audience sitting forward and they're drawn into a world because they're supplying a lot of that world in their own imagination. If it's done well, all you have to do is give the audience enough of a signifier and they can do all the colouring in themselves, and they're more actively involved in the production. That's theatre at its best: when your imagination, your intellect and your heart are awakened again, invigorated."

The "wonderful thing", Buffini insists, is that this idea of the theatre really marries with Stephens's own artistic philosophy. "He was such an advocate of the imagination."

THE CENTRAL FIGURE in the play is the Philosopher, "a magnificent, if slightly faded, intellectual", who in fact serves as a vessel through which Stephens could exact his own philosophical and political vision. Stephens "believed very firmly that a writer shouldn't be known by his life. He should be known through his work and he shines through this book."

The Philosopher allowed Stephens to stage intense debates on human needs and social justice that reflected his own firm socialist and pacifist beliefs. The book reflects "his intense curiosity about the universe, but it's not didactic, not preachy. It's very earth-bound as well as inhabiting the world of ideas and it's also completely accessible because it's a really good story. It's easy to swallow because it's so funny."

The novel doesn't upbraid us, then. Instead it "reminds us of how amazing we can be."

Meanwhile, looking at the book anew on stage reminds us of how amazing Stephens's imagination was, not least in its fusion of a wicked sense of humour with deeply held political beliefs that resonate today.

The Crock of Gold "rails against modern life and social injustice. It rails against the life that people were living in the city, how community was no longer an important thing in people's lives and how Ireland was becoming more and more materialistic and individualistic. The things Stephens is saying in his novel are even more important now, and so the city that we're taken to at the end of the play is a modern city, and the sounds that you'll hear are the sounds of the city outside, the Luas and the traffic."

While the Philosopher doesn't know what to make of it, Buffini hopes above all that a modern audience will. "I don't know whether we've pulled it off. And I won't know until it's in front of an audience." The whole thing, she concludes, "is an act of faith".

The Crock of Gold opens at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, Mar 15