As his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Twisted Tales opens at the Lyric Hammersmith, Jeremy Dyson explores his love of the author most famous for his children’s books:
It was all my mother’s doing. Watching her on a sunlounger pulling a series of faces, each one more extreme than the last, as if the pages she were reading were slapping her when she turned them.
I recognised the name on the front of the book. Of course I did. He was the first writer I had ever connected with, admired for what, in adulthood, one would call his ‘voice’. A child does not talk about books or writers in that way. He just knows what he likes. And I liked Roald Dahl. More than liked. Adored. The mischief. The danger. The wickedness. I read Charlie And The Chocolate Factory first. It had communicated more to me about the experience of poverty than every Blue Peter appeal combined. Then onto the savage grotesquery of James And The Giant Peach and the alarming moral outrage of The Magic Finger.
But here I was, ten years old and my mother was reading a book by Roald Dahl. Not a children’s book. I could tell that much from the black cover, the tiny typeface and oblique title, Kiss Kiss.
“What is it?” I asked, intrigued.
“Oh, it’s not suitable for you,” she said.
That was enough of a lure for me to keep going.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s horrible.”
But the fact she kept turning the pages told me it couldn’t have been that horrible.
“What kind of horrible?”
She put the book down, gave me a dark and delicious look.
“It’s about a brain,” she said. “A brain with an eye.”
Well, of course, that was it. I would just have to read it for myself, even if it meant stealing it from my mother’s bedside. Which I did. My next run-in with these adult stories came a couple of years later. There was much trumpeting of a new TV series which was about to begin, Tales Of The Unexpected.
I was buying my own books by now so when I saw the TV tie-in edition with its lurid red cover it was a compulsory purchase. Oh how I was hooked. I devoured it in one go. They were like perfect jokes with fantastic punchlines. Or even better, magic tricks whose mechanics were so intricately concealed that the surprises at the end seemed to arrive from nowhere.
But there is a secret about Dahl’s short fiction. In a perceptive essay about Alfred Hitchcock, the American academic Mark Crispin Miller decries the faint praise Hitchcock was so often tarnished with in his lifetime, ubiquitously described as being ‘the master of suspense’. Miller says that this is a bit like referring to the painter Turner as ‘the seascape wiz’. Dahl, too was often diminished as being the master of the twist in the tale as if this were all his stories were doing. But if that were the case, once the twists were known there would be little reason to return to them. Yet I would read them again and again and again. Yes, the sickening inevitability of their climaxes was part of that, but I was enjoying so much more. The sly black humour, the vivid locales, the brilliant characterisations, the same x-raying of flawed humanity that I cherished and recognised from his children’s books. In short he was a brilliant writer whose utter accessibility, clarity and lack of pretension would deny him a literary status in his lifetime.
I have Polly Findlay to thank for enabling me to spend intimate time with these stories once again. It was her long-cherished dream to bring them to the stage and I was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time. It was a joy to meet somebody who loved the stories as much as I did and it has been fascinating to lift the bonnet on their engines in order to dramatise them. Spending an extended period of time with each one has reminded me what a formative influence Dahl was on me and how much my own short stories owe to his. I am also amused to find my fascination with that very first story I encountered remains undiminished. It occurred to me what an apt metaphor it was for the writer’s lot; a detached brain with a lone observing eye, surveying the world around it.
Perhaps what is most impressive and most unusual about Dahl is that he was a writer with two careers, one after the other. Everybody knows about the second one, but the first deserves equal celebration. What a singular brain and what a penetrating eye.
Jeremy Dyson
Adaptor of Roald Dahl’s Twisted Tales