The Talented Mr Ripley
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PHYLLIS NAGY, AUTHOR OF THE STAGE ADAPTATION
Phyllis Nagy was born in New York City and has lived in London since 1992. She studied musical composition and theory, as well as poetry, planning to be a poet, but a tutor persuaded her to write drama.
Her first play was Plaza Dolores, written for a workshop run by a friend and producer in a small theatre in Vermont. She then began writing Butterfly Kiss but it was altered over a period of four years before it was produced at a workshop in a professional Los Angeles theatre in 1990. Her late 1980s play, Girl Bar, was not immediately popular, until a successful Los Angeles production in 1994.
In 1990-1991, the playwrights’ group to which Phyllis Nagy belonged, the New Dramatists of New York, was given money by the New York Time Foundation for exchange visits with the Royal Court Theatre in London. Through this programme Nagy visited London for two weeks in 1991 to give a reading of her play, Awake. She then returned to New York and completed the play, Weldon Rising. In February 1992, she revisited London and Stephen Daldry, artistic director at the Royal Court Theatre, arranged for Weldon Rising to be put on jointly with the Liverpool Playhouse.
Her plays, including Weldon Rising, Butterfly Kiss, Disappeared, The Strip and Never Land, have been produced throughout the world and have received awards including the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award, a Mobil Prize, a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Eileen Anderson/Central Television Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a McKnight Foundation Fellowship. Nagy is currently under commission to the Royal Shakespeare Company, Nottingham Playhouse and the Royal Court Theatre, where she was recently writer-in-residence. The Talented Mr Ripley premiered at the Palace Theatre, Watford in October 1998.
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH, AUTHOR OF THE NOVEL
Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921 and moved to New York when she was six. In her senior year, she edited the college magazine, having decided at the age of sixteen to become a writer. The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955, was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll by the Mystery Writers of America and introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, who was to appear in many of her later crime novels. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995, aged 74. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously.
Highsmith is no stranger to having her work adapted. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was made into the famous film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The Talented Mr Ripley – the first of the five Ripley novels – has been adapted twice; by René Clément in 1959 as Plein Soleil, and then by Anthony Minghella in 1999 with an all-star cast including Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett.
Highsmith maintained that she did not mind filmmakers freely adapting her novels, yet some of the final movies did not live up to expectations. What particularly rankled Highsmith was the fact that filmmakers seemed unable to grasp the underlying themes of her novels: the interrogation of identity and the questioning of popular morality. Had Highsmith survived to see Minghella’s film and Nagy’s play, she may have felt differently as at the end of both, Tom Ripley walks free, while in Clément's Plein Soleil he is arrested for his crimes. Highsmith found the denoucement of Clément's film disappointing, saying that "it was a terrible concession to so-called public morality that the criminal had to be caught."
"So much of what occurs depends upon how behavioural nuance or gesture is received
by the novel's characters – and thus Highsmith provides the literary equivalent
of 'reaction shots' throughout her work”
Phyllis Nagy
