Philip Pullman and Nicholas Hytner: Enter the daemons

The National Theatre is being accused of blasphemy for producing an adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy at Christmas time. Aleks Sierz talks to Pullman and the director Nicholas Hytner about the difficulties of the project

Philip Pullman has no intention of being the next Salman Rushdie. As his bestselling trilogy, His Dark Materials, is staged by the National Theatre, headlines have been grabbed not by the artistic endeavour of dramatising the epic, but by accusations of blasphemy. Catholic and Protestant groups have criticised the timing of the show, with a spokesman for the Church of England saying: "Given that Christmas is a major Christian festival, His Dark Materials wouldn't seem an obvious choice."

This sounds odd until you examine the books of the trilogy - Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass - more closely. They tell the story of two special children, Lyra and Will, on their quest for Dust, which has the power to dissolve universes. For them, it's a coming- of-age adventure: before they arrive at the republic of heaven, they have to deal with a repressive church, and with a parallel world inhabited by rebellious angels and soul-eating spectres. In the end, an aged god dies.

Rupert Kaye, the head of the Association of Christian Teachers, sums up the argument against the show: "Pullman sets out to undermine and attack the Christian faith. His blasphemy is shameless. This production is in poor taste, given the timing and the content. Teachers should steer clear." As a Christian teacher, he sees the books as "anti-Christian propaganda" aimed at vulnerable youngsters; a kind of literary child abuse.

He also shrewdly points out that Pullman "is not bold enough to list Allah among the names attributed to the Authority," and suggests that "this omission signals the author's attempt to insulate himself" from the risk of a Rushdie-style fatwa. This barb refers to the passage in The Amber Spyglass where an angel says: "The Authority, God the creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adoni, the King, the Father, the Almighty - those were the names he gave himself. He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves."

But Pullman has no patience with this kind of criticism. "Yes, I missed out the name Allah, but I also missed out Dieu and Gott," he says acidly. When asked if he's afraid of doing a Rushdie, he replies: "Okay, right, the next time it's reprinted I'll include the name Allah." He also points out that "he didn't call himself Allah - that's just an Arabic word for God. The names I give in the passage are just as offensive to Muslims, I hope, as they are to Christians."

As you'd expect from reading His Dark Materials, Pullman - a slim fiftysomething former teacher - is hot on the history of religion. The title itself is a quotation from Book II of Milton's Paradise Lost. "But the point is," he stresses, "that the Muslim tradition follows on from the Jewish and Christian tradition and uses the same basic myth, which comes from the same monotheistic origins. All the other names I list cover Allah as well."

The trilogy is not so much a teen cult as a big industry. The books may have sold millions of copies, winning prizes and plaudits galore, but their story has taken on a life of its own. Pullman himself read the audiobook version, then it was dramatised by Lavinia Murray for Radio 4 in January (available on CD or cassette) and now Lyra's Oxford, in which Pullman maps his heroine's home town, is in the shops. A film, with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard, is in prospect and, in the meantime, you can see the stage version at the National.

Pullman, the first children's author to win the Whitbread Book of the Year prize, has distanced himself from the film, but takes a more hands-on attitude to the two plays - adapted by Nicholas Wright, whose version of Chekhov's Three Sisters was a hit earlier this year - that make up the stage version. He's attended rehearsals and speaks warmly about "the good work of the two Nicks", meaning the director Nicholas Hytner and Wright.

Hytner, the suave head of the flagship theatre, says: "I genuinely believe that teenagers ask the big questions we have no time for in the rest of our lives." As Lyra and Will go into battle against ultimate evil, they meet angels and armoured bears, and each has a "daemon", a shape-shifting animal who might be an owl one minute or a fox the next. Try finding a theatrical way of doing that.

Staging this epic has itself been an epic task: it has taken 18 months to put together, has a cast of more than 30, and stars a former James Bond - Timothy Dalton - and Patricia Hodge, as well as younger actors Anna Maxwell Martin as Lyra and Dominic Cooper as Will. It has been hyped as the most expensive show ever at the National, but the truth is rather less spectacular. Hytner says: "The cost is a little more than Anything Goes and less than My Fair Lady, so that's two plays for the cost of one musical. The figure on our budget is £850,000."

The project has not been without its hitches. Although the two plays are sold out, the 20 December press night has been delayed until 3 January and some preview performances have been unseasonably cancelled due to "insuperable technical difficulties". Hytner candidly admits: "When I took this on, I thought it was unstageable. Now I know that we can do it - but we need more time to get this hugely ambitious production right. With hindsight, I should have scheduled more time. I apologise unreservedly to the people we have had to turn away."

Since being appointed as artistic director last year, Hytner has been looking for an epic, and Pullman's trilogy fits the bill. "It's good for the National to do," says Hytner. "We can never get the mix right of shows for everybody, but this kind of project is something we can do and hardly anybody else can. And there's a tremendous hunger for this kind of theatre when it's done right. I really wanted us to be doing ambitious and intelligent plays for older kids."

Certainly, staging His Dark Materials has been a mammoth effort, and Pullman, as much as anyone, has been on a learning curve. "The astonishing thing for me is to see how skilfully they can represent a book that takes 35 hours to read aloud - I know because I have done it - in six hours of theatre." But was it hard to let go of the story? "Oh, you already let go as soon as you finish the story and show it to someone else," he says, "whether it's your wife, or your publisher. You can't predict or determine their reaction. You wouldn't want to. That's not what reading is about."

After praising Wright's adaptation, Pullman says: "Reading is about the mind of the reader meeting the book and making something of it. But it's also about handing over, or saying, 'Well, I've told a story, now you see what you can do with it.'" For these reasons, he's comfortable with the idea that the trilogy's most obsessive devotees, its teenage readers, might be disappointed that the theatre version differs from the book.

Hytner agrees, suggesting that theatre is more like reading than watching a film. "Films tend to fill in the gaps and leave nothing to the imagination," he says. But theatre offers "a different but equivalent imaginative conspiracy" with its audiences. Teenage literary boffins will just have to accept that their favourite epic can change shape as fast as any daemon.

Hytner adds: "I have very little patience with the idea that adaptation is an inferior form of art. The proof of the pudding is always in the quality of the experience you're having in the theatre. Those who reject the idea of adaptation reject almost all of Shakespeare's work."

Pullman also stresses the fact that, while "previously the trilogy has been about the one mind and the one book communing in solitude, now it's going to have a different dimension". He's excited by the prospect of having "a live audience there, a conscious presence, all united, all following the same thing, whose feelings amplify each other's. It is something that has not been done before with that particular story. But where better to do it? With all the resources of the National."

Does he think the moral debate at the heart of the story will come across on stage? "I don't know," he says quietly. "I'm not being evasive. I just did not think in terms of the moral debate, but thought of it in terms of the story." He's wary of encouraging any one interpretation of his epic's meaning. "If I were to say this, rather than that, I think it would shut off a lot of the interesting reactions to the book and this is the last thing I want to do."

Pullman adds: "I'm just a storyteller, and what I want to do is to tell a story that engages the audience in ways that we ourselves can never predict. The storyteller is the last person to ask what the story is about."

But, surely, he can't shirk responsibility for the way that staging His Dark Materials over Christmas might offend believers? Pullman's response is swift. "This the National Theatre, not the National Christian Theatre. Our country contains not only Christians, but Muslims, Jews and a very large number of free-thinking humanists and agnostics. We all have the right to get our story told at the National. If they want the theatre to put on a Christian story, they should write a good one."

He's exasperated by puritanical zealots. "My response to them is: have you actually read the books? Well, they haven't; they're just reacting to what they think is in them because they've heard somebody else talk about them. If they read them, they would find that the virtues that the books celebrate are love, courage, compassion, intellectual curiosity and kindness. And the books condemn cruelty, intolerance and fanatical zealotry. Once they've read the book they usually have little to quarrel with, but these people do love a quarrel."

Actually, Rupert Kaye stresses the fact that he has read the trilogy from cover to cover. His soft-spoken, mild and reasonable manner is not what you'd expect from a zealot. He's no ranting Paisley. Earlier * * this year, he wrote a long review of His Dark Materials, arguing that Pullman's aim was "discrediting Christianity, undermining the Church and attacking God".

However allergic to religious fundamentalism he might be, Pullman is also conscious of its appeal. "It is very exciting to think that we live in a world where people are constantly assailed by the temptations of the Devil, and that if you go this way, you go to Heaven, but if you go that way, you go to Hell. Everything is an issue of life and death. This is very dramatic, Technicolor, 3D excitement."

Although Kaye is no killjoy puritan - his website lists his pleasures as Star Trek, bowling and vegan food - his conclusion is: "I am unequivocal; I would like to see Pullman's trilogy removed from every primary school in the land." And, moreover, "where it is available to young people of secondary age, I suggest that there is a responsible Christian teacher on hand who can answer the myths and misconceptions peddled".

It is Kaye's idea of banning the work to protect tender minds that most angers Hytner. He says: "It fascinates me that somewhere deep in the bones of religious fundamentalists is the urge to ban. Over the centuries that has not been bred out: it's hard-wired. I have no problem at all with fundamentalists taking offence at Philip's construction of a very beautiful and profoundly good mythology. If they find his ideas heretical, that's fine. Let's discuss it. But the notion of banning is completely unacceptable."

Kaye points out that in a poll on his association's website, 38 per cent say that the National is wrong to stage His Dark Materials over the Christmas period. But the show is selling well. "We are not a church. It's not the business of the National to celebrate Christmas," says Hytner. "Nor is it our business to celebrate the bring-and-buy commercial festival that Christmas has become. But the winter holidays are a very good time to do big shows because people like going to the theatre then. Winter is a very good time for the theatre."

Pullman, whose fiction has also angered members of the church in Oxford, where he lives, is unrepentant. He says: "It is an accident of history that we live in the West at a time that allows a multiplicity of voices to be heard. If you look back at history, at the Inquisition or at the Puritans, our time is a tiny window that is open-minded and free. Tolerance is a wonderful privilege. We all know about the Taliban, so we should not relax our guard."

You can see Pullman's point: not all of the criticisms of His Dark Materials have been rational. He even says he's been accused of evoking Adolf Hitler. "Somebody said that the children in my book are a sort of Hitler Youth and that they want to destroy everything that is old. Now, that's simply misreading the book."

What is in the book is the idea of weak and elderly god "crying like a baby and cowering" and "demented and powerless". This, according to Pullman, is simply a symbolic ending for an old idea of God. "It is time that this old idea of God died. And he dies in the book with a sigh of exhausted relief; he knows it is time to go. There is no point in keeping him alive. It is too miserable for everyone. It would be interesting if intelligent members of the church, the thoughtful Christians, could see that."

Ironically, the best allies of those who want to discourage pupils from seeing the show are the education bureaucrats. Pullman, who has worked with companies such as the Unicorn Theatre, is irritated by schools who don't do enough to encourage children to go to the theatre. "I saw something in the newspaper the other day where a teacher said that to take children to the theatre, first they have to drum up the money and the enthusiasm, and arrange for cover and transport, and then they have to fill in forms. Basically the bureaucratic hurdles they have to negotiate to get children out to a life-changing experience are colossal."

Pullman says: "Nick Hytner has also heard from teachers who complained that taking time out of teaching meant that schools risked falling down the league tables. This is a terrible culture we've got ourselves in. All wrong."

Still, those children who do make it to the National are in for a treat. More adult minds might wish to ponder that His Dark Materials also marks a break from the theatre's tradition of staging work at Christmas that evokes an Edwardian or nostalgic past, as in Alan Bennett's adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, which Hytner himself directed. In contrast, Pullman's epic - like this year's other National hits such as Jerry Springer: The Opera - has its sights firmly set on the future.

'His Dark Materials' is at the National Theatre, London SE1 (020-7452 3000; www.nt-online.org) to 20 March