Arvind Ethan David remembers the very first time he encountered Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “A copy was lying about in my grandmother’s house,” he explains. “I must have been about 12, and I distinctly recall going, ‘Can books do this?’”
Adams’s words, he says, “do something different to you”. “More than any other novelist, he reaches into your brain, sort of tickles it, and stirs stuff up.”
Flash forward several decades, and David, 50, is now an entertainment super-producer. And his latest project is a big one: transforming Hitchhiker’s, with its plotless absurdity and boundless ideas, into an immersive stage show. He admits it’s a massive undertaking. “Everything that makes Hitchhiker’s unadaptable in a traditional way, and everything that is problematic about immersive theatre … the two problems were answers to one another.”
Immersive theatre, for good and bad, is a leap into the unknown, a feeling any Hitchhiker’s devotee will be familiar with. First unveiled in 1978 as a radio sitcom, then as a book in 1979 (further films and TV series came later), Hitchhiker’s revolves most prominently around the intergalactic misadventures of Arthur Dent, a human rescued from oblivion on Earth and catapulted into the far reaches of space by an alien in a skin-suit named Ford Prefect. There is little linear plot from there, but lots of jokes and nonsense, along with interdimensional bureaucracy and relentless thirst for a nice mug of tea.
The stage show, David promises, covers all bases. Sanjeev Bhaskar and Tamsin Greig are among the names providing pre-recorded voiceover, while audiences become part of the action as they zip around the galaxy alongside Arthur, Ford, and depressed robot Marvin the Paranoid Android.
For David, the stage show is the latest in a nearly life-long quest to bring Adams’s work to audiences. While studying at Oxford University, he directed a production of Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and rang up Adams’s agents to let them know about it. The agents came, liked it, and told David that they’ll encourage Adams to come too.
Unexpectedly, Adams did end up attending. He was characteristically late (Adams had a slight issue with deadlines, or getting absolutely anywhere on time), but enjoyed it. “I was sitting two rows behind him, so I didn’t watch the show,” David recalls. “I watched him watch the show. He didn’t laugh for the first few minutes he was there. That was terrifying. But then, after about 10 more minutes, he starts to laugh. And we had dinner afterwards, and that started our friendship.”
Adams became a mentor, and David would go on to produce a TV adaptation of Dirk Gently for Netflix, and steer the reins of Adams’s legacy (he died in 2001 at the age of 49), producing radio adaptations, audio books and now theatre. It’s a role he considers an enormous honour. “The thing that defined Douglas was his curiosity and his disinterest in taking stuff at face value,” he says. “He was a guy who famously would get puzzled about light switches and bathroom taps, and needed to understand how they worked. He had to take everything apart and put it back together again, or sometimes fail to put it back together again. And that was very consistent in every conversation I ever had with him, whether it was about chaos theory, or the engine of a Porsche, or a vintage Bordeaux.”
David also hopes that the stage show will open Adams up to young audiences, much in the way discovering his work at 12 opened up his mind all those years ago. “Douglas has been on the GCSE recommended reading list for years, so tons of kids are still discovering him at 13, 14 or 15,” he says. “But the dream is to introduce him to new folks, too, who might read the book, or watch the film, or see the show, and then go – wow, I’d like to spend my life here.”
‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ runs at London’s Riverside Studios from 18 November, with tickets available here
