Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day to be adapted for the stage

Playwright Barney Norris will collaborate with the Booker prize-winning author on a production opening in Northampton in 2019

Twenty-five years after it was made into an Oscar-nominated film, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day is to be adapted for the stage. Ishiguro will collaborate on the adaptation, by playwright and novelist Barney Norris. It will tour the UK after its world premiere at Northampton’s Royal & Derngate in February next year.

Ishiguro won the Booker prize in 1989 for his poignant novel about a journey undertaken by an English butler, Stevens, who looks back over his life in service at Darlington Hall. It became a film in 1993, produced by Merchant Ivory, and earned eight Oscar nominations. Anthony Hopkins starred as the butler and Emma Thompson played Miss Kenton, Darlington Hall’s former housekeeper, with whom Stevens is reunited. The novel was inspired by PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and, more surprisingly, as Ishiguro explained in an article for the Guardian, by Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and the Tom Waits song Ruby’s Arms.

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