There's a heart-wrenching scene in EB White's much-loved book, Charlotte's Web, where Charlotte (a spider) tells Wilbur (a pig) that she's going to die. I wish I could quote it. But, after having the fear of God struck into me by the American lawyers who control the rights to the book, I daren't even paraphrase it.
When I started writing my new play, Notes to Future Self, I had no idea what a sticky, tangled web I'd find myself in.
The play was a commission by Birmingham Rep which would, under the auspices of the Barry Jackson Trust, tour schools and community centres as well as theatres. I knew from the start that I wanted to try to write something similar to the books and films I'd loved when growing up. Going West, Watership Down, Bridge to Terabithia, Mama's Going to Buy You a Mockingbird, Why the Whales Came, The Cay, My Girl – and, yes, Charlotte's Web – so many of the stories that I loved, sobbed over, read or watched again and again, were about a best friend or parent or sibling who dies, and how the other characters learn to cope. They were my first understanding of what literature can do, and how strongly it can affect you, letting you experience, safely, bereavement, grief, learning to live again.
I wasn't surprised to learn that it's very common for terminally ill children to ask for these stories. I discussed this at length with my sister, who is training to be a palliative care doctor; I read a lot of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and Cicely Saunders, and my play started to take shape.
Which is where the problems began. In a key scene, the child asks her mother to read from Charlotte's Web. Shortly after finishing the first draft, I read Myra Bluebond-Langner's book, The Private Worlds of Dying Children, in which she talks about the popularity of Charlotte's Web: for some, it was the only book they would read. That was one of those rare moments when you know you're instinctively and emotionally on the right track.
And then, on the day rehearsals started, we were denied the rights to use the two-paragraph extract in performance. I pleaded, begged, described the importance of the scene, sent the script to the lawyers working for the big American film corporation who control the rights to the book. I emphasised that I was willing to pay whatever the rights cost. They remained obdurate. I panicked. All the research I'd done, the conversations I'd had, confirmed that the scene was absolutely necessary. Of course, copyright law exists for a reason, but the strictures seemed excessively harsh: how could a regional theatre production in the UK impact adversely on the fortunes of a film released five years ago? The more I tried to solve the problem, the more tangled the web became. It can take weeks, months, to secure a copyright. The only way of circumventing it is to use a book by an author dead more than 70 years, which rules out most of the ones I considered. I reworked the scene to use Margery Williams's The Velveteen Rabbit, only to discover I'd miscalculated my dates: the copyright still has two years to run. Oscar Wilde's stories were too explicitly Christian. White Fang doesn't actually die; nor does Black Beauty. I tried using the passage in Homer's Odyssey where Odysseus's faithful dog dies, but it didn't work. Nor did Dickens's Little Nell, The Secret Garden, Peter Pan. A few people suggested Beth's death in Little Women, but I thought it too on-the-nose: it's easier to discuss animals dying than people.
Eventually, in desperation, I wrote a version using Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. I expected it to be far too sentimental. But when we tried it out, it worked: the key was to play against it, to make the character reading it aloud cynical of it, to make sure it was undercut and work in jokes. In the end (well, I would say this, but even so) it works better than the Charlotte's Web version on many levels: perhaps simply because I was forced to work harder on getting that scene right than any other in the play. But I'm still left perplexed and frustrated with the draconian copyright laws. And I think they do a disservice to EB White and his estate, the worth and importance of which I was paying homage to.
