Adapting Sovereign for the stage – meet Mike Kenny…

Our Press Officer, Steve Pratt caught up with Mike Kenny, who has adapted our community stage production of Sovereign… 

It began with a phone call while Mike Kenny was at Doha Airport during a stopover en route to a holiday in Thailand.

The-then Chief Executive of York Theatre Royal Tom Bird was calling to ask playwright Mike Kenny if he’d write the theatre’s forthcoming community play – an adaptation of C.J. Sansom’s novel Sovereign, one in the bestselling series of Tudor-set mystery thrillers featuring lawyer detective Matthew Shardlake.

Three or more years later Sovereign reaches the stage – not of York Theatre Royal but an outdoor stage at King’s Manor in Exhibition Square where key scenes in the novel take place.

“I had actually read the book and was a bit of a Shardlake fan. I would ask for the book at Christmas if a new one was coming out. The call to adapt Sovereign came out of the blue and that was great,” says Mike.

“The book was an incredibly good fit for a community production and large cast as it happens in York at a time the place was very crowded because of Henry VIII’s visit. The community cast can populate the city.”

Mike previously adapted York Mystery Plays for a community production and that came into play as he began adapting the book. “Henry had brought about great religious change, sacking abbeys and closing churches. York was a big Catholic city – and Yorkshire too,” he says.

“I wondered how the people of York felt about all that Henry had done. So I framed the play almost as one of the mystery plays with Henry becoming the head of the church and stepping into the role of God.

“The research into Tudor times had already been done by Sansom who created a twisty-turny whodunnit with a fantastic detective at its heart. The challenge was that it’s a very long read. With 700-plus pages you have to lose things when writing a play but it’s a whodunnit so you’re sometimes cutting out suspects and red herrings. You worry it will be obvious whodunnit so I had to make sure I kept the mystery going.”

With Fergus Rattigan and Sam Thorpe-Spinks filling the roles of Shardlake and his assistant Jack Barak, the gender balance was remedied by giving the bulk of the storytelling to a group known as the Guild Women of York – and, oh yes, having God played by a woman.

Sovereign is being performed on an outdoor stage at King’s Manor 15-30 July.

Tickets 01904 623568 | yorktheatreroyal.co.uk