AND IT WILL HAPPEN TO YOU

Joan Didion's memoir about trying to come to terms with her husband's death has become 'the indispensable handbook to bereavement'. Then her 39-year-old daughter also died. As The Year of Magical Thinking comes to London, David Hare describes n Saturday's Guardian the challenge of bringing one writer's grief to the stage.

Picture above of Joan Didion an Vanessa Redgrave by Brigitte Lacombe, also from The Guardian.

It sounds odd maybe, callous even, to say that the 18 months I spent preparing and directing The Year of Magical Thinking were professionally among the happiest of my life.

I do remember that when I was first approached by the American producer Scott Rudin in November 2005 to direct a play Joan Didion was interested to write based on her hugely successful book, a couple of friends began to look at me sideways. Was I sure? Did I really want to let myself in for such a long time addressing such forbidding subject matter? It was easy enough to spend a few hours reading a book about death which you could let flop in one hand while nursing a scotch in the other.

But how would it be to spend months in the gruelling Broadway system - endless previews, needless hysteria, erratic critics - in the company of a 72-year-old first-time playwright whose agony of grief was plainly so raw?

Click here to read the full story..........

And here is my post on A Year of Magical Thinkng from April 2007.