“They never produce it exactly as I thought it would have done. Is he nervous about changes to his 1996 Smarties prize winner? It’s always a bit difficult because you never know until you sit down and it’s performed what is going to be different.” “I’ll see the play for the first time in about a month. But Daniel is very good at it and I have great confidence in him, otherwise I wouldn’t let him. “The big challenge is who I let adapt it, I have to careful.
So, is Michael nervous seeing one of his favourite books go to the stage?
Bertie promises to find the lion one day.įighting in France in the First World War, Bertie is reunited with the lion. When living in Africa, Bertie rescued a white lion cub, but was forced to part with it and the lion was sold to a circus. The book, first published in 1996, tells the tale of a young boy who runs away from boarding school and meets an old woman who tells him the story of the butterfly lion. He said: “Of all the books I’ve written it’s always in the top two or three of children’s favourites and I like what they like.” The prolific children’s author has written over 120 books and he was very glad when one of his favourites, Butterfly Lion, was chosen for a stage adaptation. Ages 8-12.Since his 1982 novel War Horse exploded onto the stage and subsequently onto the big screen, interest in Michael Morpurgo’s extensive back catalogue has sky-rocketed. But unless readers can picture ""the famous White Horse on the hillside at Uffington"" (an enormous, ancient image carved into chalky ground), they will have difficulty imagining an adult Bertie and his wife carving out a similar picture of the white lion or of blue butterflies alighting on it en masse to ""drink on the chalk face""-concepts critical to the book's conclusion. Magic enters the novel at an appropriate moment, and the conclusion is sweet. How did it come to be there? The old woman tells him the remarkable story of Bertie, who as a boy found a white lion in Africa and was later obliged to give him to a European circus. There, fed delicious scones, he looks out the window upon the hillside to see a huge shape of a lion, switching from white to blue.
and semolina pudding""), only to meet an old woman who invites him in for tea. A boy runs away from his strict boarding school (""It was a diet of Latin and stew and rugby and detentions. The story, about a boy who gives his white lion immortality, moves gracefully through frequent switches from past to present, from first to third person, from the English countryside to pre-WWI South Africa. Winner of a Smarties Gold Medal, Morpurgo's (The Wreck of the Zanzibar) cozy, well-executed British novel may not survive the jump across the ocean-the climax depends on a casual reference likely to be lost on American readers.
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