Charlotte Jones: A woman's work

Christopher Hampton, who wrote the book for Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage version of the classic film Sunset Boulevard, likened the process of working on a musical to "wrestling with elephants". Now, the playwright Charlotte Jones has stepped into the ring. Her pachyderm opponent is The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins's intricate Victorian potboiler of repressed desires, dastardly deeds, mistaken identity and madness. And by all accounts, it's been quite a fight.

When I meet Jones, she quips that she only got the job because Hampton wasn't available. In fact, her involvement is thanks largely to the suggestion of Sonia Friedman, who is producing the show in association with Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Theatre Company. Friedman co-founded Out of Joint, one of the UK's most important new writing companies, before moving into the commercial sector in 1998, and has always had a sharp eye for fresh dramatic talent. And in that department, Jones is eminently qualified. Her eye-catching 1997 debut play Airswimming was produced at the Battersea Arts Centre, directed by Anna Mackmin, whom Jones had met through her husband, the actor Paul Bazely. It was a watershed moment for both women: they went on to collaborate again on In Flame, which was a sell-out success at the Bush and transferred to the West End.

Then, while Mackmin's career continued to flourish, Jones scored her first major hit. She wrote Humble Boy, a moving an intelligent tragicomedy about Hamlet, beekeeping and astrophysics, with the actor Simon Russell Beale, whom she had never met, in mind for the lead role. Russell Beale was playing Shakespeare's Great Dane at the National Theatre at the time, and as luck would have it, Bazely was in the cast too. He passed his wife's script to Russell Beale, who loved it, and in 2001 Humble Boy opened at the Cottesloe Theatre in a production by John Caird that also starred Dame Diana Rigg. It was a surprise smash, went into the West End and catapulted Jones into a whole new league.

On the personal front, though, things weren't quite so rosy. Jones had recently endured an extremely difficult first pregnancy, and was finding motherhood very challenging. She was also struggling - and continues to do so - with the mixed critical response to her work. So when the call about The Woman in White came, it was something of a surreal moment. "My baby was only five months old and we were living in a tiny flat in Putney, with my desk in the front room. I was feeling quite depressed. And then my agent rang and said: 'Andrew Lloyd Webber wants to see you.' It was just one of those weird turns of fate."

That first meeting didn't go well. Jones's take on Wilkie Collins's 1860 classic is a radical one, and initially she was convinced that Lloyd Webber was appalled. "I think I was still quite hormonal," she laughs. "But I started telling him my ideas, and he just wouldn't look at me at all, and I thought, 'Oh God, this is so, so bad,' but I somehow couldn't stop myself." She got the job, though, and later discovered that she had misinterpreted the composer's behaviour. "I realise now that he's just very shy, and particularly shy of girls," she says. "Obviously he's worked with actresses before - and married one of them - but other than that, this the first time he's worked with a woman.

"I came to the whole thing with some trepidation, partly just because of how famous he is. But he's such a gentleman. And I really admire his process - I think he has real integrity. Sometimes I think, 'Why is he even bothering?' He has everything he could ever want. But he's still so driven to write music and tell stories and to be in theatre. I don't know how he does it, with all the knocks he gets. I hope this is well-received, not only for myself but more for him, because I think he deserves it."

Lloyd Webber's taste for high romance - reflected not only in much of his music, but also in his collection of pre-Raphaelite art - accounts to some degree for his decision to make a musical of Collins's novel. The book is widely regarded as the first example of Victorian sensation fiction, a genre that combined realism and domestic drama with more fantastical gothic elements. But it was originally serialised, and as a result is very episodic. The tale is also related by multiple narrators, each with their own viewpoint - and the plot is fiendishly complicated.

"I'd never read the novel before," Jones admits, "and I had to get through it in two days before my first meeting with Andrew, so it was a bit like cramming for my A-levels. I really enjoyed it, and found it a real page-turner, but I must admit I did think, 'Why on earth does he want to do this as a musical?' It presented loads of challenges in terms of honing it down and fitting it into a two-act structure. It's so intricate, and the plot often hinges on a letter or a piece of written evidence, or some peripheral witness. So it was quite a mathematical problem to make it linear, and to get rid of all those narrators but still retain that sense of uncertainty about whom we can trust, and to conjure that sense of spookiness."

The story begins with Walter Hartright, a young drawing master, travelling to a Cumberland mansion, Limmeridge House, to take up his new position as teacher of the beautiful young heiress Laura Fairlie and her plain spinster half-sister, Marian. On the journey he encounters a distraught young woman dressed entirely in white, who has escaped from a lunatic asylum and is being pursued. He helps her to safety, and, on arrival at Limmeridge, is startled by her resemblance to his lovely new pupil. He and Laura fall in love, but the social gulf between them means they cannot marry, and she must instead be united with Sir Percival Glyde. Laura and the devoted Marian move to Sir Percival's estate after the wedding, where they encounter the baronet's friend, the flamboyant Count Fosco, a grotesquely fat but oddly charismatic Italian who surrounds himself with a bizarre menagerie of small animals. Sir Percival's charming manner falls away to reveal a cruel and violent nature. The strange woman in white reappears, and Walter and Marian realise that if they do not solve her mystery, the consequences for Laura may be fatal.

Jones saw plenty of theatrical potential in the novel - and plenty more that she wanted to change. "I'm glad that it's quite a flawed classic - though of course there will be purists who say that's outrageous," she says. "But it means there's plenty of room for invention." Accordingly, she's toughened up some characters, done away entirely with others and made some drastic plot changes, though the thrust of story remains the same. Most significantly, though, she's placed the character of Marian at centre stage.

"The first line of the book says, 'This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve,'" she says. "I thought it should be the other way around. Marian behaves with such resolution - she's like a detective, trying to solve the mystery. But it's important that all the women in the story are subjugated at some point. In a sense, all of them are the woman in white - they have to repress their emotions or desires, or they're shut away, or drugged - and they're trying to break out of that, to break out of the white dress and have society listen to them. I don't know if what I've written is exactly feminist, but it's absolutely a very female response to the novel."

Collins specifies that Marian is ugly, going so far as to give her a moustache; Jones's script describes her as "dark, vivacious and attractive, although not conventionally pretty". She also gives Marian romantic ambitions, and has even added a seduction scene between her and Fosco.

"I find the way Collins describes Marian misogynistic," she says. "I think he de-sexed her in order to allow her to act bravely. But I felt she should have an emotional life as well. Apparently, Collins got lots of letters from readers of the book saying, 'Who is Marian based on? Because I want to marry her!' So in spite of the business about her being ugly, the character is incredibly sexy."

The casting of the role of Marian became a bone of contention among The Woman in White's creative team. Jones wanted the part to be played by the highly regarded actress/singer Maria Friedman (the older sister of The Woman in White's producer, Sonia), who's 44. She had the support of the lyricist, David Zippel, but the show's director, Trevor Nunn, as well as Lloyd Webber, wanted to cast a younger actress. "I really felt that Marian should be played by someone older," says Jones. "She's supposed to be on the shelf, but in the book she's only in her late twenties - that's just not credible today. And Maria is such a brilliant actress as well as a fantastic singer, and the part requires such enormous range. I couldn't think of anyone who would do it better." In the end, Jones got her way. Better still, Michael Crawford accepted the part of Count Fosco. "We were amazed that he wanted to do it, because Fosco doesn't come in until halfway through the first act and leaves halfway through the second, so it's not the lead role. But he was really passionate about it."

Another thing Crawford is passionate about, she tells me, is making the character every bit as outlandish as he is in the novel. "He's going to wear a fat suit - he'll be totally unrecognisable," she says. "He's so clever physically; he has an incredible lightness about him. And he's going to have a pet rat in a harness - he's worked in all sorts of little touches."

Crawford has a reputation for being extremely difficult - but Jones says she has seen little evidence to support it.

"I can see that he is exacting," she says. "He came up to me on the first day with criticisms of the script. He has to have everything just right and he has to feel comfortable. But he's actually very humble - very gentle, and quite giggly in rehearsals. And," she adds, twinkling, "my mum loves him too, so that's also good."

The presence of Crawford in the cast might suggest a link between The Woman in White and Lloyd Webber's earlier 19th-century love story, The Phantom of the Opera. In fact, the two musicals couldn't be more different. The score for the new show has a chromatic, Britten-esque quality totally unlike the more simply melodic, sweeping lyricism of Phantom. And, where Phantom has Maria Björnson's wonderfully overblown baroque designs, The Woman in White is getting an innovative, ultra-modern look from the award-winning designer William Dudley, noted for his hi-tech use of projection and computer imaging. Jones says his designs are "gobsmacking" and give the show a powerful emotional immediacy. "They stop it from becoming too much of a period piece - it feels very new and filmic and original."

Pundits have mooted The Woman in White, along with the forthcoming Mary Poppins and The Producers, as the possible commercial success that the ailing West End is waiting for. Let's hope they're right, and that the show's triumph is enough to convince Jones that wrestling with elephants is worth the battle.

'The Woman in White' previews from 28 August and opens 15 September at the Palace Theatre, London W1 (booking: 0870 895 5579)