Adaption Rights

We represent a considerable roster of screenwriters and novelists whose works are available for stage adaptation (opera, musical and theatre). Please see below for our featured titles this month.

For further information and a full catalogue of available titles please contact Sissi Liechtenstein

Astray by EMMA DONOGHUE

Antichrist by LARS VON TRIER

M by FRITZ LANG

Frog Music by EMMA DONOGHUE

Ronia The Robber's Daughter

With the turn of each page, the characters that roam across these pages go astray. They are emigrants, runaways, drifters; gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross borders of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, under duress or incognito.

A sequence of fourteen fact-inspired fictions about travels to, in and from North America, Astray offers a past in scattered pieces, a surprising and moving history for restless times.

STAGE ADAPTATION RIGHTS AVAILABLE

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a grieving couple retreat to Eden , their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse... Following its award winning success at the Cannes Film Festival and explosive box office performance, this was one of the most controversial films ever to receive a cinema release in the UK.

M is for Murder, or Mörder, the chalked letter pressed on the shoulder of a notorious child-killer in Berlin by a member of an organised criminal underground – a secret sign to identify the psychopath and kill him. This is so that the police can call off their own city-wide manhunt, which is seriously inconveniencing the criminal classes.

Peter Lorre plays the porcine, pop-eyed serial killer Hans Beckert, speaking German with a rasping, querulous shout. Otto Wernicke plays pudgy police inspector Lohmann, and Gustaf Gründgens is Schränker, the crime overlord who will finally sit in judgment on Beckert, presiding over something between a kangaroo court and a revolutionary tribunal. Lang depicts the paranoia and feverish atmosphere that gives birth to the dual investigation from the cops and the criminals. Lohmann has a determined, forensic technique, analysing the handwriting on Beckert's jeering letter to the press, and the woodgrain of the table the paper appears to have pressed on.

Meanwhile, a hidden army of crooks and thieves pass on their own tips, and a blind peddler crucially recognises the tune Beckert whistles. It is a cousin to the early Hitchcock of The Lodger. What is fascinating is how Lang fetishises smoking: everyone has huge cigars, bulbous pipes and cigarettes in holders. It is as if smoke is the endless industrial byproduct of the city's folly, greed and shame.

Frog Music is an atmospheric and gripping novel by Emma Donoghue, author of the multi-million-copy bestseller Room, adapted as a major motion picture directed by Lenny Abrahamson.

San Francisco, 1876: a stifling heat wave and smallpox epidemic have engulfed the City.

Deep in the streets of Chinatown live three former stars of the Parisian circus: Blanche, now an exotic dancer at the House of Mirrors, her lover Arthur and his companion Ernest.

When an eccentric outsider joins their little circle, secrets unravel, changing everything - and leaving one of them dead.

Inspired by a true unsolved crime, Frog Music, a New York Times bestseller, is a dark and compelling story of intrigue and murder.

 

STAGE ADAPTATION RIGHTS AVAILABLE

Ronia lives with her father, a robber chieftain, and his band of men in their fortress on the top of a mountain. On the night Ronia was born, a bolt of lightning split the stronghold in two, leaving a huge chasm - Hell's Gap - in between.

Soon Ronia is old enough to explore the forest around her, but she must beware of the grey dwarfs and wild harpies that live there. One day she meets Birk, the son of a rival robber leader who has claimed the other side of Hell's Gap, and upon whom Ronia's father instantly declares war.

Ronia and Birk develop a friendship that is as indestructible as the mountain fortress itself. But with their families sworn enemies they are forced to keep their friendship a secret until one fateful day when Ronia's father catches Birk . . . prompting Ronia and Birk to escape into the woods and fend for themselves.

How long can Ronia and Birk survive in the magical forest? And will their fathers ever put aside their differences to get their beloved children back?

One of the biggest, strangest, maddest films in cinema history. Fritz Lang's 1927 film is a crazed futurist epic, a mythic sprawl with something of Jung and Wagner, and dystopian nightmare about a city-state built on slave labour, whose prosperity depends on suppressing a mutinous underground race whose insurrectionist rage is beginning to bubble. Metropolis predicts the ideologies of class and race of the 20th century, and there is a perennial frisson in the way the workers' leader Maria longs for a messianic figure who can find a middle way between the head and the heart, the bosses and the workers: he will be the Mediator, or the "Mittler" – a word that has a chilling echo with another real-life leader who at the time of Metropolis's premiere had a few seats in the Reichstag. The "Maschinenmensch" robot based on Maria is a brilliant eroticisation and fetishisation of modern technology makes Metropolis seem very contemporary.