Neil Bartlett - The Recs

Neil Bartlett has spent decades slipping between forms, refusing to stay put. A novelist with a taste for giving voice to those whom history has sidelined, a playwright determined to strip theatre back to its essential storytelling elements, and one of Britain’s most inventive theatre adaptors, he has built a body of work that asks awkward questions about who gets seen, who gets heard, and on whose terms. From reworking classic texts for the stage to writing fiction that foregrounds queer histories and overlooked lives, Bartlett’s career has been marked by a restless intelligence and a suspicion of easy answers.

The Recs’ editor Steve Coats-Dennis chats to Neil ahead of the premiere of his adaptation of Noel Coward’s Me and The Girls at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre in January 2026.

SCD: Your creative output is quite staggering, and we’d love to chat with you about your writing – both as a novelist, a writer of non-fiction and as an adaptor. At what point in your life did you know that writing was going to be important to you?

NB: I wrote as child – poems, when I was eight or nine or ten. So it has been part of my life all my life.

SCD: What writers inspired you to begin writing?

NB: When my love of writing turned into the idea of actually writing a book, my models were Edmund White ( who I was lucky enough to spend time with when I was in my early twenties), Oscar Wilde ( especially the Wilde of De Profundis, his letter from Reading Gaol), and the great Spanish queer novelist Juan Goytisolo. They offered me not only amazing riches of the imagination, but great, great sentences. Also, the basic idea that even if the world refused to recognise queer life and lust, that only freed you to right ahead and invent your life on your own terms.

Our algorithms insist that our attention spans get shorter and more superficial every day.

- Neil Bartlett

SCD: Your first published book was Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde – a non-fictional exploration of Oscar Wilde and queer history that traces the links between contemporary queer life and the past that Oscar Wilde inhabited. How much of the virulent and omnipresent homophobia of the 1980s inspired you to write that book?

NB: The 1980’s was a time when people were literally out to kill us. I lived in a rough part of East London, and the level of violence and casual contempt towards me and my friends was ( looking back ) pretty intense. So writing a book about another gay man who had been through a firestorm of hatred made sense. Celebrating our culture has always been my job description.

SCD: One of the things that strikes me in both that book and in your first novel, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, and indeed in your subsequent novels, such as Address Book, is the sense of how you use geography and spaces to show how queer lives leave traces, even when ‘official’ history seeks to erase them. Is that something that you are keenly aware of as you move through life as well as something you express in your writing?

NB: One of the worst things that we did ( and do) to queer children is feed them the lie that there has never been anyone like them in the world before. In fact, our history is unimaginably rich and deep and wide and various; we have been everywhere, done everything, from the nooks and crannies of your own family history to the pinnacles of History with a capital H. One of the great joys of my life is discovering new traces, new scraps of the past. The room where I write most week-days is one corner away from a street that had two queer pubs in it in the early 1700’s. I love that.

SCD: You’ve worked as an artist since 1982. How much does it behove you to be the carrier of stories – to chronicle how queers survive the darkness?

NB: My writing and my theatre-making are my activism. My job is to show not just that we survive, but that we thrive. I make memories; embody our fabulousness.

SCD: Do you think younger generations of LGBTQ+ people have a keen sense of what has gone before, or is there a sense of solipsism?

NB: Well, no-one ( gay or straight) gets the chance to learn much cultural history these days. Our algorithms insist that our attention spans get shorter and more superficial every day. Also, when I was a twenty-year-old gay-in-training, I spent my life in bars, pubs, discos and sex clubs; in all of those places, I naturally met men with white hair and stories to tell. Now that there are fewer and fewer actual gay spaces, I think it is harder for young queer people to stumble across the stories they need.

SCD: As a writer, do you have a sense of how ideas arrive?

NB: For me, it always starts with an image. I write the image first; only then do `I start to work out where it has come from. I never ask myself what it “means” until very late in the process, and sometimes not even then. I think readers determine meaning, not writers ( or directors).

SCD: How long does it take you to write a novel? And when you are writing, how would you characterise your mood?

NB: I write slowly. Also, I do other jobs as well – I am a theatre director, and a playwright, and a husband with a 78-year-old beloved. Some of my books have taken six or seven years to write.

Some of my working notes towards the adaptation which we’re premiering in Pitlochry this January date right back to 2003.

- Neil Bartlett

SCD: In terms of plotting, you said that you were two-thirds of the way through writing The Disappearance Boy without knowing how it was to end! Given the amount of time you must commit when writing long-form fiction, isn’t that terrifying that an ending might not arrive – or do you just trust in instinct or imagination will provide?

NB: I never look down. Also; I never start work on a book until the need to do so is imperative.

SCD: You’ve said, “My books are a conversation with my times.” Is this true also for your theatrical adaptations?

NB: I hope so. An evening in the theatre ( whether it has the lowest or highest of brows) only ever works if the audience feels the show is talking about them and to them.

SCD: You’ve created so many wonderful adaptations – Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, and Oliver Twist, and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to name just a few. How do you choose which text you want to adapt? And do you have to like the original to want to adapt it?

NB: I only ever adapt books that I’m completely mad about and can’t get out of my mind, often without really knowing why. I often say that they choose me. Which can’t be true – but it is.

SCD: Is adapting easier than novel writing, as you have something to reshape to begin with, or do novels allow you more freedom?

NB: In theory, writing a novel – i.e. making up a story – ought to mean that you can do anything you want. In practice, the story itself will make very strict demands. If you try and push it where it doesn’t want to go, then that will show in the end result. I always aspire to write what has to come next. I try and remove myself from the process for an hour or two, and let the story take over. Then I will re-read, edit, argue. But the story is always right, in my opinion.

SCD: What are your guiding principles when you adapt a work for the stage? Does fidelity to the original author concern you?

NB: I only adapt what I love. Ideally, I make the deputation using the original language and nothing but. Fidelity doesn’t mean literalness – you have to have a vision of how to move the story from one medium to another – but I always want to give the audience the language as well as the narrative. The authors I choose to adapt – Wilde, Dickens. Stevenson, Woolf – and now Coward – are all great maestros of the sentence.

SCD: For the inaugural Out in the Hills Festival at Pitlochry Theatre, you are adapting another iconic queer playwright – Noel Coward’s Me and The Girls. How did this come about?

NB: In 2002, I found a copy of the book in which the original 1964 short story appeared in a charity shop. I was bowled over by its voice and its force of feeling. Some of my working notes towards the adaptation which we’re premiering in Pitlochry this January date right back to 2003.

SCD: When one thinks of Noel Coward, we think of his particular rhythms and his sparkling witticisms – but would we be right in saying this work perhaps is less of the bon vivant and more revealing of the man underneath?

NB: Well….Coward always writes closer the emotional knuckle than people think. Perhaps the most distinctive thing about this story is that the showbiz world in which it is set is a distinctly tatty one – the second-rate cabaret circuit – and also that the story is told in a voice which has the distinctive rhythms of the lower middle class South London where Coward grew up. People often forget that the champagne-swilling, hard-edged, dressing-gowned Noel Coward of the publicity photos wasn’t born that way. Also, accepted wisdom is that Coward never really revealed his queerness in his work – that it was always coded, disguised, for insiders only. Well in this story, loving and screwing men ( and being an out queen, for all the world to see) are simply facts of life. Which is quite something, for 1964, when this story was published. Queer life, because it was illegal, was supposed to be lived only in the shadows. This story begs to differ….

SCD: What do you want to bring to the fore with your adaptation?

NB: Oh I will leave the audience to tell me that! I think the story is about love; about how love and honesty are the only things that matter. Plus there are some rather wonderful songs….

SCD: Are there any works that you’ve always wanted to adapt but haven’t…yet?

NB: I wouldn’t mind having a go at Dickens’ “Little Dorrit”. I read it every year of my life. And weep. And laugh. And shouldn’t I do my dear friend Edmund White, at some point?