The British are coming! Off Broadway, that is, as part of 59E59 Theaters' Brits Off Broadway Festival, introducing American audiences to innovative works from the UK. Writer and director Lucia Cox pays homage to Anthony Burgess with her inspired adaptation of the devilishly funny novel One Hand Clapping. The Manchester native and founder of theater/film production company House of Orphans sat with us to chat about the magical coincidence of bringing this particular play to New York City, her love/hate relationship with celebrity, the pleasure of riding the Staten Island ferry, the insane novel she’d like to adapt for the stage and much more.

How did you discover One Hand Clapping?

I did a master's in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. The head of the course [Professor Andrew Biswell] became the director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester. He showed me and a few students around the foundation. I told him how unaware I was about how much Burgess had written, other than A Clockwork Orange. I knew he’d written a few other things, but he was also a composer and a poet and a journalist and a teacher, and he’d written so many novels and two or three autobiographies. He was just prolific.

I said why don’t we put on a night celebrating his work -- his lesser known work. I always had the idea of getting a bunch of actors together. The Royal Northern College of Music is in Manchester, so I was going to get a couple of students to play some of his music and have a cabaret sort of night. The foundation gave me Burgess’ body of work, stacks and stacks of photocopies. I started looking and thought, I don’t know where to start. There’s just too much. I left it for about a year, and then went for another meeting. I still wanted to do something with Burgess, but I said I’m struggling to find a way in and a theme to pin it all together.

I was coming out to New York to visit a director friend and just a couple of days before I got on the plane, Andrew handed me One Hand Clapping. It felt disappointing that it was just one novel because I wanted to do lots of different things. He said, "Have a read of it. I think you might like it." And I told him to sell it to me.

He said, "It’s a female protagonist." I thought, tick (makes gesture of checking off list), that’s good. "It’s told in the first person." I thought, that would translate quite well into theater, because it’s monologues. "It’s set in 1961," and I thought that will look great. By the time I got off the plane at JFK, I’d read it and knew exactly what I wanted to do.

Bringing the play to New York feels like it’s coming home in a way, ‘cause by the time I got off the plane, I was really excited about the whole prospect. There’s also a part when they travel to New York. I mean, in the book it’s a much bigger journey. You learn a lot more and they travel a lot more, but I thought I could condense it with a dance. That’s how I came to the work and thought it could work.

How long was the play meant to run?

Only for three nights at the Burgess Foundation. It was commissioned by then and sort of built up. A festival took it on, and then we took it on a mini tour last year where we invited Brits Off Broadway. I thought they weren’t going to like it. But Peter [Tear, Executive Producer, 59E59 Theaters] loved it, so that is why we’re here.

It sounds like such a magical coincidence! Were there any difficulties in adapting the work of Anthony Burgess?

No, not really. I mean, it’s fairly true to the novel. I did change a couple of plot points. I got rid of loads of characters. Janet Shirley’s got a suicidal sister, who goes to live with them for awhile. That’s where Howard gets his pills. But I thought it’d be funnier if he got American pills because he hates everything about America, and he’s going to do them both in with American pills. (Laughs) I thought it’d be more ironic. It was fairly straight forward lifting all the monologues out.

Was it intimidating to adapt the work of such an iconic author?

Yes, because I’d never done an adaptation before. I don’t know what Burgess would make of this. I hope he’d like it, ‘cause he did write plays as well. I’d hope he’d come and enjoy it. Whether he’d tell it in the same way, I’m not so sure. Just the fact that his work is still being talked about, I’m sure he’d be very pleased with that. But whenever you take famous work there is such pressure on you to get it right. At some point as a writer, you have to go, well I have to do my interpretation. It’s an interpretation.

I remember reading an interview with [British film critic] Mark Kermode, who’s usually spot on with his reviews, talking about Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. He said that for all of its faults, it is an interpretation of the novel. Someone will do another interpretation, and that’s fine. You can’t compare a novel and a play, just as you can’t with a film and a book. It’s a completely different medium. You have to tell it in a different way. You have to change things to make it work for a theater going audience. You put your own stamp on it as you go along.

How do you think Burgess would have felt about a woman directing the play?

I’d like to think he would think it was a good thing because it’s a female driven story. I hope that he would be more pleased that it’s directed by someone from Manchester because that’s where he is from.

But I haven’t really thought about that. I suppose I should think about all these feminist things, how different it is for a woman to be a writer and director, and still very underrepresented in the creative field. But I just get on with it and try not to think about it. I’m a human being and an individual, and I’m doing my work the way I want to do it. It doesn’t really matter that I’m female. I’m just doing the best work I can do.

That sounds pretty feminist. (Laughs) In the play, Janet mentions celebrity coverage and her husband’s discomfort with it. What do you think about celebrity culture today?

Love/hate relationship with it, I think. It’s a bit of a car crash; you can’t stop watching it as you drive past, but you know you shouldn’t. I like some of it. I think it's got a place in society. We’ve always had celebrity. Lord Byron was a celebrity. He was the first person to have trinkets sold with his image on it. All the women loved him and probably the men, too. We’ve always had that obsession, with aesthetically pleasing things. I don’t think it’s a particularly bad thing. It’s how much we put celebrity on a pedestal. I think it’s fine that it’s part of our culture. But when it’s the most important thing, then it’s a bit worrying.

Have you discovered any favorite spots in NYC?

I really like Lincoln Center. I’ve seen the ballet and the opera there. I also saw a play. I love New York at Christmas. I took some of the [actors and crew] on the Staten Island Ferry because it’s in New York and it’s free!

It’s amazing!

Yes, you get a beautiful view of the skyline. You get to see the Statue of Liberty, and you don’t have to pay a fortune. You get to see the memorial [Postcards] built for the people from Staten Island that died in 9/11. It’s very moving and beautiful. I quite like Staten Island, as well!

Are there any other novels you are interested in adapting?

Well, it’s coming up to Burgess’ centenary in 2017. I’ve got a meeting with the foundation when I get back to see if there is something else that I can have a go at. In terms of other novels, the only other thing I ever read [that I'd want to adapt] -- I don’t know how you would make it onstage, you’d need a lot of money; it would have to be a big West End or Broadway show -- is a book called Geek Love [by Katherine Dunn]. It’s amazing. I think someone’s tried to get the rights to it before, but I don’t know where they’re at with that. I think it would make a great film as well. It’s about a circus family. A man whose wife takes all these pills and potions and has deformed children, so that they can perform in the freak show. It’s absolutely nuts.

In addition to writing and directing, you are also an actress.

Oh God, yes, occasionally.

Are there performances in the works?

No, but funny enough a male friend and I have been talking for ages about doing a two-person show about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. He would be Joan Crawford and I would be Bette Davis. We spent months watching all their films. Then I read the book about their rivalry, which is just hilarious. But nothing’s come to fruition with that yet because I get so preoccupied. What happens is, I have a great idea of my own and then someone phones me and says, “Could you come in and direct such and such?” And I go, “Ohhh.” And they say, “I’ll pay you.” And I go, “Okay!” So other work keeps getting in the way of my own work. In terms of acting, I’ve got an acting agent and do bits on telly.

Who or what has influenced your career the most?

Well, I’m a magpie so I borrow and take stuff from all sorts of things. I’m a big movie fan. I grew up watching films and I was really disappointed when I hit puberty because I thought well that’s it, I’m not going to be a child star. So I outlived one of the things I wanted to do. (Laughs) Brilliant. I’m not going to be Shirley Temple, great. (Laughs) Film has a massive influence on my aesthetic and how I think about theater, and how I think about writing as well. I think I write quite filmically. But I love the theater. There is nothing better than really good live theater. When you see something that takes your breath away or surprises you.

I trained in dance when I was younger, contemporary dance like Pina Bausch and Martha Graham, but I didn’t go see dance for many years. Then I started reviewing for online magazines for awhile, and went to see Hofesh Shechter, an amazing choreographer based in London. This show was just epic. I thought, wow, that is so brilliant what you can do with lights. You see lots of theater and it’s just like, lights up, scene, lights down. You’re in the theater! Use your theater lights! Use sound, make it theatrical. We have film and telly now to do naturalism. Dance is really good for showing you what you can do with lights.

Your production of One Hand Clapping does make clever use of lights and sound. Are you currently working on new projects?

Yes, I’ve got this trilogy I want to make called The Winged Trilogy with Eve [Burley, who stars as Janet Shirley in One Hand Clapping]. It’s all about exploring femininity, what it is to be a woman, women through the ages and madness, motherhood, misrepresentation. It’s a fairytale for adults.