GILES Havergal is a master of the transfer from page to stage.

In his library of adaptations stand Brighton Rock, Travels With My Aunt, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Death In Venice and David Copperfield, premiered in 2000 at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and now given its British premiere in Havergal's production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds.

"Certainly with the books I've done, I've always thought 'There's a play in there; this would be interesting as a piece of theatre'. It's not that I just want to put a book on stage; your loyalty has to be to the stage and not to the book," Giles says.

"You have to be ruthless in leaving a lot of stuff out because you're not doing it for the Eng Lit readers. You have to have the temerity to say 'I can make a play out of this'."

He notes the ironies of people feeling they own a book, a play or a performance. "Particularly with Hamlet, I've found that they lay a claim of ownership to something without it being accurate, though I think there's something rather marvellous about people feeling ownership!" he says. "But look at when Olivier did Hamlet with a blond rinse; people were upset by that at the time but now they would say 'Oh, that is my Hamlet'."

Reflecting on his task of bringing Charles Dickens's multi-layered rites-of-passage story to the stage, Giles says: "I always say it should not be called an adaptation but an amputation because you have to cut out so many wonderful characters and bits of dialogue.

"To make those cuts, you ask yourself 'Is it relevant to the theme of the play I'm writing'.

"You have to find your spine, what theme you can hue out of the book, and with David Copperfield I'm really very clear that it's his emotional development and his search for a surrogate family. Those two themes make a lot of the story redundant to the play, though not to the book of course!"

David Copperfield, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until May 28. Box office: 0113 213 7700.

Updated: 15:59 Thursday, April 28, 2005