The many iterations of Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones

In 2016, the blockbuster West Australian novel Jasper Jones will find a much wider audience.

Jasper JOnes

Blockbuster West Australian novel Jasper Jones has sold more than 170,000 copies and won a slew of awards — although it was overlooked for the big ones — but in 2016 the gothic teen tale will find a much wider audience.

Two different stage plays are scheduled for the story dubbed Australia’s To Kill a Mockingbird, one at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre in January, and a different one at the Melbourne Theatre Company in August.

This week a movie starring Hugo Weaving and Toni Collette also finished filming in the WA timber town of Pemberton.

Jasper Jones author Craig Silvey helped adapt his novel for the screen but he wasn’t involved in the theatrical script which is the work of award-winning actress and writer Kate Mulvany.

Three years ago the then artistic director of Perth’s Barking Gecko theatre company, John Sheedy, commissioned Mulvany to adapt the story, which first found life as a play under his ­direction in mid-2014.

The West Australian’s review of Barking Gecko’s Jasper Jones ­described the production as “wonderful” and lamented the fact the lengthy season sold out so ­quickly, which begs the question why the scarce resources of the subsidised stage and screen sector are being used to ­reinvent the tale so many times over.

The director of Belvoir’s production, Anne-Louise Sarks, said: “I think it’s a wonderful thing there are so many different versions of it. It’s a small industry in Australia so we’re not used to different versions of the same play being on at the same time,” but it happens in other countries all the time, she said. Where the movie has cast the lead characters as a gang of 13-year-old boys, as they are in the book, the stage play is using actors in their 20s.

MTC Jasper Jones director Sam Strong said: “It’s not impossible there might be some overlap.”

Strong said in his new role as artistic director of Queensland Theatre Company he wanted to collaborate with other companies as much as possible. He said he’d wanted to do Jasper Jones for 18 months before it was confirmed.