Neil Gaiman brings books to the stage at Hobart festival

AUTHOR Neil Gaiman knows well the importance of versatility.

Neil Gaiman has combined his passion for the universal message of fairytales with a talent for performance.

IF you have ever wondered what it was like to see Charles Dickens perform in public but were a century and more late, Hobart’s Theatre Royal on a lazy Saturday afternoon last month was as close as anyone might expect to get.

The space has the cramped verticality of ­theatres designed on the old Restoration template (gentry stiff in their boxes; working classes with foaming tankards in the pit). Staring up at the gilt and plaster cornices, you can almost imagine players taking the stage as gaslights flare. But this time a hipster string quartet sits beneath a large white screen, while a casually ­dishevelled man in black reads a fairytale, by turns comic, lovely, angsty and grim, without a single stutter or muffed line.

His audience, many but not all of whom are age-appropriate for the performance, sits rapt: the strings sob, screech and cough as haunting images by British illustrator Chris Riddell flick past like some demented slide night. It is a tribute to the creator of the story — novelist, short-story writer, legendary comic-book auteur and social media phenomenon Neil Gaiman — that this beautiful cacophony remains firmly in the background. Gaiman’s lugubrious yet electric presence, his storytelling elan, rules the show.

So it makes sense that the first question ventured the next morning, when Gaiman materialises in his hotel lobby for a late breakfast and a chat, is whether the English-born author has consciously adopted the mantle of his grand literary forebear. Is this the Victorian theatrical retooled as a live audiobook?

“Absolutely!” Gaiman replies, and while scanning the menu he tells of a formative childhood experience: visiting the theatre to see Welsh playwright and actor Emlyn Williams play Dickens in a one-man show. Taken by Williams’s carefully calibrated histrionics, gripped by the almost pre-prepared theatricality of the excerpts from the novelist’s work, Gaiman decided then and there that “this was just the sort of thing I wanted to do”.

The multimedia aspects of his performance nod to wider events, adds Gaiman. His shows are part of MOFO, the arts and music festival held in January under the auspices of David Walsh’s Hobart-based Museum of Old and New Art. Although he is first and foremost a writer, Gaiman wants to honour the larger spirit of the undertaking. It turns out that his string quartet collaborators are semi-locals too: FourPlay, of which Gaiman speaks in rhapsodic terms, is a band of classically trained Sydneysiders he has been working with for years.

What also becomes clear is that Gaiman’s affinity with Dickens arises from the shared circumstances of their respective historical moments. For Dickens, he explains, “copyright did not work”. Those famous public readings, largely undertaken in the US, were a way for the older author to “turn popularity into cash” in a country where he was widely read in pirated editions.

“Even as a relatively young writer, just moved to America, I looked around and thought: ‘I don’t know what the future will bring,’ ” he says. “At the time I was mostly working in comics, but then I attended a conference and read one of my short stories — and discovered I was good at it.”

Though he admits to a certain amount of native acting ability, Gaiman explains that it took a decade of practice to polish the act of “being myself while telling a story to a room full of people”. While the career anxiety that drove him to the stage has yet to be fully realised in terms of book publishing, the transformations wrought by the digital era on the film, TV and music industries portend a future in which simply writing books will not be enough to sustain even relatively successful authors.

Gaiman relays these considerations with simultaneous eloquence and practicality. Whatever happened to the author as occupant of the ivory tower, writing high above (as Gustave Flaubert redolently put it) the tide of shit lapping below? I put it to the man behind the reinvention of DC Comics’ Sandman and Swamp Thing, author of Hugo-winning novella (and subsequent film) Coraline, possessor of an imagination revered by George RR Martin and Philip Pullman, that he is mainly interested in narrative, in plain old-fashioned story, and so is allergic to the modernist tradition of striving to produce beautiful words, bugger the audience. He gently disagrees.

“When photography showed its ability to capture form in the 19th century, painting had to consider what it would do in response; and, as we now know, it explored elsewhere. Likewise with literature. I love the reaction against Dickens, against Kipling, against plain storytelling. I feel that figures such as Joyce took the toolkit of what you can do with language — you don’t just have to do narrative — and explored elsewhere.

“This was,” he adds, “a time when story took refuge in genre — in more mainstream forms.” Yet he is also keen to claim kinship between impulses. Dicken’s Bleak House is a proto-modernist text without peer, he argues, and James Joyce’s Ulysses, with its playfulness and incorrigible punning, is joyous fun of a kind we associate with more populist literary forms.” There is no neat bifurcation, Gaiman concludes, no strict distinction; there is only the power of story.

What he means by this unfolds, piecemeal, over a plate of scrambled eggs and Atlantic salmon.

“I think there is something intensely Darwinian about stories,” he says. “It’s not even survival of the fittest. It is survival of the survivals. But you can watch a story moving into a specific form and then pretty much staying there — at least in the oral tradition.”

Gaiman uses the example of Grimm’s Tales, which went through three different editions during the editors’ lifetimes. What began as a fierce, rich and unbowdlerised set of tavern tales were softened across time for broader public consumption. The fairytales we inherited in written form are deformed by ideology, cleansed for kiddie palates. It was only when, years ago, Gaiman took on the task of rewriting Hansel and Gretel that he was obliged to challenge the various filters placed between the present and the original impulse of the tale.

“This was a story with power and terror,” Gaiman recalls, “and I just wanted to get it back to absolute basics. I returned stepmothers to their original status as mothers.

“I removed fantastic elements added in later editions of the story. No birds leaving messages: just the fear and utter isolation of the children.”

Oddly enough, when speaking of these historically distinct narratives, Gaiman returns to the present. He speaks of his time embedded with the UNHCR as a visiting writer. His sense of the proper manner and mode of storytelling was shaped by speaking with refugees arriving in the Golan Heights from Syria after weeks of walking. He tells of how the loss lack of water supply, or food, or an essential sense of safety drove families from their homes. He recalls accounts of imams granting permission to eat pets — cats and dogs — before hunger finally sent men, women and children into exile.

Often betrayed by people-smugglers but at least alive, their shoes long gone and their feet lacerated, they arrived at the camp where Gaiman was based and describe themselves as fortunate. “That’s Hansel and Gretel,” the author concludes, spearing the last of his toast.

“That’s a world in which folk have food for their family, and no more. In Grimm’s Tales, they say: ‘There was a war on and there was famine in the land.’ This is no rote statement, even today; it is a fact of contemporary human existence I wished to explore.”

The story Gaiman performed in Hobart was called The Sleeper and the Spindle. It, too, took old stories — in this case, a mash-up of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty that maintained fealty to source narratives while making something sexy and sad — and found contemporary resonance. It was just one of dozens collected in the new volume of short stories Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances.

That book turns out to be a rattle-bag of all these fascinating and potent cross pollinations. Fairytales and mordant cultural commentaries come disguised as fragments and full-blown narratives; our dreary collective fears and disgusts are reflected back as eternal concerns. A love of narrative wide enough to encompass Scottish Highland folktales and episodes of Doctor Who turns out to be anthology of stories about who we are here, now, in all our banal daily accoutrements.

As Gaiman finishes his green tea, I want to ask how social media has shaped the emerging collective intelligence of our species. But given a creative intelligence that can’t help but mock its presumptions, the author can only reflect that the stunning pos­sibilities of the digital realm have taught him one thing: if your dog won’t swallow a pill, coat it with butter. It turns out Twitter, where he crowdsourced said veterinary advice, has its uses after all.

Neil Gaiman’s Trigger Warning is published by Headline.