From the trenches to the stalls

The writer Sebastian Faulks exudes a sense of calm accomplishment. But even he seems tense about the stage adaptation of his bestselling novel Birdsong

‘I’m not excited. I don’t do excitement,’ says Sebastian Faulks. Which is probably just as well. Four years have elapsed since the project he’s currently involved with, a dramatisation of his bestselling novel Birdsong, was first suggested to him by the playwright Rachel Wagstaff. I meet them both in Faulks’s Holland Park flat, where he writes every day on a huge Apple Mac overlooked by miniature portraits of two deceased colleagues. A picture of Dickens, which belonged to his mother, hangs on the wall beside a relief of Tolstoy reproduced on what looks like the bottom of an ashtray. ‘From his house in Moscow,’ Faulks explains. ‘You nicked it?’ ‘No,’ he mutters, ‘it’s from the gift shop, I’m afraid. The gift shop, yes, along with the Anna Karenina tea cosy.