New version of Jules Verne classic Around the World in Eighty Days opens at Hull Truck

“My early ideas were about declaring a style and not pretending we were anywhere else other than a theatre,” says Chambers. “We were also going to represent the world in a dynamic and quite modern way and re-examine some of the themes of Empire. It was going to be an incredibly joyful, music filled, brash and quite theatrical production.”

Some of the themes of Verne’s 1872 novel are, as are a number of works from the time, problematic to a modern audience. Those themes of Empire Chambers refers to, are a case in point. “Once I had decided all that, it set off many months of finding the right creative team that could fulfil the brief and then really dig into what the play is – as a piece of nostalgia. People remember it as something that’s been around in the dramatic ether for many years, it’s a well-loved story but it has some quite challenging themes in it. One of the first things I said was that I don’t want two white men paying their way around the Empire, that doesn’t feel like a story that urgently needs to be told. So, we cast Stefan Adegbola as Phileas Fogg and we’re playing him as a black man in a white world of privilege and I think that’s a really interesting journey, it adds stakes and lots of interesting textures to the story.”

Co-produced by Hull Truck Theatre and Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake, the iconic story arrives in Hull this week. The story of Phileas Fogg and his adventures as he tries to circumnavigate the globe to win a wager with his valet Passepartout, Adegbola is looking forward to taking on the role. “I come across as an extrovert, but I’m an introvert as well. However, because of my profession I’m generally able to override it. Phileas Fogg’s character and the story that we created for him together is of someone who is actually an extrovert, but he’s been put in a position where he seems like an introvert ,”says Adegbola. “What we start with is a very private person who opens up through the story. He’s learning to open up through the people he meets, through the experiences he has and through the wild, spur of the moment, uncanny decision to go and do this thing and try to travel around the world in 80 days.”

In many ways, Verne’s story couldn’t really be less ideal for a stage adaptation, on the face of it. While there is a lot going on in the story, the heart of it, as the title suggests, is an adventure that takes the heroes around the world. It’s not an easy thing to achieve on stage. The director says: “The play is about a love story between Passepartout and Fogg, not in a conventional sense, more like a platonic sense, the odd couple travelling the world. An unlikely pair who are at the other end of the spectrum, a man with privilege and money who’s able to do these things with a white woman who’s from some sort of artistic background, who’s eccentric and very theatrical and bizarre. There’s a sense of 80 Days being an impossible thing to stage anyway and this becomes more interesting because we have an even more unlikely pairing. So, with the rest of the casting, I wanted to make sure that half the cast weren’t white, half the cast were female or non-binary and half male. If you read the play, it’s a very male dominated white world and I just wanted to make sure the world was represented a bit more when you look at the stage, like Britain right now. Of course, we then needed to find actors with tremendous spirit.”

That includes Adegbola. “My experience as an immigrant in the UK means you’re playing a part, to a degree, because you have to,” he says. “Your nationality always gets referenced, you’re being a different person or an ‘other’. That means that you have to learn to manage the expectations that people might have when they encounter that otherness in you and that’s a sort of acting process in itself. What made me want to become an actor was I realised it was something that I could actually do as a profession rather than as something that was an aspect of having to live the way I lived. I think that’s the briefest and clearest way I can describe why I became an actor.”

At Hull Truck Theatre, May 4-20.