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He has won the Booker Prize, been named one of the Times’ 50 Greatest British Authors since 1945, and seen two of his six novels become high-profile films: The Remains of The Day, starring Anthony Hopkins, and recently Never Let Me Go.

Never Let Me Go is beautifully written, yet relies on a gradual build-up of information filling in the history and setting the scene for weighty revelations, making it perhaps not an obvious choice for film adaptation.

Speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival in conversation with Sunday Times Literary Editor Peter Kemp, Ishiguro admits that when writing Never Let Me Go, he ‘didn’t want it to be a film. When I started writing, fiction was in a vulnerable position – novels had to offer something one couldn’t get from the TV or cinema. I wanted to do something that couldn’t be done in any other medium – I was trying to write an unfilmable book’.

Yet filmed it was, and 300 pages of novel were made into an 80 page screenplay. When good books are filmed it is the natural instinct to lament the inevitable cuts and condensation of the flowing prose, but Ishiguro claims not to see it this way. ‘We’re not comfortable with film adaptations, we don’t look at them cleanly, as if they’re films. We demand fidelity to the source, but perhaps this is naïve, inappropriate.’

Instead Ishiguro sees the film as complementary to the book. ‘You have to extract the essence of the book for the screenplay. I didn’t want a translation; I wanted the film-makers to take the idea further. I feel like a songwriter who hopes that talented musicians will take his basic material further – I want them to be inspired, I want to discover things when I hear their interpretation. The book is safe inside its covers.’

Perhaps a reason Ishiguro dislikes the comparisons between film and book is that they are such different media. ‘In a book, you can have a universe in someone’s mind – it’s very difficult to do that in a film, as it’s a very third person medium. The physical setting is very obvious. A novel can be set in a hinterland between the mind and the real world, and the world outside might not be very realistic, but this is hard when you’re doing a film.’

He moves on to talk about the book itself. The title comes from the poignancy of asking for the impossible, as in the book Kathy and Tommy come to realise that given their situation, hoping for more time on earth to enjoy being in love is a request that cannot be granted. While the book’s premise has affinities with science fiction, it reads much more as a coming-of-age novel with a sinister and tragic twist. ‘Some have called it a fable about mortality, others a dystopian book about what might happen if we do things with science. The importance of the project is in trying to find a metaphor for the fact that we have bodies that age. We can’t live forever – what do we do with that knowledge? I wanted to look at the way people face that inevitability as they move from childhood to adulthood. It’s a metaphor for mortality, raising questions: What’s important to us once we are aware that our time is limited?’

He is asked whether he intended the book as in any way allegorical for the condition of exploited underclasses. Reared as clones, the world has turned its back on children like Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, preferring to forget that they exist. ‘I often go for things but the metaphor doesn’t quite fit, and before I know it I’ve got a secondary set of themes on board. The exploited class theme was like that. There are rich and poor parts of the world, and the exploited are out of sight for us.’

A question many have raised about the book is why the clones accept their fates without struggle. We never see any attempt to run away, or even any real questioning of why they are in their situation, but rather a passive acceptance. ‘In life, most don’t have the perspective to try to escape. Instead we try to dignify our lives, to find meaning in our situation. It’s fascinating the extent to which people don’t rebel. Most of us just know the world we’re born into and it’s hard to see beyond that. But there is a sense that if we make things remarkable enough, we might escape.’

Ishiguro moved from Japan to England aged 5 and has always worked here. He seems to have a slightly tense relationship with his Japanese connections. ‘I started off setting novels in Japan, but I think readers are very literal minded about settings, people thought there was a journalistic element and that what I was writing about only pertained to Japan. So The Remains of the Day is deliberately a very English book. We want people to take universal themes and truths. It’s frustrating that we must set novels somewhere.’ He tells an amusing story about how an early version of the film was shown in America, and people asked if this cloning for organ donations actually happened in England. This is a novel in which failure to suspend one’s disbelief can have disastrous consequences.

Already one of our most successful writers, Ishiguro’s wisdom and gentle tone suggest that success couldn’t have come to a nicer man. Never Let Me Go is certainly a must-read, especially for those who have not seen the film and for whom the suspense as the dark truths are painfully gradually revealed can really be experienced.

The RSC’s most recent production of The Merchant of Venice is an ambitious and brave attempt by Director Rupert Goold to modernize one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’. The Merchant follows the affairs of Antonio (Scott Handy), a prosperous merchant of Venice, as he leverages his overseas ventures to the moneylender Shylock (Patrick Stewart) in order to finance his love-struck friend Bassanio (Richard Riddell) in a quest to win the hand of the beautiful Portia (Susannah Fielding). The play presents a problem to modern audiences because it was originally conceived as a comedy, culminating in the humiliation (for comedic purposes, in the original script) of ‘the Jew’, Shylock. This juxtaposition between original comedy and the need to focus the audience on the issues of racism and anti-Semitism represented by the treatment of Shylock makes it a difficult play to stage with nuance.

Goold doesn’t shy away from the anti-Semitism of the text, but decides to tackle it head on. Goold deftly brings out the humanism in Shylock’s villainy and the racism in Portia and Antonio’s heroism. We are forced to watch and contemplate the barefaced anti-Semitism of the text in what Goold described as a “play full of individuals united by racism”. Completely rejecting any attempts at a period setting, the show is set amidst the avarice and superficiality of contemporary Las Vegas. Goold insists on forcing the play into the present with the use of car rides, ‘dollars’ instead of ‘ducats’, wigged reality TV stars, and a scene which takes place in a lift. In this context (and a plurality of American accents), Shakespeare’s text is lost in the cleverness of Goold’s vision. We spend more time, as an audience, trying to justify the set, costume, and time period than we do pondering the weighty ethical issues of racism, blame, oppression, fidelity, and superficiality raised by the text.

For instance, Portia is cast in this production as a blithering blonde southern belle for half the play before inexplicably reversing her intellectual chops for the famous ‘courtroom’ scene in Act IV. Portia’s marriage had been arranged in her father’s will – suitors would have to choose between three chests (gold, silver, and lead), and failing to find her portrait would swear to forgo marriage. Goold envisioned this as a reality TV show with a Britney Spears-cum-Anna Nicole Smith flavour. This trivialises Portia’s predicament and destroy the power of Shakespeare’s character (whose wit and sass align her with the Beatrice of Much Ado About Nothing) in one fell swoop. 

There are moments where the glitz and glamour of Vegas produce strikingly appropriate connections between text and production. The masquerade scenes are amicably done as debauched romps on the Strip. The suggestion that ‘the Duke of Venice’ is, in fact, an underworld boss and that Antonio’s fate will be decided by the brutal justice of the mafia also fits. However, these are exceptions in the play for their lucidity and appropriateness. The only scene which commands any attention is the courtroom scene of Act IV, where a disguised Portia plays lawyer to save Antonio from the murderous justice of Shylock. The scene is tense, brutal, crushing and comic. The gamble of developing The Merchant of Venice into a dark comedy pays off in the perfectly performed peak and plummet of Patrick Stewart’s Shylock; in the jarring anti-Semitism of Portia; and in the agony of Antonio. The moral bankruptcy of the original anti-Semitism is placed in stark contrast by Stewart’s mesmerising portrayal of Shylock as an oppressed man possessed by the desire of revenge.

Stewart balances his Shylock between the villain in the script and the trodden-down, spat-upon, humiliated Jew which commends his character to so many modern theatre-goers. The audience watches after his daughter’s flight as he is taunted by characters who turn their ‘S’s into the ‘hisssssssssssss’ of Auschwitz. His response, the ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ speech, is second only in passion and performance to his speech before the trial. If there is a reason to see this play, it is Stewart.

In many places the play is genuinely funny. Launcelot (Jamie Beamish) is reimagined in this production as an Elvis impersonator, and his first soliloquy produced ripples of laughter. Beamish’s performance was spot on, and the audience laughed with him (where they laughed at the play in many other places). When the concept of this play gets described coherently, it sounds deceptively interesting, brave, and challenging: set The Merchant of Venice amidst contemporary Las Vegas in an effort to expose the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the heroes. But, there is a je ne sais quoi in the execution that causes the whole to flounder. A multitude of small things fall flat: the contrast between the modern and the ancient; the jarring presence of Shakespearean language in a casino; the appearance of Yoda and Batman costumes; and the Elvis songs. In every scene, there is something which, like a sharp note in a flat key, suggests a mistake. The whole, in this case, is less than the sum of its parts.

At Wadham this week there is the chance to see something really worthwhile. An Evening of Dance is a true collaboration of town and gown, students and non-students brought together by a love of dance are putting on some real show-stoppers with an eclectic mix of all varieties of dance from tap to traditional Indian. There are so many different styles of dance on offer that listing them would be tedious. However, I promise you that watching them wasn’t. 

An example of the more modern dance on offer is Bond which, as you may have guessed, uses the well-loved theme songs associated with 007. It’s an energetic and staccato piece which more than anything expresses the strength and power of the dancers as they work together to create the impact it demands. Perhaps a little too innocent to capture the entire essence of our favourite spy but overall just as sophisticated and entertaining as the character in the  blockbusters.

Much longer, more ambitious and far more original is Icarus, a short ballet inspired by the Greek myth in which Daedalus attempts to flee across the sea on man-made wings with his son, the eponymous Icarus. The choreography captures the joy of flying with all six dancers wheeling across the stage in graceful lines like a flock of birds. The freedom of the later scenes is in direct contrast with the opening where the dancers seem stuck to the floor, trapped by gravity as the struggle to stand. There is a feeling of restlessness which permeates the dance, bringing drama and lyricism to the themes of freedom and over-confidence. Sarah Thorp, the choreographer, has managed to create a ballet which seamlessly moves through cheeky confidence, euphoria, wistfulness and agitation in under twenty minutes. 

It’s rare that you get to see a group of dancers so focused and in tune with each other and the pleasure they get from performing is palpable. An Evening of Dance is a fantastic event emphasising the power of movement in a city where we’re often so focused on words. In more ways than one this is a rewarding production; did I mention that it’s all for charity?