Cracking a code on stage: “The Da Vinci Code” hits Vertigo Theatre

How do you take a global thriller that takes over seven hours to read and shrink it down to two hours on a stage?

That’s the challenge director Simon Mallett faced with Da Vinci Code, the latest production at Vertigo Theatre, taken from the popular Dan Brown novel.

“It’s an interesting challenge to take a 600-page novel and distill it down into a two-and-a-quarter-hour theatre experience,” Mallett says. “There might be some interesting surprises just because of the adaptation process.”

Written for the stage by Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel, the same team behind last season’s adaptation of The Girl of the Train. The script reimagines the high-stakes chase through the Louvre and churches, with a fully Calgary-based cast and design team.

The plot stays familiar — symbolist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu try to crack a murder mystery steeped in religious history. But, it will likely be different than what you imagined as sliding panels transform the set from Paris to London and back again. It is one of the largest sets Vertigo has ever built.

“There’s a lot of spectacle,” says Mallett. “It’s a big show.”

Mallett took the job of directing with fresh eyes. He hadn’t read the novel, but had seen the movie. He says first he watched rewatched the film, read the play script, and  then dove into the book afterward, to better understand what the play was leaving out.

“You’re taking that 600-page novel and cramming it into a 75-page stage play,” he says. “So knowing the background behind it is really useful… but there are also a lot of places where we’ve intentionally gone away from what’s in the book.”

Some of the omissions are strategic; take Silas, for example. In the novel, he’s an albino assassin — a controversial portrayal that this production sidesteps entirely. That’s not a mistake, Mallett says — it’s part of what makes theatre a unique lens.

“Every choice that we’ve made is in the interest of telling the best story that we can on stage,” he explains. “There are going to be things that aren’t what it was in your brain when you were reading the book — unless you were picturing the book happening on stage.”

The Da Vinci Code runs at Vertigo Theatre in Calgary to June 8. Tickets start at $30 and are available at vertigotheatre.com or by calling 403-221-3708.