Condensing Captain Corelli: Rona Munro on adapting Louis De Bernières’s novel for the stage

When leading Scottish playwright Rona Munro was asked, back in 2017, whether she would be interested in writing a stage version of Louis De Bernières’s hugely popular 1994 novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, she had just two strong memories of the book she had read more than 20 years earlier. There was the haunting beauty of the setting, in a mountain village on the Greek island of Cephalonia during and after the Second World War; and there were the two poignant love stories at the heart of the novel and of the 2001 film – the story of Italian army captain Antonio Corelli and his love for Pelagia, the daughter of the village doctor who helps him recover from his war wounds, and the story of the book’s opening narrator, Carlo, who has lost his love Francesco in the war, and gives his life to save Corelli’s.