In her debut play Too Many Books, journalist Judi Bevan delivers a heartfelt and thought-provoking exploration of the complexities of international adoption in the 1990s.
Inspired by lived experiences of adopting a child during the time of China’s one child policy, it focuses on issues of identity, cultural displacement and the journey of parents trying to create a family.
Too Many Books plays Upstairs at the Gatehouse from Wednesday, February 26 to March 16. Details: https://www.upstairsatthegatehouse.com/
Writing for The Theatre Playbook, Bevan reveals the inspiration behind the play, the themes at the heart of the story and her writing process to develop the script.
Too Many Books is a ‘quest’ plot about a naïve middle aged couple who have both married for the second time and want to start a family. Neither of them have had children and after two failed pregnancies and two failed IVF treatments they decide a better way forward would be to adopt.
They are surprised to learn there are very few babies available for adoption in the UK and in any case they are too old to be allowed to adopt a young child. The alternative is to adopt an older child which has been through multiple placements and after heart-searching they feel they are not up to it.
They learn that the one child policy in China where the government decreed couples should only be allowed one child – although the policy varied from province to province – means that many baby girls are being abandoned and are available for adoption by Westerners.
Some of our friends had adopted and had found it far more difficult than they had imagined. The story is informed by several couples’ experience including our own, many of us coming across seemingly hostile social workers during our assessment.
We explore the themes of personal freedom such as the ability of anyone to have a birth child versus how very difficult it is to adopt. We also look at the challenges of adopting a child from another race.
We see Daniel and Julia, the main protagonists, embarking on their quest full of hope and optimism. They are soon disillusioned by a unsympathetic adoption agency and are initially rejected but they take their case to the courts. You will have to come and see the play to see if they succeed. The other characters include the first, hostile social worker they meet and a second, more sympathetic social worker who, herself is adopted.
I had the idea for the play while I was working with Conor Montague who heads up fiction and playwriting at the Irish Centre in Hammersmith. I originally met him at the CityLit where I also attended classes by Jemma Kennedy who last year had her play Genesis Inc performed at the Hampstead Theatre.
The benefit of working on a play while attending classes is that the script can be workshopped so one hears how the character sounds, what sounds clichéd and what gets a laugh. There is also feedback from the teacher and other students.
As for a writing process, I originally prepared an outline of the plot and the characters and took it from there. I write best in the morning when my brain is clear of the paraphernalia of everyday life.
Christopher Hunter and I have liaised extensively through the recent development of the script which has been extremely useful as he has enjoyed a life-time career in the theatre. I decided to write a play, rather than a film script because my mother was an actor and also wrote two plays when she was teaching amateur groups. I know several screen writers and it is quite a different art although I attended Robert McKee’s famous Story Structure course when he was in London many years ago. I put on a one act play at the Irish Centre last year and hope to write other full length plays.
As for lessons I have learned? It’s a lot harder than it looks!
Judi Bevan, February 6, 2025