Griefs Grim Dance: A Single Mans Story Brought to Life on Stage

In a world where the passage of time can sometimes feel like a blur, American singer-songwriter John Grant recently stumbled upon a book that had the power to stop him in his tracks. "I can't believe that somehow I was able to make it all the way to the age of 55 without having read that book!" he exclaims from his sofa in Reykjavík. "It's a transformative book. I was completely blown away by it; I've been trying to get everyone that I've ever met to read it." The book in question is Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, published in 1964 and later adapted into a 2009 film directed by Tom Ford, starring Colin Firth. Now, the novel is about to be brought to life on stage as a ballet, premiering at this year's Manchester International Festival. Grant, the former Czars frontman and now an acclaimed solo artist (with albums including Pale Green Ghosts and his latest, The Art of the Lie), is writing the new show's songs. A Single Man tells the story of middle-aged academic George, an Englishman in LA, living through devastating grief following the death of his partner, Jim, in a car accident. The book charts, as Grant puts it, "the millions of tiny moments that make up human life." The idea of turning the book into a ballet came from choreographer Jonathan Watkins (Kes, 1984, Reasons to Stay Alive), who had been musing on the concept before the pandemic. "Jonathan was pursuing me about this for several years, and I was a little confused about why anyone would want me to do it," says Grant, though he says he's always liked dance. Once he had read the book, it resonated so strongly there was no doubt. "It was like this man had been inside my head walking around," he laughs. "I knew I was self-absorbed, but I didn't realize there were people out there that understood me so deeply." The book's portrayal of grief, especially, connected deeply with Grant, whose mother died of lung cancer when he was in his 20s. "My work is saturated by that," he says. "But sometimes I wonder if I've ever actually been able to grieve yet. Grief is nothing if not an extremely skittish beast, right? The individual experience of dealing with grief is a very strange thing to go through. And it's so masterfully depicted [in the book] within the context of going about your day." When I speak to Watkins some days later, he too talks about the theme of grief, focusing on those experiencing it. "It's also that there's this great love between two men at a time when people didn't really believe that two men could love each other that much, and therefore couldn't feel grief in the same way," he says. For Watkins, who founded the company Ballet Queer in 2023, the importance of A Single Man as a queer story was key to wanting to make this work. He explains why he was so keen to work with Grant, who is himself gay: "I always saw it with John Grant; I really loved his work and I could hear that the themes of his existing songs already had an overlap with the book."