Writer Mike Sizemore is the creator the sci-fi television show, Slingers, which is currently in pre-production; he is currently writing a sci-fi feature script and an opera, The Night Bride, to be performed in the UK in 2012. He is in the process of adapting Diana Wynne Jones' novel, Howl's Moving Castle, for Southwark Playhouse.

“This is probably the most collaborative thing I’ve ever done,” Mike Sizemore says of his adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’ entrancing fantasy novel. “I’m serving quite a few masters.”

Chief among them are Davy and Kristin McGuire, the creative team behind The Icebook, a magical living pop-up book that ingeniously blended animation with live action. Initially Sizemore, whose ‘sizzle reel’ for sci-fi series Slingers has seen him courted by Hollywood, was initially asked to help create a scaled-up version of The Icebook for the stage but, at the suggestion of Southwark Playhouse artistic director, Chris Smyrnios, it was decided to use the same striking visual techniques to bring Wynne Jones’ novel to life. Sizemore was immediately taken with the idea. “I’d read it years ago and knew what a great story it was.”

A living pop-up book.

Written in 1986, the novel charts the friendship between a volatile, dandyish young wizard and a young girl who’s been placed under a spell by the evil Witch of the Waste. It was adapted for the screen in 2004 by Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki of the renowned Studio Ghibli and the film version is, to many people, as beloved as the book. But though this production contains a couple of visual nods to Miyazaki’s film, it is the book that is being adapted for the stage, something that posed its own challenges. “The story is quite dense. There’s a lot of plot. The first thing for me was to start working out what we would keep and what we would have to lose.”

In some ways the production is “very much a continuation of what Davy and Kristin were doing on their own with The Icebook.” Their vision has informed the writing process and the way in which their work blends live action with animation helped shape the production. The use of projections “allows us to play around with scale,” Sizemore explains. “It’s more cinematic. We can do wipes and dissolves. We can cut from exterior to interior shots. When the Witch of the Waste is at the height of her powers we can make her enormous in comparison to the rest of the cast.”

There has been more interaction and dialogue on this project than Sizemore is accustomed to from working in film and TV; the piece has evolved over a comparatively short period of time, constantly changing shape as more people become involved. “When Fyfe Dangerfield came on board we began thinking more about making room for the music and the same thing happened when Stephen Fry came on board [as narrator]; I did another draft that made the narrator into more of a character.”

At the heart of the narrative is a love story. This is fundamental to the tale he wanted to tell, even though Sophie, for a good part of the book, “is an elderly lady and Howl is this great, rakish, roughish, philandering dude.” The McGuires’ design provides ways of addressing this division. “We bring out Sophie’s younger self, her spirit, through the projections so that Howl gets to interact with a younger Sophie. That shaped the way I went about writing it.”