Madame of the moment

Everything changes, nothing changes. Today's bored woman, married with one child, not enough to do, her head stuffed with chick lit, her small-town husband worthy but dull, is going to be well tempted if a seducer comes along.

And, if she runs up credit-card debts that she has no hope of paying and is worried to death as a result, who can be surprised? Move her 150 years back in time and you have Madame Bovary, subject of Flaubert's classic novel of intrigue, infidelity, debt and death.

Human aspirations are pretty much the same throughout the centuries - only the props change. Then sex in a coach, today in the back of the Volvo. Bovary springs to life on stage as a familiar figure - in need of a therapist, perhaps, to cure her of shopaholicism, and a copy of Women Who Love Too Much to tuck under her arm - but she's you and me, and it hurts.

'I have been so disappointed,' she says to Charles, her husband, and it strikes to the heart. The lovers desert her, love itself has failed her. And, like so many adulterers --horrid word, but it's what we're talking about --she tries to make him 'understand' and forgive.

But he, as you may imagine, is pretty angry, and she, frankly, unforgivable. The lovers, so tempting to Emma Bovary, are to Charles just callow youths or gross fornicators.

This version of Madame Bovary has been about six years in the writing. I wrote it first, on request, as a straight stage adaptation of the novel.

And then, and then, and then, it went - then she married him, then she got pregnant and then she fell in love, and then into debt and then it all went wrong - but I could see the play didn't 'work'. I was adding nothing to anyone's understanding of the novel.

What I had done seemed an impertinence. There is always a faint feeling of guilt when it comes to 'doing a classic' - I mean, why? How can you improve on the original? Surely everyone knows the story. I had 'done' Hardy's Tess and Brontë's Jane Eyre and Ibsen's Doll's House over the years, because I was asked and because I could, and because one should not allow oneself to be intimidated by the task ahead - but perhaps Flaubert was a play too far.

Shouldn't the writer have the courage of their own inventiveness and do something new? I put the work back in the drawer, to everyone's relief, and wrote a play about a chat show host interviewing a genetic scientist who had cloned his own wife, in the course of which the terrible and wonderful secret was revealed to the family.

It was called The Four Alice Bakers - and was performed at Birmingham Rep and 'worked', though it didn't, as they say, 'travel'. But Madame Bovary lingered on in the back of my mind. The faithless creature would not lie down quietly and die.