Beowulf: The Musical had its premiere at Greyfriar Kirk at Edinburgh Festival Fringe on 15th August. I sat down with its writer and composer, Umay Acar-Sümer, to talk about the source material and why she feels it was ready for a musical adaptation.
What made you decide to write a musical version of Beowulf?
I was doing my master’s in medieval studies, and I was specifically studying, storytelling traditions of the Anglo-Saxon. I wrote a lot about poetry and storytelling, and Beowulf is probably my favorite of all time.
Do you have a favorite translation?
Oh, I really like the [S.A.J.] Bradley translation. I think that one’s really easy to get into.
It’s amazing Beowulf survived when you think about how little else we have from that time.
There’s quite a lot of riddles, like the Exeter Book Riddles, which are amazing, and from the same Codex as Beowulf. There’s a lot of fragments of things. [Beowulf the Musical] is based on that fragment, it’s the longest we have. And I just think, it was so long ago, and there’s nothing today that is the same in the way we live, but the emotions are the same. People are the same. That’s what I love about it.
What made you feel like it had to be a musical?
Well, I love music. I’ve been composing for a while, and so I was thinking of writing a musical. I was just thinking about Beowulf specifically, but it was just the idea of how do I adapt this into a musical? I was in a musical theater company that had a lot of female performance, but in the film I couldn’t find a lot of big female roles, so I had to create quite a lot of them. I just went to for research deep dive. Of all the connections that these characters have all the time. So that’s why I added some bits from Gesta Danorum, and I added the scribe character.
How did you decide what needed to be a song?
So before I started writing, I just made a list of all these what I thought was important. I started with writing the songs first and then I would connect them together. I mean, with musical theater, it’s all about when you can’t express yourself with words, you start singing, when you can’t express yourself with singing, you start dancing. Beowulf’s first song is called ‘Heard You Needed Me’, and that’s when he’s introducing himself. And you can’t just come in and say, this is my name, and this is what I’m here to do, because he is the main character and we need to know what to admire in him. It’s his ‘I am’ song. So I thought those kind of soliloquies, like those moments of silence, of the character being in their heads were the right moments.
This is a work that has been recited for over fourteen centuries. Do you feel any sort of responsibility towards the material in that way?
When I decided that I wanted to adapt Beowulf, that was one thing I thought a lot about. That was just around the time I was writing my dissertation, and it was about storytelling traditions and the importance of the spoken word. I was also very conscious about, that people are going to know this poem and they’re going to notice if anything is off. And I know that when I love something and I see an adaptation and it’s changed, I may not be happy with it. And I didn’t want that to happen because I love this piece so much. There is a responsibility that I felt that way.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Erin Murray Quinlan is an American playwright, amateur beekeeper, and proud confirmed solver of Cain’s Jawbone. Her full biography can be found at www.erinmurraquinlan.com.
