Ian Fleming's family asked him to write a Bond novel. The PG Wodehouse estate wanted his words for the first authorised follow-up to the beloved Bertie Wooster novels. But Sebastian Faulks’s biggest challenge may come in Brighton next week.

The Birdsong author has been talked into making his stage come-back – several years after his debut in a school nativity play as one of the… yes, you guessed it, Three Wise Men.

“On one evening I will appear in it as a soldier. I will have a couple of lines but a couple of lines only, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to learn,” he jokes.

He’ll appear in the final week of the run, he adds, on a night yet to be confirmed – though the production will celebrate its 200th performance on Thursday.

“I don’t think I’ll fluff the lines but I shall be doing a rehearsal. You can’t just walk on. I’ll probably have to have a hair cut as well.”

The appearance is one way for the former deputy editor of The Independent On Sunday and team captain on long-running literary panel show, The Write Stuff, to thank director Alastair Whatley, writer Rachel Wagstaff and the cast of a second touring production of Birdsong as it closes in Brighton.

For director Alastair Whatley, the cameo will be a “magical moment”.

“For Sebastian to be in it for a brief moment – there’s something quite magical about it.

“It’s that experience of being in a world that he wrote – I don’t think he ever imagined he would be on stage doing it.

“It’s quite a special thing to do right at the end of the tour.”

Whatley adds, “Just doing one night nearly killed us during those first couple of weeks. To say we have done it 200 times is quite something...”

The run is fitting for an epic, tragic story which traverses three generations. Wagstaff rewrote Faulks’s fourth novel, first published in 1993, for the second time for its second tour.

Yet Faulks initially warned her against the move.

“I spent a lot time spelling out to her how difficult it would be, and asking her if she really thought it was worthwhile. I said, ‘If you have a good painting, why are you trying to make a sculpture out of it?’”

Faulks believes it is the extremity of the circumstances the characters find themselves in which the audience responds to.

“They watch it and think, ‘Thank God I have never undergone all of this’. These experiences are far outside the lives of most people but there is something about the way the production works which makes people able to identify and think, ‘It could be me’.”

For his research, Faulks went to the Imperial War Museum and read letters, postcards and memoirs by people describing their experience.

He visited places in Flanders on the Western Front with a group of veterans in 1988, and spent time near Amiens, in France, where the first section of the book is set.

“I went backwards and forwards to that area around the river Somme and explored it a lot on foot because I wanted to get a feeling of the lie of the land and the geography of the place. I just sat in the fields and thought about it really.”

The veterans’ experiences and anecdotes from Flanders were of no use – he wasn’t going to change his plotting to squeeze in an anecdote from an old man.

“It’s important to go to places, but ultimately you have to rely on your own imagination to recreate that experience,” he says.

“Characters are not based on any real people. It’s all made up. People find that difficult to believe, but there it is.”

Faulks took six months to pen the ideas which had brewed for more than four years beforehand.

Spending such long periods with a novel must be daunting.

Faulks says for an idea to crystalise, first one must seperate thoughts and ideas.

“We have 10,000 thoughts a day but an idea is something which you can go back to, spend time with, because it’s perplexing, contradictory. It is puzzling, it has a lot of meat on it.

“I think when I realised I could make a book about the First World War the thought that became an idea was, ‘What does this tell us about human beings?’.

“We talk about human nature and psychology and our understanding of it, but standing a hundred yards apart and killing ten million men for no reason, what does this tell you about the nature of human beings?

“Why did nobody say, ‘Stop it, this is enough’? It is a great puzzle. That was the heart of the idea as far as I was concerned.” 

Faulks on...

... being invited by PG Wodehouse’s estate to breathe new life into Jeeves And Wooster:

“I’ve read all the Jeeves And Wooster stories about five times each I  suppose. When I accepted the commission in February I re-read a couple
of them, but then I thought, that’s enough.

“I think I’ve got the voice in my head and so I stopped reading any more. I trusted myself to reproduce something like it.”

Jeeves And The Wedding Bells will be published in November by Hutchinson, which issued all of Wodehouse’s later novels.
Wodehouse died in 1975 at the age of 93. He wrote more than 90 novels and 300 short stories during a literary career spanning more than 70 years.

“It’s coming out in November,” adds Faulks, “so all your Christmas present problems will be solved.”

... rewriting Bond novel Devil May Care to mark the centenary of Fleming’s birth:

“PG Woodhouse was more difficult from the stylistic point of view because his style is very funny, clever and difficult to imitate without falling flat on your face. Ian Fleming’s style was very effective in the Bond books but it
wasn’t so hard to do an approximation of it.

“Every book has its own dangers and rewards. Writing in the voice of someone else you are hidden inside the shell of someone else, so you are less exposed, but on the other hand you especially don’t want to fail because you feel you’d be failing someone else as well.

“If you write your own book and people don’t like it, you’ve only let yourself down.”

... the possibility of a Birdsong film?

“It’s a complicated situation. The film is temporarily on hold. It’s not going to happen this year, but maybe next year.”