Cinema and stage adaptations of Ernest Hemingway novels have struggled to match the writer’s descriptive power.

But a new production of A Farewell To Arms premiering in Hove is aiming to buck the trend.

Director Andrew Quick believes by combining stage and film his imitating the dog company can turn Papa’s novel about his First World War experience into compelling live drama.

“Hemingway didn’t recognise the films as being his writing, but I think he would recognise this,” he says.

Quick has chopped Hemingway’s story of an American ambulance driver who falls in love with a British nurse on the Italian front in 1918.

He has penned a few descriptions which summarise some passages. But, he says, Hemingway’s words make up 99% of the text.

The company uses a Greek chorus, live filming and projection, and specially-commissioned music to “bring theatre and cinema together” and make the audience feel as if “they have fallen into the book”.

“When you start off with any novel you struggle to befriend the characters and get at one with the story.

“But then there is a point when you buy into its narrative and structure.

“That is what we have tried to stage: that idea of the book gradually coming to life like when you read.”

Hemingway’s experience in Italy was his first taste of war.

He answered a Red Cross appeal for First World War volunteers while working on The Kansas City Star. He arrived in Paris and was quickly despatched to Italy. In 1918 he returned home after being injured by an Austrian mortar shell.

Hemingway later wrote, “When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you... Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you.”

A Farewell To Arms might be a war novel but is also a love story – albeit a bleak one.

“It deals with the politics between man and woman and the two main characters have a complex affair.

“They survive by cutting themselves off from the world and as soon as they get back in the world it destroys them.

“That is a constant theme in the book. No matter how ideal and romantic you will be. The world will destroy you.”

A farewell to arms The Old Market, Upper Market Street, Hove, Thursday, November 27 to Saturday, November 29