WHEN it comes to adapting a book as hefty as A Tale of Two Cities for the stage, where do you start?

Bradford-born Mike Poulton began by reading the novel.

“You can’t simply put a novel on its feet,” he says. “You have to find the play within the novel, otherwise you don’t have a dramatic structure — you have a novel structure and it doesn’t work. When I was doing Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies I sort of threw away the novel and found the play under the surface. I said to [author] Hilary Mantel: ‘It’s like taking a Rolls Royce apart and assembling it as a helicopter’ because it’s a different animal.

“Hilary in that case was very supportive. Charles Dickens doesn’t get an input, so I had a free hand with the text and was able to find a line through the novel that I thought would make a very powerful play.

“What I tried to do was to write a thriller. I like to have people on the edge of their seats, from the opening scene I like to increase the pressure and send them out in tears, which I think is what happens in this. There are lots of laughs, lots of tears.”

Dickens considered A Tale of Two Cities the best story he’d ever written. Interweaving one family’s intensely personal drama with the terror and chaos of the French Revolution, it’s an epic story of love, sacrifice and redemption amid horrific violence and world-changing events.

Was it difficult for Mike to decide what to keep and what to cut? “It’s always tough,” he says.

“You think ‘that’s a wonderful bit’ but it has to go because it doesn’t contribute to the dramatic structure. But there is so much that is play-like. Dickens was a great man of the theatre and thought in scenes, visually, so I used those parts of the novel that would lend themselves to a play.”

Was there a temptation to set it in a different era?

“No, never,” says Mike. “People talk about making things relevant but if a novel is a classic, as this is, it’s always relevant, you’re dealing with characters who are as much a part of ourselves as we are today.

“You don’t need to modernise a thing. Also, it’s a particularly interesting period in history — France and England were enemies with two very different systems. We had an aristocratic, royalist system and they’d just lost that rather violently in France.”

Mike first read the book as a schoolboy. “I must have been about 13. Later on I did a mock O-level paper and ignored all the set books.

“I said: ‘I’m going to write about my favourite novel, A Tale Of Two Cities. I got a very good mark. It was a bit of a risk but it worked.”

He feels strongly that quality productions continue to be seen outside London.

“London has got the lion’s share of everything, I won’t go into the politics but I do think we ought to support regional theatre a lot more because not everybody can get to London, not everybody can pay London prices,” he says.

“Theatre in the regions has got to grow, otherwise it becomes a series of museum pieces.

He adds: “I think people will come out of A Tale of Two Cities having been terribly moved, having learned lessons about themselves and the way you should never give into despair and should always stick by your principles.

“Mainly I want them to come out having had a really good experience seeing something they can’t get on film or TV. Then I want them to come back and see something else.”

A Tale of Two Cities runs at the Alhambra from October 4-8. Call (01274) 432000.