A SCIENCE-fiction classic about a sentient planet is being brought to Scotland for the first time.

Solaris, by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, has previously been tackled by giants of cinema Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh.

Now the 1961 novel, set on a space station orbiting a strange oceanic planet, is being brought to the UK stage in an adaptation by top playwright David Greig, artistic director at the Royal Lyceum Theatre. Opening at the Edinburgh theatre’s 2019/20 season tonight, Solaris will then head south to London’s Lyric Hammersmith Theatre.

The production premiered in June at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, which describes itself as “Australia’s most boundary-pushing theatre company”.

Malthouse co-chief executive Matthew Lutton directs Greig’s adaptation in a continuation of a relationship which saw the pair present a critically acclaimed run of classic Australian novel Picnic At Hanging Rock in 2016.

An international cast will bring Lem’s book to life, including Polly Frame as Kris Kelvin, a psychologist sent to investigate the strange behaviour of scientists on board the space station.

The production sees Kelvin communicate via video to Gibarian, a doctor obsessed by the mysterious planet played by internationally celebrated actor Hugo Weaving.

Greig, who has previously adapted Alasdair Gray’s sprawling Lanark and Joe Simpson’s mountain epic Touching The Void for the stage, says he enjoyed the challenge of adapting Solaris.

“I’m only interested in adapting things that make me wonder how the hell am I going to do it,” says Greig. “There were moments like that working on Touching The Void and Lanark, but we found our way through it.”

“I knew the Tarkovsky film from way back but I hadn’t read the book,” says Greig. “I found it surprised me. Whereas Tarkovsky’s film is amazing and full of loss and loneliness and yearning, the book is much more funny and wry. While we’ve not turned the play into a comedy, I think there is a wit and lightness and strangeness that comes from the book. It’s not completely true but it’s not a bum steer either – it’s actually not entirely dissimilar to the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.”

Mindful that the speculative futures of science fiction do not traditionally translate well to the stage, Greig and Lutton decided to set the piece during the time Lem originally wrote the work in cold war Poland in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Imagining each of the scientists as men was something the author likely never gave a second thought, says Greig, who decided to present the protagonist of Kelvin as a woman.

“In the book every single character is a man, and an assumed white man at that,” Greig says. “There comes a point when you think: ‘Was that just the assumptions of the time?’ Lem’s imagined world presents the whole of the planet Earth a unified thing. Why would we not think the crew of this spaceship is representative of Earth?”

Greig continues: “Once you ask that, you’ve already made a change. And then you think about Kris Kelvin, who’s a psychologist. And yes, why not have a female psychologist? We should at least ask the question. I couldn’t see us losing anything from the story and thought instead there was a lot to gain.”

Lem’s book, says Greig, is less concerned with gender than basic human needs.

“It’s no coincidence that Kelvin is a psychologist,” he says. “Solaris is a story of contact. We yearn for contact but it’s also a source of danger, a source of fear. Like all the best science fiction, Solaris uses planets and space and aliens to talk about something that’s very deeply human.”

September 12 to October 5, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, £16 to £33, Wed and Sat, 2pm, mats, £14 to £29. Tel: 0131 248 4848.

lyceum.org.uk