Why Piranesi May Be the Hardest Fantasy Novel to Adapt — and Why Everyone Wants to Try

Imagine trying to adapt a novel whose most important character may not technically be a person.

In Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, the House is an impossible world of vast halls, thousands of statues, staircases flooded by tides and upper levels where clouds move through the architecture. Piranesi walks through it with patience and reverence. He records what he sees in journals. He cares for the dead. He meets a man he calls the Other. And because Piranesi accepts this world so completely, the reader initially has no choice but to accept it with him.

That is the magic trick. Clarke does not simply show us a strange place. She traps us gently inside one person's understanding of it.

And yet two major adaptations are now moving forward. The Royal Shakespeare Company will premiere a stage version at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from July 3 to August 21, 2027, adapted by Sami Ibrahim and directed by Ned Bennett. Meanwhile, stop-motion studio LAIKA is developing an animated film directed by Travis Knight, with screenwriter Dave Kajganich attached. Knight recently acknowledged the book's reputation for being “unfilmable” and said he was willing to take the challenge.

The House is huge, but the novel is strangely intimate

The easiest mistake would be to treat Piranesi as production-design heaven.

Of course the House is visually irresistible. Endless marble galleries. Classical statues. Ocean water surging through staircases. Birds crossing enormous chambers. Light entering spaces that seem far too large to belong to any human building.

A filmmaker could spend years designing those images. A stage company could build an extraordinary set around them. But if the adaptation becomes primarily about showing us how impressive the House looks, it may miss what makes the House matter.

Piranesi does not experience it as a fantasy attraction. It is home. He knows the tides. He notices birds. He catalogues statues. He treats the House as something benevolent and alive, not simply a puzzle that exists for him to escape.

That emotional contradiction is much harder to stage than an impressive flood.

The real special effect is Piranesi's mind

Clarke tells the story through journal entries. That gives the reader access not only to events, but to the system Piranesi uses to understand them. His dates, labels, observations and assumptions create the structure of the book.

On the page, we can notice a contradiction before he does. We can pause over a strange phrase. We can remember an earlier entry and realise that something no longer fits. The mystery is built collaboratively between narrator and reader.

Film usually wants to make information concrete. If a camera shows an object clearly, we know it exists. If it shows a room, we know what the room looks like. That certainty can be dangerous for a story where perception itself is part of the mystery.

Stage has the opposite limitation and perhaps the opposite advantage. Theatre cannot realistically build an infinite House, but it can make a small space behave psychologically. A door can become a threshold. A pool of light can imply another hall. Repetition can make architecture feel endless without literally constructing endless architecture.

Five reasons the novel resists adaptation

The RSC may have one advantage film does not

Theatre is built on agreement.

A stage audience willingly accepts that one room can become ten rooms, that a lighting change can become evening, that a chair can become a carriage and that a few metres of floor can represent a journey across a country.

That willingness may be perfect for Piranesi.

Director Ned Bennett has a reputation for formally inventive work, while adapter Sami Ibrahim has previously worked across theatre that engages with history, politics and shifting perspectives. The RSC has also described Piranesi and its new Mrs Dalloway as part of a larger theatrical question about how to put inner life on stage.

The Swan Theatre itself may help. It is an intimate thrust-stage venue rather than a giant proscenium box. If the production allows the House to emerge around the audience rather than behind a frame, the limited physical space could become an advantage rather than a compromise.

And LAIKA may be the most logical film studio for it

If Piranesi must become a film, stop-motion is a fascinating choice.

LAIKA's best work has always depended on physical texture. Coraline turned buttons, fabric, miniature rooms and handcrafted faces into something simultaneously beautiful and unsettling. Kubo and the Two Strings, directed by Travis Knight, made myth feel tactile rather than weightless.

That matters because the House should not feel like an anonymous digital environment. Its statues, stone, water and architecture need weight. Piranesi touches things. He gathers things. He measures and catalogues. The physical world is central to his identity.

LAIKA acquired the rights in 2024, with Knight attached to direct. In 2025, Dave Kajganich — whose credits include Suspiria and Bones and All — was reported as the screenwriter. And in October 2026, Knight confirmed that the project remains in development, explicitly acknowledging that people have called the novel unfilmable.

That does not mean the film will arrive soon. Knight has also warned that LAIKA's stop-motion process takes time and that none of its next projects is right around the corner. For a book this delicate, that may be reassuring.

The biggest danger is explaining the mystery too well

Modern adaptations often fear audience confusion.

A strange detail becomes a line of explanatory dialogue. A symbolic image becomes a flashback. A character's uncertain memory becomes a clean timeline. The logic becomes easier to follow, but the atmosphere becomes thinner.

Piranesi cannot afford that trade.

The novel works because the reader slowly understands that the categories Piranesi uses are incomplete. Clarke gives us clues without announcing that they are clues. We are allowed to feel the world change shape underneath us.

A good adaptation therefore needs confidence. It must trust viewers and theatre audiences to sit inside uncertainty. It must allow silence, repetition and unanswered questions to exist long enough to become meaningful.

That is unusual in an entertainment culture that increasingly competes for divided attention. It is also exactly why the project is exciting.

Why readers will care even if the adaptations fail

Piranesi won the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction and became a major bestseller, but its reputation has grown through something more intimate than awards. Readers hand this book to other readers with a peculiar warning: know as little as possible before you begin.

That kind of recommendation is powerful because it treats discovery as part of the artwork.

The RSC production and LAIKA film will inevitably change that relationship. Posters will show the House. Casting will give Piranesi a body and voice. Trailers will choose what imagery to reveal. People who have never opened the book may meet its world visually first.

That is not automatically a loss. A great adaptation can create a second doorway into a story. It can make readers return to the novel and notice things they missed. It can reveal a new interpretation of a familiar scene.

But Piranesi is the rare case where the adaptation will be judged not only by what it shows, but by what it has the courage not to show too quickly.

That is why the next year will be so interesting. The RSC will test whether the House can exist in a room full of live people. LAIKA will test whether a handmade film can make infinity feel physical. Both will have to solve the same impossible problem.

How do you adapt a story whose greatest power comes from the fact that the reader cannot see the whole thing?

Maybe you do not solve it completely.

Maybe you build another labyrinth.

For more on why publishers and studios keep returning to books for screen material, read our feature From BookTok to the Big Screen: How Viral Books Become Movies. You can also explore our guide to the most anticipated new books of October 2026.