He won eight Oscars for Slumdog Millionaire and huge acclaim for such stylish films as Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Sunshine. But now, just when his cinematic success is at its most giddying, Danny Boyle is to return to his theatrical roots – having been, in his words, "distracted for 15 years by the movies".
Boyle will make his National Theatre debut next winter, directing an adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, it was announced today.
According to the National's artistic director, Sir Nicholas Hytner, Boyle was one of the first artists he approached when he started at the theatre eight years ago. It was then that Boyle – over cake at a cafe – outlined his ideas about a Frankenstein production.
According to Hytner: "He has a very particular take … and he described to me in detail how he would make a theatrical event out of it … He wants to make a large-scale and visually ambitious event for our main stage."
At Boyle's suggestion, writer Nick Dear was commissioned to adapt the novel around "a central idea of Danny's", according to Hytner, though he would not say what this was. But it was only after Slumdog's Oscar success that Boyle told Hytner he was ready.
Speaking at the unveiling of the theatre's next season, Hytner said Shelley's novel interested Boyle because of the way it highlighted "the way we have messed around with our environment; the ethics of genetic engineering". The production, however, will not update Shelley's original 1818 novel to a contemporary setting.
Boyle is currently in Utah in the US directing his next film, 127 Hours, about a climber who becomes trapped under a boulder and must saw off his own arm to survive. He will start working in earnest on Frankenstein when the film is complete.
Theatregoers will have an opportunity to observe, in Hytner's words, "how a director with a very distinct personal style has been altered by 15 years in film".
Boyle was artistic director of the Theatre Upstairs, the second stage of the Royal Court theatre in London, from 1982-85, and deputy director of the main theatre from 1985-87.
There he directed plays such as Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Grace of Mary Traverse and an acclaimed production of Edward Bond's Saved. He also directed five productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
However, these productions tended to be small-scale, even when he worked at the RSC. Ibsen's The Pretenders was performed at the intimate Swan theatre in Stratford, as was Tirso de Molina's The Last Days of Don Juan and Ben Jonson's The Silent Woman.
Boyle's film career, meanwhile, has taken a trajectory from the low-budget Shallow Grave in 1994 to the polychrome fantasies of Slumdog Millionaire.
"As a movie director he's as happy carrying his camera around the slums of Mumbai as working on a vast set for a film like Sunshine. He has a big visual imagination," said Hytner, adding that when Boyle worked in theatre in the 1980s, "he wasn't a 'big' stage director".
Other highlights of the forthcoming season include Sir Peter Hall directing his daughter Rebecca Hall – who has a growing film reputation after starring in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona – as Viola in Twelfth Night.
Michael Grandage, artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse theatre, will make his National debut with Georg Büchner's Danton's Death. Welcome to Thebes, a new work by Moira Buffini for the theatre's Olivier stage, will be directed by Sir Richard Eyre.
Rupert Goold, who had a hit with Lucy Prebble's Enron, will work on a new drama by Mike Bartlett called Earthquakes in London, and Handspring, the puppet company behind the National hit War Horse, will return with a new piece devised and directed by Neil Bartlett.