Stage alliance gives Storm Boy wings Cast members of the production of Storm Boy, Rory Potter, 12, Peter O'Brien and Trevor Jamieson, on the Sydney Theatre Company stage at Walsh Bay. THE author of Storm Boy, Colin Thiele, is no longer alive and the Australian film industry has lost touch with Henri Safran, the French director of the AFI-winning 1976 film based on the children's book. Even the film's famous pelican Mr Percival is no longer with us, having died in 2009 after living to the age of 33 in the Adelaide Zoo. But 50 years after it was written, Thiele's book is still in print and frequently read by school kids inside and outside the classroom. Storm Boy has been continually in print. It's one of those books that just sells," New Holland publishers managing director Fiona Schultz said. We've done at least 400 reprints across various editions over 50 years. Its success is wonderful for Colin Thiele. He was a lovely man. Next week, for the first time, the story of a boy growing up with his father on the fringes of society will be brought to life in the theatre by a team from Perth's Barking Gecko and the Sydney Theatre Company. Within months of being appointed artistic director of Barking Gecko in 2011, director John Sheedy asked writer Tom Holloway to adapt the story for the stage. Trevor Jamieson, Peter O'Brien, Rory Potter and Michael Smith are among the cast. "It's our homegrown film, one we can own and it's such a beautiful story," Sheedy said. Despite the tale being so definitively set on South Australia's windswept Coorong coast, and the film having been shot there with funding from the SA Film Corporation during the creatively vibrant Dunstan era, the stage play has no links to the state. State Theatre Company of South Australia chief executive Rob Brookman agreed there would be an audience for the play in Adelaide on account of its being such a famous South Australian story. But he said he didn't know if anyone in the state had ever tried to bring Storm Boy to the stage. "There are not that many films that get turned into plays," he said. Given it's now happening, we'll certainly be checking it out but we couldn't program it until 2015. Sheedy said the story had endured because Thiele created "the perfect recipe . . . You've got a friendship between a boy and a pelican, and for children (that's) such a beautiful combination to have a human and an animal as best mates.