FROM La Traviata to Moulin Rouge, the tale of the tart with a heart who finally finds love tragically late has been around for centuries, writes David Lewins.

But now writer Neil Bartlett has gone back to the original source, La Dame aux Camelias by Alexandre Dumas, to create Camille, starring Daniela Nardini.

"I always wanted to tell the story of Camille as if it were for the first time, to make it something new," said Bartlett, artistic director of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, where the play, which is now coming to Malvern, began.

"It's based on a true story about a group of people living in a city where it was fashionable to live fast."

The story is based on Dumas' own affair with the famous Parisian prostitute known as Marie Duplessis.

Dumas transferred himself into the novel as the young artist Armand and Marie Duplessis became Marguerite, who finds love at the same time she discovers she has a fatal illness.

Bartlett and director David McVicar used this 1847 original novel as a source for Camille, even though Dumas himself adapted it for the stage in the 1850s.

"He wrote the play in the mid 19th Century when there was heavy censorship and you couldn't really talk sex or money," said Bartlett.

"Eventually he had to give it a happy ending where Armand and Marguerite are reunited and she dies happy," said Bartlett.

"But that isn't what happened."

Playing Marguerite is Daniela Nardini, better known as Anna from the hit TV series This Life.

Bartlett said: "This is the story of Marguerite who lived and died in 19th Century Paris, but Daniela makes it something completely contemporary and really exciting."

But will audiences still be as shocked as when Dumas tried to squeeze it past the censors in 1850s?

"They'll have to come and see for themselves," he said. "That is why we go to the theatre. It is in the present tense and it has the impact of seeing people in front of you getting drunk and behaving badly."

Bartlett is both a writer and a translator, and Camille sits somewhere between the two.

"The reason it says adapted and not translated is that I was working from the book and all of that cannot make it on to the stage.

"It is my ear and my eye which selects what goes on stage but every line of dialogue is from Dumas."

Now the play has premiered, is it as Bartlett imagined?

"You can never imagine what actors are going to create. Theatre is not made on a typewriter, it's made in the rehearsal room," he explains.

Camille runs in the Festival Theatre from Tuesday to Saturday, May 6 to 10. Tickets cost £10 to £18 from the box office on 01684 892277.