adaptation
Laura de Lisle
“We haven’t started yet!” Hannah-Jarrett Scott, dressed in Doc Martens under a 19th-century shift, reassures us as she attempts to dislodge a yellow rubber glove from a chandelier in the middle of the set of Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of). So begins this rollicking all-female adaptation of the timeless Jane Austen romcom, in which the servants recreate their famous mistresses’ and masters’ turbulent love lives.Written by Isobel McArthur, the play originated in Scotland in 2018 and has gone through several versions before pitching up in the heart of the West End. Directed here by Read more ...
graham.rickson
This weighty box set contains all 52 episodes of the BBC’s take on George Simenon's Maigret, four seasons of which were made and broadcast between 1960 and 1963. Given how much vintage BBC material has been wiped, that this series can now be watched on Blu-ray is little short of miraculous.Decently restored from the monochrome originals, the majority of the instalments stand up pretty well, despite the spartan sets and bewildering range of accents on display. The amount of Parisian location footage is a surprise, adding to the series’ authenticity. Studio sequences were shot live, leading to Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Let it snow! The Broadway musical adaptation of the Disney film behemoth Frozen premiered back in 2018 and now, following Covid delays, a rejigged version finally makes its home in the West End – to the delight of the army of miniature Elsas in attendance. The good news is that there’s plenty here to keep grown-ups entertained as well.The show faithfully adheres to the film plot – as, indeed, it must to avoid a riot – but Jennifer Lee’s book adds more psychological depth to Elsa and Anna (Samantha Barks and Stephanie McKeon), and addresses, if doesn’t quite solve, the dramaturgical issue of Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Philoctetes, Odysseus, Neoptolemus: the men’s names in Sophocles’ Philoctetes are all unnecessarily long and weighed down by expectations. Poet Kae Tempest’s lyrical new adaptation for the National Theatre focuses on the chorus, spinning out the original’s scope to examine the effects of conflict on women – and showing off all their Mercury-nominated wit and wordplay in the process.The subject matter located us at the end of the Trojan War, after Achilles’ death but before the horse comes into play. Philoctetes has been festering on an island for a decade, marooned there by Odysseus after an Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
If you’re looking for a distraction from the apocalyptic headlines that seem to be the norm right now, then it may appeal to descend into the pleasantly air-conditioned surroundings of Jermyn Street Theatre and take a trip to 1888. Here you will be greeted by literature’s most famous nobody, Charles Pooter, whose comic fictional diary – after an initially lukewarm reception – came to be celebrated by figures ranging from Hilaire Belloc to Evelyn Waugh.In this stage version, written by Keith Waterhouse in the 1980s, his account of his life commuting between Holloway and the City of London, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's commanding, and then there's Michael Sheen, who sweeps on to the Olivier stage 15 minutes or so into the new National Theatre revival of Under Milk Wood and scoops up the entire production with it. Inheriting a role made to order for this Welshman, Sheen takes to his fellow countryman Dylan Thomas's 1954 classic as if on a date with destiny. Lyndsey Turner's approach to the intrinsically piecemeal material may at times tilt towards the fussy, but Sheen comes at this portrait of small town life like a man possessed and holds the audience in his disheveled, gleaming-eyed grip from the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They all laughed when the streaming service Britbox declared that it wanted to become a sort of UK-orientated Netflix, because so far it’s been mostly a back catalogue operation which plunders the BBC and ITV archives. You really want to pay a subscription to watch Are You Being Served? and Rosemary and Thyme?However, Britbox has produced, or co-produced, series including The Pembrokeshire Murders and the forthcoming A Spy Among Friends, and The Beast Must Die is the first drama to be shot for Britbox UK. It’s been adapted from the 1938 novel by Nicholas Blake (the pseudonym of Cecil Day- Read more ...
tanika.gupta
On the first day of rehearsals for Out West at the Lyric Hammersmith in May, myself and fellow playwrights Roy Williams and Simon Stephens stood, masked up and lateral flow tested for Covid, and listened as the Lyric Hammersmith's artistic director Rachel O’Riordan welcomed us at the traditional theatrical “meet and greet".As I looked around the room at the producers, stage managers, sound, lighting, costume and set designers, and the communication and theatre staff, I was struck by the enormity of the moment. I’d missed this so much - for over a year! Rachel talked about how important it was Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A little less than two years after Sean Holmes’s kick-ass Latin American carnival-style A Midsummer Night’s Dream erupted at the side of the Thames, it has returned to a very different world. It’s no longer a natural expression of the kind of exuberance we take for granted, but a reminder of what we might be again – a blast of colour from our post-vaccine future.The Globe is, for obvious reasons, one of the best ventilated theatres in London, but full social-distancing measures are in place and the cast reminds us that if evenings like this are to remain possible we must keep our masks on. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This pallid chick flick limps out on release having changed its title since its Berlinale 2020 debut; in the US it's known as My Salinger Year, but perhaps market research in Blighty decreed that name-checking the author of The Catcher in the Rye wouldn't play as well here. Based on novelist Joanna Rakoff’s 2014 auto-fiction, it’s an account of the period she spent working for a legendary literary agent in Manhattan in the mid-90s. While Rakoff’s book has some appeal for readers interested in publishing or nostalgic for accounts of ambitious young graduates trying to Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It wasn’t Jane Austen’s subtlest move, naming her roguish soldier George Wickham. As countless GCSE English teachers have patiently read in generations of essays, his surname sounds a lot like "wicked" – and wicked he is. Adrian Lukis, who played him in Andrew Davies’ 1995 TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, reprises the role in the perfectly pleasant Being Mr Wickham, livestreamed this past weekend from the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds by the Original Theatre Company. It’s Wickham’s less-than-successful attempt to clear his name of the mud Austen dragged it through in her novel. Read more ...
graham.rickson
To Sir, With Love is a very loose adaptation of ER Braithwaite’s autobiographical novel. Reflecting on his experiences as a teacher in London’s East End in the late 1940s, Braithwaite’s commentary (one of two provided here) advises us that “as you read the book, that’s how it was. In the movie, they took huge liberties.” These included director James Clavell updating the action to 1967, and doing away with a subplot featuring an interracial relationship. The bare bones are unchanged, with Sidney Poitier’s Mark Thackeray, a highly educated immigrant from British Guiana, taking on a temporary Read more ...