adaptation
Katherine McLaughlin
The task of adapting 1978 novel The Switch by Elmore Leonard - who sadly passed away last year - is given to relatively new director Daniel Schechter who brings together a superb ensemble cast, lush seventies set design and a gritty style. He mostly rises to the occasion thanks to confident camera work and an obvious rapport with his actors.When a scam cooked up by a couple of crooks, Louis (John Hawkes) and Ordell (Yasiin Bey aka musician Mos Def pictured below right), to kidnap the wife of a dodgy businessman goes horribly wrong a waiting game begins. Unbeknownst to anyone the husband Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
There are all sorts of companies and shows out there that claim to “rock” the ballet, or otherwise shake up, take down or reinvent an art form that, they imply, is (breathe it softly, the dirty word) elitist, or at least irrelevant. Few, I’d imagine, perform this operation with anything like the skill and intelligence of Dada Masilo, whose 2010 version of Swan Lake opened the lively short smorgasbord season that Sadler’s Wells are calling their Sampled festival. Masilo’s reinvention works because she understands ballet, and not just its conventions – though she skewers those with Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The French auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet is best known and loved for his early work: Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children and (conveniently ignoring Alien: Resurrection) Amélie. These films introduced him as a director with a very particular, rather charming vision; they were sublime, sometimes twisted works of partial fantasy which the more recent A Very Long Engagement and Micmacs didn't quite live up to. With his latest, T.S. Spivet, Jeunet does something quite exciting: he takes the highly characterful way he sees the world and fashions it into three dimensions. It makes for a vibrant Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As Literary Review's "Bad Sex in Fiction Award" recognises, there's not a lot that's funnier and more damaging to a story's credibility than an attempt to be sexy that falls flat or, even better, that misfires spectacularly. Some of the most famous movie duds - Showgirls, Body of Evidence, Boxing Helena, Colour of Night - which are beloved of course by a certain type of film enthusiast, this reviewer included, strive for smouldering and deliver mainly laughs. Which brings us to the latest example of inept eroticism: In Secret, debut writer-director Charlie Stratton's adaptation of Zola's 19th Read more ...
David Nice
If you’re tempted to see Fiona Shaw’s impressive solo performance as Mary the mother of a son she can’t bring herself to name – and see it you probably should – then bear two things in mind.First, anything you may have heard or read about this being the narrative of everywoman mourning an everyman who just happens to have been crucified is nonsense; despite the contemporary props, it’s unequivocally the New Testament story told from a perspective which Biblical literalists will dislike (and they hated it very vocally when the show opened in New York).Second, don’t expect the kind of nuanced Read more ...
Anya Reiss
About a week after my modern adaptation of The Seagull closed in 2012 at Southwark Playhouse the director Russell Bolam texted me, "Same again?" So it’s now in 2014 that at (the new) Southwark Playhouse we’ve got our modern take on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which has just opened.I made it modern because I can’t see any other reason for me to do it. There are loads of eloquent, clever versions of the original knocking around and I don’t feel any need to throw another one in unless I’m doing something different. The reason to make it modern though is more than that, and I have more than a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s the bad books, it has been famously said, that make the good films. As for the good ones, they have to take their chances. There is so much more to lose, so many nuances of tone and subtleties of texture to be sacrificed. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is one such good book. It won the Orange Prize for fiction in 2007 and became a bestseller. Being a multi-stranded narrative peopled by a rich array of characters against an epic backdrop, its journey to the big screen was always on the cards.Set in Nigeria in the 1960s, it tells of two well-to-do, well-educated and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When a book is published, there are broadly speaking three alternative fates which lie in wait. It goes global, it sinks without trace, or it sells modestly and steadily to the readership for whom it was intended. There is, however, another potential option, which is that it catches a thermal and veers off in an unforeseen direction.In 2008 my book I Found My Horn was published. It told of my fractured association with a musical instrument I learned for seven years in my youth, which I then resumed on the brink of my forties. I gave myself a target: at the end of the year I had to stand up in Read more ...
philip radcliffe
“It’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind,” advised Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West when writing the spoof biography Orlando as a “love letter” to her. When she had finished the novel, depicting Vita as an androgynous time-traveller, she wrote defensively: “It is all over the place, incoherent, intolerable, impossible.”Molly Gromadzki as the alluring Sasha performs demanding aerobaticsWelcome to her world of topsy-turvydom, in which the eponymous hero changes sex, cross-dresses, transgresses barriers of gender, place and time. Along the way he/she derides Read more ...
David Benedict
“Her most devastating surprise ever.” Thus spake The Guardian, a quote happily slapped across the cover of the first paperback edition of Agatha Christie’s 1967 thriller Endless Night. While I wouldn’t go quite that far – that honour goes to her still startling, genre-busting The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) – it’s a compelling little chiller. Small wonder that ITV wanted it for their franchise. Just one tiny problem: it’s a crime novel without a detective. Step forward screenwriter Kevin Elyot who, like an invisible mender, has satisfyingly woven Julia McKenzie’s Miss Marple into Christie’ Read more ...
David Benedict
How do you solve a problem like...no, not Maria, Candide? Musicals are loved for their scores – and Leonard Bernstein’s one for this really is a cracker – but they’re held together by their books, i.e. the script/dramatic context that makes audiences care about the characters and plot. Filled to bursting with good intentions, Matthew White’s exuberantly rough’n’tumble new Menier production does its damnedest but there’s no disguising the fact that Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of Voltaire’s satire of inexhaustible optimism remains tension-free. The gulf between the score’s strength and Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Classic children’s stories often have a darker side; a shadowy area that lends an eternal quality to an otherwise merely durable yarn. Such is Mary Poppins. How and why it came to the big screen is one of Hollywood’s best tales, previously untold until now with Saving Mr Banks, a controlled yet poignant story hinging on the persistence and pain essential to bringing even the cheeriest film to fruition.Blind Side director John Lee Hancock’s high-profile effort focuses on the psychological backstory of one of the most famous children’s stories of all. It is a big mission – even if few will know Read more ...