adaptation
David Benedict
From Nicholas Hytner and Alan Bennett’s wonderfully nostalgic version of The Wind in the Willows through Coram Boy, the international smash hit War Horse and beyond, the National Theatre has a startling track record in turning what used to be patronisingly regarded as “family shows” into first-rate theatre. But for most of the first act of Pinocchio, the latest entry in the National’s Christmas Hits stakes, it looks as if there’s nothing worse than great expectations. Despite entrancing visuals, the uninvolving storytelling is as wooden as its central character. Mercifully, however, once Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Theatreland is currently awash with pantomimes and rehashes of A Christmas Carol, so all credit to this ambitious new production, an adaptation of the 1935 children’s book, The Box of Delights. Long before Narnia, poet laureate John Masefield was concocting tales of children dispatched to mysterious country houses for safekeeping but encountering deep magic, time travelling and talking animals. Serialised by the BBC in the mid-1980s, this new stage version is the work of children’s writer Piers Torday and takes full advantage of the wonderfully ramshackle Victorian relic that is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How good was Howards End (BBC One)? Practically flawless. Even if it broke into a bit of an action-packed sprint towards the dénouement, it’s been a triumphant reaffirmation of EM Forster, a canonical favourite back in the 1980s courtesy of Merchant Ivory and David Lean who has since fallen out of favour with dramatists.It began with the casting. As the capable, questing Schlegel sisters Hayley Atwell and Philippa Coulthard (pictured below) rejoiced in a physical similarity which made it extraordinarily easy to believe in their mutual loyalty and intellectual compatibility – though of course Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Woman in White insists on being told and retold. Wilkie Collins’s much loved thriller is perhaps the most widely and frequently adapted of all the great Victorian novels. In Marian Halcombe it has a resourceful heroine whose appeal doesn't rest remotely in her looks, and in Count Fosco with his menagerie of sinister pets it has an impeccably flavoursome villain. No wonder the BBC is unleashing yet another television version, while the Charing Cross Theatre has revived Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2004 musical in a newly stripped-down version.A first theatrical version found its way onto the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jabberwocky is all the more enjoyable once you get past what it isn’t; Terry Gilliam’s 1977 directorial debut is a medieval romp starring Michael Palin and a short-lived Terry Jones, but audiences shouldn’t expect a Monty Python film. Gilliam and Palin’s bonus commentary is a joy, Gilliam describing his relief at “not having to be funny all the time,” free to let this baggy, rambling tale unfold at a more stately pace. There are many mirthsome moments, but Gilliam admits that Jabberwocky “is more quirky than funny.”The inspiration for Gilliam and screenwriter Charles Aveson was the nonsense Read more ...
David Edgar
Since mid-August, I’ve been doing something I swore I’d never do again. I’ve been rehearsing a new adaptation of a novel by Charles Dickens. Sometime in the autumn of 1979, I received a phone call from Trevor Nunn, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He explained that the company wanted to do a version of a Dickens novel, and would I be interested in adapting it?As my brain rushed chaotically through what I remembered of the Dickens canon, he explained that the choice was down to two: the dark and majestic late novel Our Mutual Friend and the earlier picaresque jollity Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Go west, opera-lover: Mid Wales Opera is back in business. In fact, it’s been back since spring this year, when it toured venues in Wales and England with a warmly reviewed Handel Semele and a striking (and impressively cast) Magic Flute inspired by 1970s British sci-fi. That was the first production under the company’s new artistic leadership of Jonathan Lyness and Richard Studer – a conductor/director team with considerable form and substantial ambitions. This spirited chamber staging of Walton’s 1967 “extravaganza in one act” The Bear – MWO’s third new production this year – is modest in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can it really be a quarter-century since that finest of all Merchant-Ivory film adaptations, Howards End, was first released? So it is, astonishingly, which surely means the time is ripe for a fresh celluloid take on EM Forster's enduring 1910 novel about morality, love and loss in Edwardian-era England. The current outing grants the creators of this collaboration between the BBC and the American channel Starz four Sunday nights to capture what the glorious Anthony Hopkins/Emma Thompson film conveyed in half that time. The verdict so far: compelling stuff that doesn't as yet fully Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Although playwright John Pielmeier, who has written this stage adaptation of The Exorcist, reckons that “I adapted the novel, not the film,” the indelible images from William Friedkin’s 1973 movie were always bound to define an audience’s expectations. The spinning head and green projectile vomiting have entered collective folklore, and the film’s extensive use of prosthetics, elaborately sinister sound effects and subliminal imagery conspired to earn it the reputation of being the most terrifying movie of all time.However, this isn't even the scariest play this week. Designer Anna Fleischle Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Second World War is central to our national imagination, yet it has been oddly absent from our stages recently. Not any more. Nicholas Wright’s new play, an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel about lonely English women and American servicemen which premieres at the Hampstead Theatre in north London, effortlessly evokes the world of the Home Front deep in the middle of total war. Yet adapting novels is a risky business, mainly because their tone is so hard to convey without using paragraph after paragraph of prose, and Wright struggles to give us a convincing stage version of a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's not every day that an actor breaks your heart playing a character who surrenders his. But that's among the numerous achievements of Timothée Chalamet's knockout performance in Call Me By Your Name. Playing a culturally savvy and articulate 17-year-old American who comes of age sexually in sun-dappled northern Italy in 1983, Chalamet's work is a thing of wonder. As is the film, by turns ravishing and wrenching. The director, Luca Guadagnino, has explored the labyrinthine byways of desire before in the likes of I Am Love and A Bigger Splash, but never with anything like Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The crime novels of Jo Nesbø are rampaging Nordic psycho-operas. The author's Oslo detective Harry Hole is a lofty alcoholic who takes an outrageous pummelling in his pursuit of deranged serial killers. His many adventures fill the crime shelves in bookshops with their fat spines in flashing yellow upper case, but until now he's been kept from the screen. Michael Fassbender feels like correct casting, a loping, freaky lunk who can embody obsession and self-loathing.In The Snowman, we first encounter Hole waking up on a public bench with a hangover from hell. He has an ex-girlfriend Rakel ( Read more ...