adaptation
Jenny Gilbert
Sometimes you go to the theatre and in the first 10 minutes are convinced that the production is going to smash it, only to find by half time that it’s not. Initial delight gives way to mild irritation, and as a member of the ticket-buying public you draw a line under it and hope for better luck next time. A critic, however, must identify what didn’t work and why. Sally Cookson’s stage adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s best-loved novel seems to have everything going for it: dynamism, narrative clarity and a willingness to strip the story to the beating heart beneath the corset-stays. It takes Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Oh dear. I thought that this was going to be one of those exciting fantasy films that livened up TV on weekend afternoons in my childhood, and that there would be kitschy special effects and ludicrous dialogue. But no, it's not 20,00 Leagues under the Sea, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad or even Dr Doolittle. It's a turgid plough through a Jules Verne yarn which doesn't even introduce a freaky creature until almost 50 minutes into the storyline, and then it's just some poor old lizards matted into a drab seaside set. Journey to the Centre of the Earth frankly doesn't deserve the full Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Of the many good reasons for seeing Akram Khan’s 2016 remake of Giselle – his work is often a headline event, for one – the most compelling is the company performing it. English National Ballet used to be the poor relation of its plusher sister national flagship in WC2. Not any more. Under the leadership of the fabulous Tamara Rojo (formerly a major attraction at that plush national flagship) it has been transformed from a troupe of also-rans into a company of demons."Demonic" is the only word for the ferocious energy and precision with which ENB’s dancers deliver Khan's extraordinary feat of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A decade after his masterpiece, The Tree of Wooden Clogs, won the 1978 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Italian director Ermanno Olmi took Venice’s 1988 Golden Lion for The Legend of the Holy Drinker (La leggenda del santo bevitore). Festival victories aside, at first sight the two films could hardly seem more different.In the second film Olmi moved into distinctly new territory for him: Legend was an adaptation (of the 1939 novella by the Austrian writer Joseph Roth), featured professional actors (Rutger Hauer in the lead role), was made in English, and counts as a fable, very different in style from Read more ...
Blake Morrison
Is there anything more terrifying for a playwright than the first day of rehearsals? For months, even years, you’ve been working and reworking the text, saying the words aloud to yourself in an empty room and imagining the actors saying them to a packed auditorium. Now at last you’re here, for the read-through, with the cast, director, costume designer, choreographer, lighting man, deputy stage manager, etc, arranged round a big table. It ought to be exciting. It is exciting. But also scary. The dialogue, in others’ mouths, sounds different from how it sounded in your head. Less crisp, less Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How many more throats must be slit in 19th-century London before the river of blood starts to clot? The Limehouse Golem follows the gory footprints of Sweeney Todd and various riffs on the Ripper legend. Based on Peter Ackroyd’s 1994 novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, this belated adaptation sensibly ditches the reference to a star of the music hall whose name recognition value isn’t what it was in the late Victorian East End.Uncovering the identity of the eponymous golem is the hospital pass handed by his superior to Inspector John Kildare (Bill Nighy). The so-called golem, a killer so Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The story of the man (and it usually is a man) who voluntarily disappears has been told and told again. Wakefield is based on an EL Doctorow short story which is itself inspired by a short story by Hawthorne, so it’s a narrative with deep ancestral roots. In this iteration Bryan Cranston plays Howard Wakefield, a New York salaryman who, thanks to a chance train delay one evening, decides on a whim to absent himself from his own life.As this life involves marriage to Jennifer Garner, who has given him two gorgeous twin daughters, this looks like senseless squandering of a winning hand. But as Read more ...
Susan Sheahan
Much loved, yes. But Dickens’s novel is probably little read by modern audiences and so a chance to see a new adaptation of this tale of discontent, riot and general mayhem set in the French revolution and spread across London and Paris in the late 1700s should be a genuine treat for theatregoers. And on paper Matthew Dunster’s version for Regent's Park of this intense exploration of injustice (billed, in fact, as "a new play") has it all: love, death, comedy, revolution and the promise of a provocative exploration of the underlying issues of power, oppression and tragedy connecting how we Read more ...
Matthew Dunster
When you are adapting a novel like A Tale of Two Cities, it's a privilege to sit with a great piece of writing for a considerable amount of time. You also feel secure (and a bit cheeky) in the knowledge that another writer has already done most of the work.I always have an eye on the final production, whether I'm directing it or not. I want to always be thinking about what theatre and theatre artists can achieve on behalf of the novel. So the adaptations hopefully aren't like dialogue-led plays, more like scores for the theatre. Tim Sheader, the director, and I, love Dickens. We re-read Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This show feels like an end-of-the-exams party, and in a way that’s exactly what it is. If the fruits of Emma Rice’s short tenure as Artistic Director at the Globe were a series of tests that she is deemed to have failed, then Tristan & Yseult, a revival of an early hit devised for the company Kneehigh, is her parting two-fingered salute. For here writ-large are the rowdiness and irreverence and – heavens above – microphones and electric guitar that so offended a certain faction of the board that it was persuaded to terminate Rice’s contract, despite having hired her precisely because of Read more ...
Saskia Baron
For those of us still mourning John Hurt, this lovely HD restoration of the actor’s favourite film is a real joy. Made in 1975 for Thames Television, it’s stood the test of time remarkably well. Funny, moving and often cited as a turning point in British acceptance of homosexuality, The Naked Civil Servant is based on the aphoristic autobiography of Quentin Crisp, who famously described himself as “one of the stately homos of England”. Born Denis Pratt in 1908 into a respectable suburban family, he reinvented himself as the flamboyantly camp Quentin Crisp, rent-boy, artists’ model, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
From the breathless questions posed at the beginning onwards, My Cousin Rachel charges forward like one of leading man Sam Claflin's fast-galloping steeds. Presumably eager not to let this period potboiler become staid, director Roger Michell swoops in on the characters for close-ups and lets his surging camera duck and dive where it may. The result certainly eclipses whatever memory people may have of the 1952 film of the same Daphne du Maurier novel, which heralded a young Richard Burton in the role Claflin takes here. But after a while, one wants to urge everyone to calm down. It's only a Read more ...