adaptation
Mark Kidel
Neil Bartlett, as he has demonstrated in his earlier Dickens adaptations of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, knows how to make gripping theatre out of a complex work of fiction. His Great Expectations rattles through the twists and turns of Pip’s coming of age with a pace that rarely lets up, so much so at times, that there is perhaps not enough space for reflection and the emotional complexity of Dickens’s mature doesn't fully come through.Bartlett has a command of storytelling through the transformation of everyday objects, the surprise and mood-changing potential of light and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Right at the start of the boom around 20 years ago, a Hollywood mogul is said to have told one of his people to get some more work out of that Jane Austen. She seemed like a good source of romantic comedies. Regrettably for all, there were only ever six titles from this promising scriptwriter, and those have been done and done again by film and particularly television. Only Northanger Abbey has not provoked producers into serial adaptation, and that’s presumably because the story of poor Catherine Morland’s hyperactive imagination turns out to be not as Gothic as a horror filmmaker would wish Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
For their first visit to the UK, Shanghai Ballet have brought a narrative ballet based on a Chinese theatrical version of Jane Eyre. It focuses on Bertha Mason, Mr Rochester’s mad wife in the attic, whose fate has often troubled readers, though the Shanghai narrative does not ask about the economic and social conditions of exploitation, the colonialism and sexism that have trapped her.Instead it presents Bertha, Jane and Rochester as three troubled souls in a kind of eternal love triangle. But Charlotte Brontë's classic is not a novel about a timeless dilemma, it is about a specific character Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Kemosabe, The Lone Ranger is fun. Despite its star and producer blaming American critics for poor box office stateside, this film is Pirates of the Caribbean on horseback - and that's the Pirates franchise before it bloated in 2007.There is a lot of good in The Lone Ranger, starting with Armie Hammer. Perfectly cast as John Reid, he’s the long, tall and handsome lawyer whose rough-hewn brother Dan (James Badge Dale) is the town’s ranger and husband to the gal John loves (Ruth Wilson). Coming upon a strange Native American called Tonto, John puts him in jail, only to meet him again in a Read more ...
Matt Parker
In both a personal and literary sense, Grant Hart has been to hell and back. While the 52-year-old Minnesotan is still best known as the drummer and songwriting contributor behind legendary US punk band Hüsker Dü, his fourth solo album, The Argument, is a bold adaptation of John Milton's Paradise Lost that could finally see him recognised as an artist in his own right. And it's about time.For better or worse, Hart has spent three decades being cast as the yin to Hüsker Dü frontman Bob Mould's yang. In contrast to Mould's direct, hardcore-influenced compositions, it was Hart that brought Read more ...
Heather Neill
It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is essential to quote the famous opening line in any reference to Jane Austen's best-loved work. Pride and Prejudice is 200 years old and being celebrated with balls, literary walks, readathons, television programmes and this adaptation for the stage. Notwithstanding several films (including Joe Wright's in 2005, with Keira Knightly as Lizzy) and Andrew Davies's memorable BBC version screened over six episodes in 1995 (with Colin Firth making Darcy a sex symbol in a wet shirt) another truth has to be acknowledged: no other medium truly Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Ballet is telling stories again. Last night Wayne McGregor’s debut as a narrator followed hot on the heels of Cathy Marston’s Witch-Hunt for Bern Ballett, both in the Royal Opera House complex, and Northern Ballet’s visit to London with David Nixon’s new The Great Gatsby. (To say nothing of David Bintley's Aladdin and even less of Peter Schaufuss's Midnight Express.)Nixon is known as a straight narrative man, Marston a more expressionistic type, McGregor all abstract and kinetic, theory. Seeing the three works during the current orbit of Kenneth MacMillan’s eyepopping Mayerling at Covent Read more ...
bella.todd
The absolute loyalty of a little boy to his under-deserving friend is what swells The Kite Runner’s heart and fuels its tragedy. So you can’t really blame Matthew Spangler’s stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 bestseller for sticking faithfully to the novel’s melodramatic side. But Giles Croft’s production, a joint venture between Nottingham Playhouse and Liverpool Everyman that’s playing in between as part of the Brighton Festival, hasn’t quite found a way to balance narrative drive and emotional punch. That tight grip on the storyline never loosens long enough to really let the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Yok is a fine Turkish word meaning “there isn’t any”. You use it for “no”, as in, say - is Midnight Express any good? Yok.The hot news surrounding this production was all in the scarpering of its two stars a week before opening, both exceptional Russian artists with stellar reputations to lose. While Britain was agog at the latest fleeing from responsibilities of the wayward tyro Sergei Polunin - slated to play Billy Hayes - probably the more indicative evacuee was the senior Igor Zelensky, Polunin’s mentor and boss at the Stanislavsky Ballet, but better remembered over here as a king of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When Tess was released in 1979 much was made of the fact that Hardy’s western England had become Polanski’s northern France. Also, that he had cast a German actress in the title role with a wobbly Wessex burr. All these years on, Nastassja Kinksi’s performance looks as ravishing as ever, and doesn’t sound too bad either. An extra layer of otherness is added to her portrayal of a beautiful young country girl passively buffeted by fate – and seduced, possibly raped by a powerful male - with the recent revelation that her father Klaus Kinski abused her half-sister and tried it on with her too. Read more ...
David Nice
Snow flurries outside, steam heat within. Writer-director Yael Farber’s transposition of Strindberg from a 19th-century Swedish estate to a contemporary farm in South Africa’s Karoo region on the eve of a storm is so painstakingly evocative that all worries about the latest publicity image – shades of blaxploitation, more Mandingo than Miss Julie – instantly evaporate.There’s much of the same giddying power-shifts and sexual violence that buffet the original, but Farber’s recent conception, fresh from acclaim at last year's Edinburgh Festival, recalibrates the context dramatically. The Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Skipping across time and place – South Pacific 1849 to Cambridge/Edinburgh 1936 to San Francisco 1973 to UK (looks like England) 2012 to Neo Seoul 2144 to Earth’s post-apocalyptic Hawaii 2321 – Cloud Atlas is like a scary old punk who's actually quite nice. A simple and satisfying moral centre stops you from feeling its 172 minutes are a waste of time and its six stories don’t intertwine as much as play tag with each other. But look past extraordinary makeup, special effects, distracting painted horses and Hugo Weaving as Old Georgie, an irritating amalgam of Tom Waits and Johnny Depp, and Read more ...