adaptation
josh.spero
You can never have enough Dickens, doctors say. Or is it exercise? Either way, the BBC has gone to town on the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth as if the moths are eating away in the Victorian closet and all the costumes need to be used as much as possible.We had the overly mannered Miss Havisham and Burberry scowls of a new Great Expectations on BBC One and an ever-so-mysterious and oddly adapted Tale of Two Cities on Radio 4 (I like to believe they wear costumes in the studio). Last night came The Mystery of Edwin Drood, about which the biggest mystery was what sort of ending would be Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Wanted: classic novel, preferably 19th-century but 18th will do, or early 20th. Anything reeking of period before television acceptable, though preferably not too working class. English if poss. Barnaby Rudge need not apply.Is there a crisis in the adaptation industry? Is inspiration running dry? This Christmas a new adaptation of Great Expectations became the fifth – yes, the fifth – version of the work put out by the BBC. In a nanosecond or two the movie will follow with Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham and Mike Newell (Four Weddings, Harry Potter 4) at the helm. No matter that Dickens Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Without wanting to sound humbuggy, do we really need another Great Expectations? Let alone two. There’s yet another movie coming next year but breasting the tape first is a new three-parter from the BBC. Cinema last visited the story of Pip Pirrip in 1998 when Alfonso Cuarón transplanted the novel to present-day New York. On television Tony Marchant had a go a year later. Theatre was there even more recently with Declan Donnellan's staging for the RSC in 2005 and Watford Palace's Asian version earlier this year. And looming over them all there’s always David Lean’s still definitive adaptation Read more ...
Jamila Gavin
Someone told me that the highways and byways of England were littered with the bones of little children. It was a shocking statement and of course I asked, “What do you mean?” I was told that abandoned children were a common feature of the past, but that in the 18th century someone called a “Coram Man” used to wander about from village to village and town to town – a bit like a tinker – picking up unwanted children.But who was this Coram Man?” No one seemed to know. With only the name “Coram” to go on, I trawled through the London telephone directory and came across the Coram Foundation in Read more ...
sheila.johnston
The great Ealing film comedies are often viewed as sacred cows, no matter that a small but significant number of them were decidedly sacrilegious. Indeed, one of the studio’s last productions, Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955), was also one of its cruellest. Now it has been adapted by Graham Linehan, who asserts that his aim was not to emulate Mackendrick’s jet-black satire but to translate it into farce. And that’s just what he has done, most enjoyably.Linehan respects the film but isn’t about to be intimidated by it: “Being fooled by art is one of the primary pleasures of the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The Deep Blue Sea, the latest from justly esteemed British director Terence Davies, shares its name with a Renny Harlin movie about genetically modified sharks (well, give or take a definite article). Both films deal in high anxiety and the looming spectre of death and both indulge in their own particular brand of theatrics. And - this may surprise you – as cinema, the shark movie works better.Part-inspired by such masterful works of filmic melodrama as All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), with more than a touch of the heightened, adulterous shame of Brief Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The trajectory of Terence Rattigan’s standing finds two peaks separated by a deep trough. From the late Thirties to the mid Fifties, he gave a voice to a social class which liked to keep its feelings under lock and key. Then in 1956 Rattigan was occluded by the dazzling verbal incontinence of Jimmy Porter. In 1991 a production of The Deep Blue Sea at the Almeida starring Penelope Wilton rebooted his reputation.His centenary amounts to another celebratory reassessment. Theatres small and large have been turning to the unvisited margins of Rattigan’s work. But Separate Tables and The Browning Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Family occasions can be fraught affairs, as playwrights from Harold Pinter to Alan Ayckbourn have convincingly proved, but the mother of all family meltdown dramas must be Thomas Vinterberg’s Danish Festen, a Dogme 95 film made in 1998. Soon after, this was turned into a stage play by Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov, which had an outstanding success in David Eldridge’s version here in 2004. Now a Romanian theatre company, Nottara, from Bucharest, bring their version to London.At the start of the evening, we are welcomed chez Klingenfeld-Hansen (the Danish names remain unchanged). The family has Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You can forget “I am Heathcliff”. And abandon hope of “I cannot live without my soul” and “I love my murderer” while you’re at it. Andrea Arnold’s newest addition to the canon of Wuthering Heights adaptations is the story flayed so raw you can see bone. Jettisoning such fripperies as dialogue, fixed cameras and even for the most part avoiding professional actors, she takes period drama by the wing-collared throat and throttles it with gonzo relish. Brooding and brutality is in generous supply, but when we get down to the sharp end of this blighted romance Brontë’s passion seems oddly dulled, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Based on the novel by SE Hinton, The Outsiders is a tender coming-of-age movie set against a tough backdrop of flick-knives, rumbles and gang warfare. In Francis Ford Coppola’s vision, it’s also a romantic cinematic homage to Gone with the Wind.Released in 1983 to a fairly mixed critical reception, the story is set in 1960s Oklahoma and involves the gang rivalry between the Greasers, a bunch of kids born on the wrong side of the tracks, and the Socs, affluent prep boys. It's told through the eyes of Ponyboy (C Thomas Howell), a 14-year-old Greaser who is involved in an opening chase sequence Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The source material for a film like The Help - a story about the black maids who worked for white families in the American South and raised their children as their employers busied themselves with making money and playing bridge - would normally be a memoir or a news archive. But The Help is adapted from the novel of the same name by Kathryn Stockett, published in 2009.The book, which has sold more than two million copies, is set in 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi, when segregation was at its height and the civil rights movement just a few years old. Stockett and director Tate Taylor (who Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Tomas Alfredson’s riveting, stately adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy novel is an immaculately measured teaser, delivered one carefully heaped spoonful at a time. Primped, polished and with the tension ratcheted up a notch for the big screen, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a high-wire tight introduction to a group of men who live their lives in guarded apprehension. It’s populated by an all-star cast, led by a formidably restrained Gary Oldman as - watcher of the watchmen - George Smiley.For those unfamiliar with le Carré’s eight Smiley novels (of which Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the Read more ...