adaptation
emma.simmonds
As fresh and enchanting as the first flushes of spring, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s imaginative retelling of Charlotte Brontë’s 19th-century proto-feminist novel captures the thrill of attraction with rare perception, sweep and tenderness. It foregrounds the book’s Gothic elements and the lovers’ links to the natural world, showing love itself as both a benign and devastating force of nature. Rochester’s voice is carried to Jane on the wind, their passion burns like fire and Jane’s heartbreak is as bone-chilling as the blanket of cold earth she weeps upon.Screenwriter Moira Buffini (Tamara Drewe) Read more ...
hilary.whitney
The stage musical The Lion King has been seen by nearly 10 million people in the UK - almost 60 million worldwide – and Lord only knows how many must have seen Walt Disney’s animation. I have a friend who reckons he has seen it at least 26 times and a female acquaintance who firmly believes that curling up in front of the DVD is the cure-all for heartache – well, we can’t all write songs like Adele - but until recently, The Lion King had completely passed me by. I couldn’t even have hummed so much as a crotchet and a quaver of Elton John and Tim Rice's Oscar-winning song “Can You Feel the Read more ...
fisun.guner
This warm-hearted production of E Nesbit’s most famous novel premiered to glowing reviews at its site-specific venue last summer. I didn‘t catch it last year, but I doubt this swift revival is any less captivating, nor the new cast any less sure-footed or engaging. Marcus Brigstocke has taken on the role of the gruff but loveable station master Mr Perks, whilst the three adult actors playing the children - Amy Noble as the sensible Bobby, Tim Lewis as the ever so mildly rebellious Peter and Grace Rowe as the charmingly ditzy Phyllis - bring just the right balance of earnestness and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sarah Waters’s highly praised novels have marched from the page to the screen with regimental regularity and no apparent sacrifice in quality. Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, with their big Victorian brushstrokes, were built for television no less than Dickens is. With The Night Watch, adapted last night, her subject was still the love that dare not speak its name. But two things were different. This time Waters’s sweeping saga was compressed into a single film. And it was brought forward in time to the Blitz, when a modern lady’s drawers could be whipped off in a flash.As usual with Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Dickens wasn’t wrong – hard times they were. Around 1300 men, women and children worked at the Murrays’ Mills complex in the Ancoats area of Manchester in its mid-19th-century heyday (if you can call it that). Arrive a minute later than 7am and you were locked out, without pay. Now that actors are treading those same worn and oil-stained boards with an imaginative new version of Hard Times, you won’t get in after 7pm (and you’re the one paying, of course).In wide bays, where the machines (Dickens’s “mad elephants”) used to clatter and spew out cotton like confetti, on a mill floor 100 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Thanks to her evergreen bestseller Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson can call on an army of fans to buy her work whenever it appears in print. Its debut on screen is, perhaps, another matter. Will they buy the BBC’s rendition of Case Histories? Those who have not had the pleasure of reading it are less advantageously placed to grumble about hideous revisions, outrageous changes and all manner of infidelities. But even an Atkinson newbie might find it a bit rum that Scotland seems to be entirely populated by people with English accents.Welcome to the BBC casting department's Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Anyone turning on BBC Four last night expecting to watch the first episode of Room at the Top will, at least in part, have got what they were expecting: lashings of sex. Only one problem. It wasn't in Room at the Top. Owing to a late-blooming rights dispute, the BBC decided on the day of broadcast not to go ahead with their new adaptation of John Braine's 1957 novel. On the principle that if you would have liked that, then you'll like this, they had a rummage in the archives and produced a rabbit: their version of Fanny Hill, first broadcast in 2008.It's a shame the BBC didn't get their legal Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Another week, another northern novel about working-class libidos adapted for BBC Four. One is still catching one’s breath from the festival of copulation that was Women in Love. Spool forward a few decades - or a week in television scheduling terms - and roughly the same set of characters have reconvened for the next instalment of how's your father in Room at the Top. They’ve got the same accents, the same set of preoccupations about class, and the same tendency to rummage around among one another’s nethers. For a certain cadre of English novelist, sexual intercourse most definitely Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tomorrow, When the War Began, Australia's highest-grossing movie of 2010, was written and directed by Stuart Beattie. It was adapted from John Marsden’s novel of the same name, the first in his seven-book Tomorrow series for teenagers, published 1993-1999. They tell the story of Ellie Linton and a group of her high-school friends who have to try to save their country from an invading militia after their hometown of Wirrawee has been taken over, their families taken prisoner and their homes destroyed.Ellie (a winning performance by Caitlin Stasey) and her best friend Corrie (Rachel Hurd-Wood) Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This film tells an extraordinary - scarcely believable - story. Throughout the 20th century, the UK sent tens of thousands of children from care homes and orphanages to the colonies, later the Commonwealth. Parents were routinely told their children had been adopted by British families, while the children were told in many cases that their parents were dead. Children had been sent to the colonies since the 1600s but in the 20th century there was a formal nationwide policy organised by churches, local authorities and Dr Barnardo’s homes, which stopped only as recently as 1970.Jim Loach's (son Read more ...
Jasper Rees
As preparation for this new account of Women in Love, I conscientiously picked up a copy of the novel for the first time since studying it at university. Big mistake. By half an hour into the drama I was in a state of some discombobulation. His adaptation may be called Women in Love but William Ivory has dipped back into The Rainbow, the novel’s preceding companion volume. At some point he seems to have lobbed both books into a cement mixer.The question is - why can’t he? After all, once upon a time they were both meant to be part of the same volume called The Sisters. You can’t muck about Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Great Expectations: it’s getting harder and harder to name a classic novel that hasn’t found itself covered in greasepaint and pushed out onto the stage. With adaptations everywhere to be seen – the National Theatre is making something a speciality of them, and there are even plans for John Grisham’s A Time to Kill on Broadway – the cry has gone out against plundering these works for their plots. Bad adaptations are all about the losses, the characters, scenes and significance stripped from the novel along with its Read more ...