adaptation
James Saynor
For those who ever wonder if soccer scoreboards, or score-line captions on TV, can ever be made to reach three figures, consider the match between AS Adema and SO l’Emyrne, two teams in Madagascar, in 2002. It ended 149-0, but that was only because of an on-field protest. (They were all own goals.)A more shocking shellacking was a year earlier when American Samoa lost 31-0 to Australia in a World Cup Qualifier. It was the biggest loss in international football history, or possibly in school playground history, or possibly in back garden history against the dog – and is now the starting point Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There are probably two distinct audiences for the latest adaptation from Les Enfants Terribles, The House with Chicken Legs: the young teens who lapped up the fantasy novel by Sophie Anderson on which it is based, and the adults who came with them. The latter may not be as enraptured as fans of the book by the piece’s staging, not to mention its almost three-hour length. The piece made its debut at Manchester’s HOME venue, where it seems to have had a favourable reception. The QEH, though, is a different kind of space: quite steeply raked and with inadequate acoustics, which make it hard Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Intimacy isn’t everything, but there’s nothing like seeing dance live and up close. A good seat in a large theatre will give you the whole stage picture but lose the detail. Lost too will be that quasi-visceral connection with the movement.A fascinating academic study found that the brains of people watching dance, presuming they are paying attention and not checking their phones, transmit messages to the appropriate muscles as if to prompt a sympathetic mirror dance. We don’t generally act on these messages (imagine the scenes if we did) but subliminally they are there, urging our emotional Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As the 117 minutes of Wonka tick by, the question it poses gains momentum: who is this film actually for? Children of all ages?It’s an “origins” story, standard now for all manner of film character, showing the sunnier side of Roald Dahl’s eccentric chocolatier, and how his magical chocolate factory came into being. This Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) is more elfin than goblin, a lovable chap with looks to set teenage girls swooning. It has a love story of a kind in it, but not the type that sets young teeth a-grinding. It’s essentially a comedy, with Britain’s sitcom finest popping up like wack-a Read more ...
James Saynor
After a few years of cinema, the wow factor of seeing actual things moving about on a screen wore off a bit and showmen saw that jump cuts and stop-motion – the dawn of animation – could lift audiences some more. The liberation from gravity, in fact, is a singular pleasure of animation: being half-sellotaped to the floor is one of life’s great bores, it seems to delight in pointing out.If Disney led the tradition of smooth-as-you-like animated artwork, Europeans often fancied the jerkier joys of stop-motion mannequins leaping around. The Polish-language The Peasants adopts a new form Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Familiarity has bred something quite fantastic with the Old Vic Christmas Carol, which is back for a seventh season and merits ringing all available bells - those and a lost love called Belle being crucial to the show. Matthew Warchus's staging at this point seems a seasonal imperative, and in a wild-haired Christopher Eccleston, Jack Thorne's adaptation of Dickens's 1843 call to empathic arms has its most emotionally piercing and resonant leading man yet. I've seen all the various Scrooges, from Rhys Ifans in 2017 onwards, including a memorable Covid-era turn from Andrew Lincoln Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The National Theatre these days seems to be going from hit-to-hit, with transfers aplenty and full houses at home. And there's every reason to expect that this fizzy adaptation of Roald Dahl's 1983 creep-out, The Witches, has the West End and further in its sights.The first major musical drawn from the singular mind of Dahl since the runaway success that was (and is) Matilda in 2010, the show couples musical theatre newbies (the Olivier winning director-writer team of Lyndsey Turner and Lucy Kirkwood) with dab hands in the field like composer and co-lyricist Dave Malloy and the veteran Read more ...
Gary Naylor
“But that’s what they’re paying for!” replied my son as we, a little shellshocked by the previous three hours, skirted Trafalgar Square on the way home. I had reservations about some key components of the alchemy that produces great theatre, but none about the spectacle, even more impressive (as we subsequently agreed) than the big Cirque du Soleil extravaganzas that cost a helluva lot more for a seat in Vegas. On its own terms, The Mongol Khan is a five-star show – and I’m already recommending it to friends. Not without reservations of course. As is the case for Grand Opera newbies, one must Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You really don’t want to pick up The Time Traveller’s Wife in a game of charades. Half the clock would be run down just showing that it’s a novel, a film, a TV series and a musical. That spawning of spin-offs over the last two decades is a testament to the appeal of Audrey Niffenegger’s characters and story, but their relatively lukewarm critical and popular receptions speaks to the difficulty of going from page to screen. Is it any more successful travelling from page to stage? For anyone who has not seen any of those previous adaptations, the plot is tricky to follow Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The day after I saw the show, as went about the mundanities of domestic life, I wondered how long it would take to come across a reference to 1984. My best bet was listening to an LBC phone-in concerning next week’s conference at Bletchley Park on Artificial Intelligence, but the advertising break intervened, so I switched to Times Radio. Sure enough, at 12.11pm in a report on an apology issued by the Cabinet Office to journalist, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Big Brother Watch was mentioned as the organisation that animated the complaint. It was not felt necessary to explain much about its purpose Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Imagine a world in which speech has a daily legal limit. Not a limit on what you say, but how many words it takes to say it. Now imagine how such a scenario might work as dance.Adaptations are so common on the theatre stage that the change of state often barely registers: films into plays, novels into ballets, novels into plays… The Limit is different. It takes a West End play, adds live music and choreography, replaces the two leading actors with dancers, and then has those two dancers speak the playscript.The title of the original play, by Sam Steiner, was memorable if unwieldy. Lemons Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A dystopian present. Sirens ring out across the city. Firefighters rush to the wrong locations. A man insists on entry to a big house. He’s not selling anything, so he can’t be an arsonist can he? His friend turns up and she’s pretty upfront about her intentions – and the barrels of petrol in the attic rather give the game away. But the wealthy homeowner, so ruthless at work, is so polite at home, the coming conflagration all but accepted as a matter of… manners, social convention, apathy?Max Frisch’s 1950s play started as a radio production that has moved to theatres around the world, Read more ...