adaptation
aleks.sierz
She’s the most famous young pout in Hollywood. And her first West End appearance has already sparked a media frenzy, making this contemporary version of Molière’s The Misanthrope the hottest ticket in town, with massive advance bookings already guaranteeing anyone associated with the show a credit-crunch-proof Christmas. Of course, I’m talking about Keira Knightley – I mean, who isn’t? But what about the play, which opened last night with a barrage of paparazzi flashbulbs? And how does La Knightley shape up?Written by Martin Crimp, this take on Molière’s 1666 tale about the sourpuss Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’ll always be Austen on the telly. As the Bard is to the boards, so is Saint Jane to the box. The six novels were published (though not all written) in a seven-year period in the 1810s. In a rather shorter tranche of the 1990s they were all adapted for the (mostly small) screen. They’ve now just been done again, on the whole rather less well than the first time round.And such is the public’s greed for stories from Austen’s world of box-hedged romantic decorum that these days even the authoress gets pressganged into starring as herself. Her early life was covered in Becoming Jane, her Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Oscar Wilde was once bossing a high-society drawing-room with swishes of his rapier wit when someone else had the temerity to mint an aphorism. “I wish I’d said that,” intoned the great man. Back came the devastating retort: “You will, Oscar, you will.”Wilde was in fact a keen recycler of his own bon mots. Many of those clever-clever inversions that ornament the plays first did service in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The author’s pragmatic calculation was that if they worked on the page, why not the stage? But for some reason, not a lot of them seem to have made the onward journey to the Read more ...