adaptation
Heather Neill
Ibsen's Nora slammed the door on her infantilising marriage in 1879 but the sound of it has continued to reverberate down the years. In 2013, Carrie Cracknell directed Hattie Morahan in an award-winning performance at this theatre, last year Tanika Gupta profitably wove her story into that of colonial India at the Lyric, Hammersmith, Robert Icke's Children of Nora is due to open in Amsterdam in April and Samuel Adamson's exploration of relationships in four distinct periods, Wife, at the Kiln last summer, echoed Nora's experience. Jamie Lloyd is scheduled to bring his original touch to Frank Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Say what you will about The Taming of the Shrew (and you’ll be in good company), but it is one of Shakespeare’s clearest plays. Asked to summarise the action of, say, Richard II or Love’s Labours Lost and you might lose your way somewhere between rival Dukes or intrigues within intrigues, but the marital tussle between Petruchio and his “shrew” of a wife Katherina is –for good or ill – secure. Whatever else director Maria Gaitanidi has done with Shakespeare’s most provocative play here, the overriding impression here is one of confusion. Wrapping unpalatable clarity in abstraction doesn’t Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Back in 2016, David Ayer’s infantile Suicide Squad burst upon us in a wash of lurid greens and purples. Ayer’s film had a myriad of problems, not least the hyper-sexualisation of Harley Quinn, played by Margot Robbie. While controversy abounded, Robbie’s performance remained a highlight. A manic mix of Betty Boop and Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest, she stole the film. Now Quinn has her own gleefully anarchic spin-off, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), directed by Cathy Yan and loosely based on the characters from the 1996 DC comic. It’s Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Changing the gender of the title character “highlights the way in which women still operate in a world designed by and for men,” argues Chris Bush, whose reimagining of Marlowe’s play premieres at the Lyric ahead of a UK tour. It’s certainly a compelling idea – albeit one already explored in previous productions like Pauline Randall’s 2018 gender-swapped Faustus at the Globe – but the resulting piece, though impassioned, is unfortunately rather a muddle.Johanna Faustus (Jodie McNee) is the epitome of powerless: a low-born, 17th-century woman whose apothecary father (Barnaby Power) crushes her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Uncle Vanya must surely be the closest, the most essential of Chekhov’s plays, its cast – just four main players who are caught up in the drama's fraught emotional action, and four who are essentially supporting – a concentrated unit even by the playwright's lean standards. Its overlapping strands of unrequited love and desperate loneliness are tightly wound, so organically so that any single false note risks throwing the whole off balance. That’s never the case in director Ian Rickson’s exquisite production of this new adaptation by Conor McPherson, one which stretches the original in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Armando Iannucci’s move away from the contemporary political satires that made his name, first signalled by his bold, uproariously brilliant Death of Stalin, continues apace with a Dickens adaptation that feels quietly radical. It’s not just the colour-blind casting, which includes Dev Patel playing the young hero; the most striking thing about Iannucci’s Copperfield is how gloriously exuberant it is. While not turning away from the social concerns and personal cruelties that permeate Dickens’ work, Iannucci cranks up the comedy, humanity and sense of community of David Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Bela Lugosi’s dead,” as Bauhaus sang, in memory of the star of 1931’s Dracula. But of course death has never been an impediment to the career of the enfanged Transylvanian blood-sucker. Filmed and televisualised almost as frequently as Sherlock Holmes, Count Dracula would doubtless join the cockroaches as the only entities to survive a thermonuclear holocaust.Whether we needed another new TV version is at least debatable, let alone this lumbering behemoth (for BBC One) from the conjoined brains of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, comprising three 90-minute slabs over consecutive nights. Moffat Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Matthew Bourne’s tally of hits is such that many of his dance-drama interpretations of old ballets and films were labelled “classic” as soon as they appeared. Yet The Red Shoes, Bourne’s 2016 tribute to the 1948 film, is arguably the one that most rewards repeat viewings. Thickly layered with entertaining detail, you can see it again and again and still find new things to love.It’s also unique in adding more dance than the original contained. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film follows the rise of a talented young British dancer, Vicky Page, as she joins a foreign ballet troupe ( Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Two years ago Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle dusted off the Robin Williams vehicle from the Nineties with entertaining results, improving on the original with astute casting, a goofy script and special effects that didn’t take themselves too seriously.A sequel was inevitable. And as befitting a film that takes place inside a video game, to make it work the filmmakers had to go onto the ‘next level’ in terms of plotting and spectacle. They’ve achieved that, with a great deal of ingenuity, while perhaps predictably losing some of the freshness of the earlier outing.Jumanji is the literally Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This scary, electrically beautiful adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book about living on the faultline between imagination and reality is a fantastically alternative offering for the festive season. While the parameters of the story are dark, it’s an edgy, stunningly thought through tribute to the wild and wonderful life of the mind, and its ability to help us engage with the horrors that life flings at us. Though there is no shortage of Gothic special effects, the success of the production is due in no small part to Samuel Blenkin’s superb, comically gawky turn as the “Boy” at the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Inua Ellams’ Three Sisters plays Chekhov in the shadow of war, specifically the Nigerian-Biafran secessionist conflict of the late 1960s which so bitterly divided that newly independent nation. It’s a bold move that adds decided new relevance to the action, grounding proceedings that are more often generalised in their listless disappointment to a very particular time and place. We certainly view the travails of the Chekhov’s eponymous protagonists – instead of Olga, Masha and Irina, here they are Lolo, Nne Chukwu and Udo – in a different light when starving refugees and the battle Read more ...
Graham Fuller
British cinema has done so badly by Christmas that the revival of a film that parses the nature of the festival while mining its potential for sparking family strife is cause for celebration. Long neglected, The Holly and the Ivy (1952) has been handsomely restored by StudioCanal and deserves to become a seasonal staple alongside Scrooge (1951), Comfort and Joy (1984), and the BBC adaptation of Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings (1986), which is currently available on YouTube only. The Holly and the Ivy was adapted by Anatole de Grunwald from Wynyard Brown’s West End hit. Set on Read more ...