adaptation
aleks.sierz
After six years, associate director Robert Icke bids farewell to the Almeida Theatre. In this time he has pioneered contemporary versions of classic stories, such as 1984, Oresteia, Uncle Vanya, Mary Stuart and Hamlet with Andrew Scott. Against the trend for short and snappy shows, some of Icke's plays are examples of marathon theatre, where the sheer length of the performance wears down audience resistance and creates an experience of deep immersion. Now, directing his own very free adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Professor Bernhardi, which stars the brilliant Juliet Stevenson, Icke Read more ...
Royce Vavrek
It was during the 1997 Golden Globe Awards telecast that I first caught a glimpse of the film that would change my life completely. Midway through the ceremony was featured a short clip of a paralysed man telling a young woman, his wife, to go and find another man to make love to. She was to come back to him and tell him about her sexual encounter. “It will feel like we are together,” he says. “Love will keep me alive.” My 13-year-old brain exploded.They were Bess and Jan, the central characters in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Wave; the complexities of their narrative I would fully glean Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
London’s Troubadour White City theatre has got off to a, literally, flying start. Sally Cookson‘s National Theatre-Bristol Old Vic adaptation of JM Barrie’s classic makes an exuberant comeback at this new venue, whose technical possibilities allow for some genuine thrills, not least when its hero soars high over the auditorium. Such standout moments of spectacle are backed up by a bravado performance that overflows with energy, keeping a youthful ensemble of some two dozen nimble from start to finish. With a completely new cast, led by the phenomenal John Pfumojena, who fizzes on his feet Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Better than the 2001 film but likely to disappoint devotees of the book, Captain Corelli's Mandolin onstage works best as a reminder of the identifiable stagecraft of its director, Melly Still. Playful, non-literal, and often endearingly physical (the human goat all but steals the show), Still's approach to this tale of love during wartime overrides a reductive and sometimes comically cliché script from Rona Munro full of lusty Italians singing Verdi and the like. As summer filler at a playhouse devoted for most of the last year to Harold Pinter, one could do a lot worse, and the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For a while, child abuse has been banished from our stages. After all, there is a limit, surely, to how much pain audiences can be put through. Now, however, the subject is back, thanks to the Almeida Theatre's new stage adaptation of the 2012 Danish film thriller Jagten, by Dogme 95's Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm, and which memorably starred Mads Mikkelsen. The plot is about a male teacher who becomes the target of mass hysteria after being wrongly accused of sexually abusing a child in his infants school class, and this version by David Farr effectively turns the screw on our Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Revisiting Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career for the first time since I saw it in its year of release, 1979, is a mixed experience. I was close in age to its heroine and it was one of the first mainstream feature films I’d ever seen directed by a woman. At the time, it seemed incredibly exciting and inspiring and while the film is still impressive and enjoyable, it’s somewhat less radical than I remembered. The film’s glorious costumes, ornate interiors and repetitive piano score threaten to obliterate its relatively subtle feminist message: I remembered it as more Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A chronic recycler, Dennis Potter fashioned five feature films from his earlier TV dramas and another from one of his novels. The best of them are 1985’s Dreamchild (from the BBC's Alice, 1965) and Track 29 (1987), which he adapted from the BBC's Schmoedipus (1974). The latter was one of Potter’s "visitation" plays, in which frustrated or guilty protagonists conjur into existence an angel – or the devil, in the case of Brimstone and Treacle (banned in 1976, remade in 1982) – to commit an act of liberating violence.As in Schmoedipus (which starred Anna Cropper and an inspired Tim Curry), Read more ...
Tom Baily
Next up in Disney’s parade of live-action revamps is: yes, Aladdin. The other recent re-dos – Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Dumbo – just about managed to overcome the remake challenge: be faithful to an original that will remain definitive for audiences, whilst updating the material enough to obtain contemporary relevance. A re-jigged plot with fresh surprises is an added bonus. Aladdin, like the others, just about does the job.And so we return to fictional Agrabah and meet the city’s most wily young street urchin (and his even wilier pet monkey). It’s the archetypal rags-to-riches tale: Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Publishable, but worth it?” EM Forster’s hesitations about the value of Maurice, his novel of Edwardian homosexuality – written in 1913-14, it was published only posthumously, in 1971 – were certainly redeemed by James Ivory’s 1987 film of the book. Even if, typically, the only place where it wasn’t really well received was in its home territory, the UK: reactions elsewhere, from the Venice Film Festival where stars James Wilby and Hugh Grant shared the Best Actor award, through to distribution in France, where it apparently played for a year, were far more enthusiastic. But if any doubts Read more ...
Marianka Swain
English National Opera continues its run of semi-staged musicals, in commercial collaboration with Grade Linnit, with a revival of this vintage oddity. Mind, commercial might be a stretch, as Dale Wasserman, Joe Darion and Mitch Leigh's 1965 work – it quickly transpires – is a tough sell, particularly in a quixotically cast revival that struggles to find a coherent tone. Loosely inspired by Don Quixote, the densely layered musical sees author Miguel de Cervantes (Kelsey Grammer) awaiting trial by the Spanish Inquisition. When put on trial by his fellow prisoners as well, with his Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Chimerica is a stage-to-screen adaptation that has certainly kept up with the times. When it opened at the Almeida back in 2013 – a West End transfer followed, along with an Olivier award for Best New Play – Lucy Kirkwood’s drama was (very loosely) about the geopolitical symbiosis between the world’s two largest economies, China and America (hence, the title). It was seen through the prism of a story that began back in 1989 on Tiananmen Square and continued through to the present day.Channel 4’s new four-part drama, adroitly directed by Michael Keillor, retains the original’s sense of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
About a year ago, director Rebecca Frecknall electrified this venue with an award-winning revival of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke, rescuing the play from obscurity and showcasing the star qualities of actor Patsy Ferran. Now Frecknall and Ferran take on a much less obscure drama, Anton Chekhov's 1901 classic Three Sisters, which has been newly adapted by Cordelia Lynn, a young Royal Court playwright whose previous work includes the very impressive Lela & Co and One for Sorrow. But can this dream team adequately reveal the psychological richness of Chekhov’s masterpiece?Having Read more ...