adaptation
Gary Naylor
Rebecca Lenkiewicz's adaptation of August Strindberg's 1900 paean to the power of loathing over loving uses the now familiar trick of dressing characters in period detail while giving them the full range of the 21st century's argot of disdain and distress.Indeed, the spectacular sprinkling of the C-word (indeed, pretty much the A-Z words) here jolts us into the thought that though divorce laws may be more liberal these days, marriages can still limp on with each party secretly (or not so secretly) waiting for the release that only death can bring.Roll in medical interventions that prolong Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
When George Balanchine said that “there are no mothers-in-law in ballet”, he wasn’t just stating the obvious. He meant that there are some things that simply cannot be expressed in dance. Emotion and nuance are a story-ballet’s native territory; factual complications are a no-go.Yet Christopher Wheeldon has ignored this famous advice in his latest three-acter for the Royal Ballet. The story he chose to adapt, Like Water for Chocolate, the 1989 bestseller by the Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel, not only features its fair share of convoluted family relationships but more crucially centres on Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Playwrights return to classical myths for two main reasons – to shine a light on how we live today and because they're bloody good yarns.Marina Carr's re-telling of Clytemnestra's story is boldly innovative in its conception and execution, but it never loses sight of its source material's power – and we wonder how, if "Enough is Enough" didn't work thousands of years ago, how is it going to work now?King Agamemnon needs to do something as his men are mustered for war and the blood is up, but the winds will not come to fill their sails for the passage to Troy. Worse still, a potential Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
When Bliss, a new play adapted from an Andrei Platonov short story by Fraser Grace, made its debut in Russia in early 2020, Cambridge-based company Menagerie were told that their production was “very Russian”.I’m no expert on Russian culture, but I would agree – in a good way. Paul Bourne’s production for the Finborough Theatre takes a while to warm up, but still packs a poignant punch.Nikita Firsov (Jesse Rutherford) has returned home from the Civil War to a post-apocalyptic landscape: rural Russia in 1921. There’s no food and almost no people. The price of stealing grain is execution, and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Zorro (what a name!) is back, swashing and buckling his way into the West End, 13 years after he left and now not the only one wearing a mask. He’s also an entertainer turned political leader, inspiring his people to resist an evil martinet. Well, that sort of thing is back in fashion too.Stephen Clark and Helen Edmundson’s story sets up two brothers in the Spanish outpost of Los Angeles (it’s 1805) with one, Diego – younger, the favourite – sent to Barcelona to learn the skills he’ll need to lead the pueblo when his father dies, and the other, Ramón – older, resentful – staying in California Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
"Disgusting", "depressing", "sheer horror from start to finish", a "filthy, rotten, immoral play". Such were the comments from viewers published across a spectrum of British newspapers following the BBC transmission, on 12 December 1954, of Nigel Kneale’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.The papers themselves were similarly critical. "A Tory guttersnipe’s view of Socialism" was the assessment of the socialist Daily Worker. The Daily Express opted for sensationalism. Its headline read: "Wife dies as she watches".Adapted by Kneale, obviously, from George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel, and now released Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The Merchant of Venice is a comedy, you say? Shakespeare, as ever, refuses to be confined to convenient boxes, his best plays’ extraordinary pliability and longevity a testament to the piercing eye he cast towards the slings and arrows that assail humankind. More than most of his works, The Merchant of Venice requires a director to take a stance, especially these days, so as to send the audience in a chosen direction. This is not unique - no text can. nor should, be sacred - but those decisions bubble closer to the surface in The Merchant than perhaps any other play in the canon. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We open on “Seventeen is Swell”, the antithesis of Janis Ian’s 70s angsty anthem, “At Seventeen”. Megan is living it large as the cheerleader’s leader with her football captain boyfriend, two loving if strict parents and a golden future of all-American domestic bliss ahead. In short, she has all her pom poms in a row.Well, except she doesn’t really enjoy the more intimate moments with the dim jock, Jared; she has pin-ups of Eva Herzigová where Johnny Depp should be; and she’s, horror upon horrors, a vegetarian! In the kind of Midwest town where you might expect Louis Theroux to turn up to Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Wind the clock back 45 years and the Big Apple was bankrupt, the lights had gone out and many native New Yorkers were packing their bags. Gangs controlled whole neighbourhoods, drugs were the currency of choice and, for a kid with no college, prospects were strictly limited. The movie Saturday Night Fever captured this social decay, illustrating the crisis of confidence that suffused so many big Western cities.In faraway England, the nihilism of punk was leaning into the "no future" narrative, but suddenly, here over the ocean was Tony Manero, this strutting master of the universe, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Somewhere in the world right now, one can hear Mister Mister's AOR hit, "Broken Wings" on an MOR radio station, capturing mid-Eighties synth pop perfectly. Few listeners will know that its inspiration is a 1912 autobiographical novel by Lebanese-American poet, Kahlil Gibran. A source that worked for a four-minute pop song has now been extended by two hours and made into a West End musical. Stranger ideas have worked – unfortunately, this one doesn't.Having fled Beirut as a child with his mother and siblings when his father was imprisoned, 18 year-old Gibran returns from America at the Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“If you want romance,” the cast of Emma Rice’s new version of Wuthering Heights say in unison just after the interval, “go to Cornwall.” They’re using the modern definition of romance, of course – Emily Brontë’s novel is full of the original meaning of "romantic", much wilder and more dangerous than anything Ross Poldark gets up to.Rice’s anarchic adaptation preserves that feral quality, with the Moor itself telling the doomed love story of Cathy (Lucy McCormick) and Heathcliff (Ash Hunter), but doesn’t do enough to keep up its energy.The opening is more Kafkaesque than Brontësque (though Read more ...
David Nice
It sounds like the title of a play by Rattigan. No such luck: “Force Majeure” – a legal term with which all too few will be familiar, in which circumstances beyond anyone’s control cancel a contract – is how Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film Turist is known beyond Sweden (an American remake with Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, not good by all accounts, has much the best title, Downhill).This tragicomedy about the consequences of a husband and father running away from his family when an avalanche seems about to overwhelm a ski-resort restaurant has been adapted for the stage by Tim Price and Read more ...