adaptation
Jasper Rees
The BBC has other things on its to-do list at the minute. However, once all the newly installed acting heads have been replaced by actual heads, and the matter of the ex-DG’s severance pay sufficiently chewed over by the Corporation’s bosom pals in the Fourth Estate and the Conservative Party, perhaps someone at TV Centre could get around to other business. The search, for example, for a costume drama capable of giving Downton Abbey a bloody nose.It’s not been a good period for period on the BBC. Since the ladies of Cranford hung up their bonnets, Upstairs Downtairs trailing oodles of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No Dickens novel seems to come around the block more often than The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, possibly excepting Great Expectations, which is taking a bow on both big screen and small for the bicentenary year. Relatively recent assaults on the teeming 800-page doorstopper include adaptations by ITV, on the big screen, Radio 4 and Chichester Festival Theatre. That would surely count as enough Nicklebys already. But into this bustling crowd the BBC has thrust its own new version. Will it fight for its place in the world like the novel’s impetuous young hero, or be trampled Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week a holy relic has gone on show in the British Library. The continuous scroll of the original manuscript of On the Road is a kind of ur-artefact of the Beat Generation. Typed up by Jack Kerouac in three weeks in April 1951, and 120 feet long, it underpins a central myth of the Beats: that a tight-knit counter-cultural post-war generation of young American writers were powered by nothing but inspiration (plus of course pills, nicotine and booze). They wrote the way jazzers performed - free-wheelingly, in the moment, without regard for the piffling orthodoxy of structure. Or as Kerouac' Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
When Complicite conceived their beautiful A Disappearing Number they gave maths energy, drama, and above all watchability, but they never quite brought the heart. In Simon Stephens’s new adaptation, A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has it in abundance (as well of course as a dead bee, a live rat, three beer cans and 20-odd metres of model train-track). When you can persuade an audience to stay behind after the curtain-call for a mini maths tutorial you’re doing something right; when you can reduce them to tears with it you’re doing something miraculous.Christopher (Luke Read more ...
aleks.sierz
As the Olympic Park rises out of the desolation of East London, British theatre is also being regenerated by the sports fest that looms increasingly large on the horizon. Although it has recently lost its local authority funding, Edward Hall’s Swiss Cottage venue is no slacker when it comes to ambitious work. Having commissioned upcoming talent Mike Bartlett to adapt Hugh Hudson’s 1981 film, Hall has already secured a West End transfer for the play, in advance of its opening last night.Alluding to a line from that most English of inspiring poems — William Blake’s “Jerusalem” — Chariots of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Andrea Arnold’s starkly naturalistic reboot of Emily Brontë’s masterpiece of 1847 isn’t the first costume drama of the last 20 years to scorn the heritage-culture approach. In 1995, Roger Michell’s Persuasion, one of the best but least fêted of the Jane Austen adaptations, put handheld camerawork, natural lighting and grainy images in the service of the downwardly mobile Elliot clan’s shabby gentility, making poor Anne’s Cinderella plight all the more affecting.Evocatively photographed by Robert Ryan, Wuthering Heights goes much further in its invoking of pathetic fallacy. There are times Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Given the numerous and now pretty tiresome comparisons that pundits and punters alike have drawn between the Hunger Games trilogy and the inexorable Twilight saga, it’s worth taking a moment to imagine how the franchises’ respective heroines might get on if they actually met. One can’t imagine they’d see eye to eye on much.The Hunger Games’ fiercely self-reliant Katniss Everdeen is a 16-year-old with the weight of a broken world on her stoical shoulders, fighting tooth and nail to protect her family from starvation and violent oppression. Twilight’s meek, passively dependent Bella Swan Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Literary adaptations are a godsend to an industry that loves a good story but is too busy blowing the budget on chase sequences and explosions to pay a decent screenwriter. But among the glossy, desperately earnest adaptations (last year’s Jane Eyre, this year’s The Great Gatsby) there are also some quirkier reworkings that invite audiences to play an extended game of spot-the-classic – Clueless (Jane Austen’s Emma), Tamara Drewe (Far From The Madding Crowd) The Lion King (Hamlet – yes really). The novels of Thomas Hardy have drawn more attention than most, providing a whole filmic sub-genre Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In many respects it's hard to fault director Cary Fukunaga's take on the Charlotte Brontë classic. Fast-rising Australian actress Mia Wasikowska brings appropriate strength and moral clarity to the title role, while Michael Fassbender makes a mocking, sardonic Mr Rochester (albeit a rather too photogenic one). The lovelessness of Jane's early years with her unfeeling aunt, Mrs Reed (Sally Hawkins), is wincingly drawn, and her time at the grim Lowood school leaves the viewer feeling as beaten and abused as the heroine herself.Chuck in a quietly sparkling turn by Judi Dench as Mrs Fairfax Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Many a redoubtable British theatre talent has stumbled at the altar of cinema before, which is another way of saying that Bel Ami is hardly the first film to suggest that not every heavyweight of the London and international stage - in this case two such titans in Cheek By Jowl supremos Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod - is to the celluloid manner born. Leading man Robert Pattinson deserves credit for thinking outside the Twilight box while only confirming one's sense that he, too, looks sadly adrift beyond his established habitat. Much like his co-directors, if the truth be told.There Read more ...
Ismene Brown
With most horror films the monster gets flushed down the metaphorical toilet - blown up, spat out, switched off. In this one you must live with the monster forever. As most people know, We Need to Talk About Kevin is about a boy who becomes a multiple murderer. That’s established in the opening shot (using barrel-fuls of tomato passata, I'd guess) with a vivid repellency and realism that you only slowly realise has drawn you deep into his mother’s mind - where you will stay for the rest of the story.Lionel Shriver’s novel seemed to me somewhat too schematic and clever in its treatment of her Read more ...