costume drama
James Saynor
Lovers of a particular novel, when it’s adapted as a movie, often want book and movie to fit together as a hand in a glove. You want it to be like sheet music transfigured into the sound of an orchestra. Too often, though, the resulting film can resemble the sound of the orchestra trying to play in boxing gloves.Such worries arise for readers of Jim Crace’s rich and eloquent novel Harvest, published in 2013. It iridescently tells of an English rural community assailed by the enclosure movement, in which landlords fenced off common land to make money off sheep (a gambit that picked up steam in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The best way to experience Ed Atkins’ exhibition at Tate Britain is to start at the end by watching Nurses Come and Go, But None For Me, a film he has just completed. It lasts nearly two hours but is worth the investment since it reveals what the rest of the work tries hard to avoid openly confronting – grief.Actor Toby Jones reads from a diary kept by Atkins’ father, Philip during the months before his death from cancer in 2009. With mordant humour, he titled it Sick Notes and, by turns, the entries are sad, funny, banal or full of pain and fury. Jones’ audience is a group of young Read more ...
James Saynor
Life in Tudor times is a gift that keeps giving to film and TV people, even if the history has to be bent a little for things to make sense to contemporary audiences – Elizabeth (1998) and A Man for All Seasons (1966) being two of the more successful examples of such retrofitting of the past.Filmmakers usually try to frame someone back then as a modern protagonist with a modern agenda, even though few of those old-timers can be photoshopped into that. So here comes Katherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry VIII, presented as something of a pre-potato feminist icon in Firebrand, a movie from Read more ...
Anthony Cecil
The Smyrna Catastrophe of 1922, in which tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians were slaughtered by Turkish soldiers, is a topical subject for our dark times. Unfortunately the intervening century hasn’t put an end to ethnic cleansing or to the plight of refugees.Grigoris Karantinakis’s 2021 costume drama, originally released in Greece as Smyrna My Beloved, seems to be aware of uncomfortable historical parallels. It begins in 2015, Titanic-like, with a nonagenarian survivor rescuing something from the deep. In this case, Filio Williams (Jane Lapotaire), whose grandmother fled to Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Tom Littler opens his account as artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre with one of the more radical choices one can make in 2023 – directing a 102 year-old play pretty much how it would have been done in 1921.It’s all very period (beautifully designed with superb attention to detail in props and costumes by Louie Whitemore) and trusts its audience to peel back the onion layers of subtext carefully concealed by Somerset Maugham. And, yes, it might make you cry as you do so.We’re in Blandings Castle territory (or would be if PG Wodehouse had allowed himself a whiff of Evelyn Waugh’s Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Polly Walker's character in Netflix's sumptuous new Regency romance, Bridgerton, could've easily been little more than a villainous Mrs Bennet. We meet Lady Featherington as she's forcing one of her daughters into a tiny corset, muttering about how she could fit her waist "into the size of an orange and a half" when she was the same age. But Walker finds the tragedy amid the comedy, creating a character you can't help but sympathise with, as she's done before in State of Play and Line of Duty. With a second outing pretty much in the bag, Walker discusses what makes Bridgerton Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights was meant to hit cinemas this summer, but, in response to Covid-19, has been put back to 2021. Instead, we get the early release on Disney+ of Miranda’s Hamilton – filmed, NT Live style, with the original Broadway cast at three performances in June 2016, and now available to a wide audience for the first time. Who could say no to this? Stage director Thomas Kail also helms the film, and the result is an exhilarating, immersive experience of this dynamic musical about America’s forgotten Founding Father, who travels from Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Alarm bells start ringing whenever you discover an author is adapting their own work for a screenplay. In the case of New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton, the alarm proves to be false. Over the course of seven years, and apparently 200 drafts of the first episode alone, Catton has eloquently distilled her 848-page novel The Luminaries into six 60-minute episodes for the BBC. In the process, she’s stripped away the novel’s structure and a lot of its detail to create something more appropriate for a visual medium. The result is spectacular, but very different from the original Read more ...
David Nice
Could an epic cinematic masterpiece be turned successfully into a three-act play? Confession first: Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander is my No. 1 film. On one level a slow-burn, pre-World-War-One family saga, on another a timeless human comedy pitting cosy security against unbalanced seeming austerity, resolved by the decisive intervention of the supernatural, it couldn't be radically reimagined for the stage in the way that Ivo van Hove did so unsettingly with Persona – another one on the top 10 list – by linking it with a relative Bergman rarity, After the Rehearsal.That said, Stephen Read more ...
Owen Richards
Luca Changretta got his just desserts, Alfie Solomons made a last gasp for the quiet life, and Thomas Shelby revealed his true enemy – Peaky Blinders wrapped up another exciting series in a high-octane and neat finale.Tommy always has a way out; four series in and we still fall for it. In tonight’s final episode, it looked like his reckoning had finally arrived; Arthur’s death snapped Tommy into a violent rage in scenes reminiscent of last series’ capture of Vincente Changretta. It’s in these moments we witness the real Tommy; a terrifying and dangerous man who drags his family down with Read more ...
David Nice
None, or two? Only the tiniest whiff of spoiler is involved in pointing out that while the stage version, or at least the one I saw with an actor friend playing an early victim, settled for a semi-happy ending, this magnificently brooding adaptation in three parts – just the right length, surely – dooms us to ultimate discomfort, as an especially merciless Agatha Christie intended. The bare essentials of what may well be her masterpiece, with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Endless Night close contenders, were all professionally bolted in place, and the embroideries in a faithful 1939 setting Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
We return to the dramatised Selfridges five years after the opening of the store that changed the face of British shopping - and yet, despite proving those who doomed his enterprise to failure wrong, the smile on its eponymous owner’s face is as false as his moustache is magnificent. Although Harry Selfridge (Jeremy Piven) was able to turn on the charm for visiting journalists in tonight’s series opener, the absence of his wife and daughters - back home in the US where the girls, we are told, were finishing school - cast a shade over the celebrations.Although Rose (Frances O’Connor) did Read more ...