adaptation
The Box of Delights, Wilton's Music Hall review - children's classic novel transferred to stageSaturday, 09 December 2017
Theatreland is currently awash with pantomimes and rehashes of A Christmas Carol, so all credit to this ambitious new production, an adaptation of the 1935 children’s book, The Box of Delights. Long before Narnia, poet laureate John Masefield... Read more... |
Howards End finale, BBC One review - who isn't going to miss the Schlegel sisters?Monday, 04 December 2017
How good was Howards End (BBC One)? Practically flawless. Even if it broke into a bit of an action-packed sprint towards the dénouement, it’s been a triumphant reaffirmation of EM Forster, a canonical favourite back in the 1980s courtesy of Merchant... Read more... |
'She has escaped from my Asylum!': The Woman in White returnsTuesday, 28 November 2017
The Woman in White insists on being told and retold. Wilkie Collins’s much loved thriller is perhaps the most widely and frequently adapted of all the great Victorian novels. In Marian Halcombe it has a resourceful heroine whose appeal doesn't rest... Read more... |
Blu-ray: JabberwockyTuesday, 28 November 2017
Jabberwocky is all the more enjoyable once you get past what it isn’t; Terry Gilliam’s 1977 directorial debut is a medieval romp starring Michael Palin and a short-lived Terry Jones, but audiences shouldn’t expect a Monty Python film. Gilliam and... Read more... |
David Edgar: 'Ebenezer Scrooge is alive and well'Monday, 27 November 2017
Since mid-August, I’ve been doing something I swore I’d never do again. I’ve been rehearsing a new adaptation of a novel by Charles Dickens. Sometime in the autumn of 1979, I received a phone call from Trevor Nunn, artistic director of the Royal... Read more... |
The Bear, Mid Wales Opera review - small stage, big ambitionsSaturday, 25 November 2017
Go west, opera-lover: Mid Wales Opera is back in business. In fact, it’s been back since spring this year, when it toured venues in Wales and England with a warmly reviewed Handel Semele and a striking (and impressively cast) Magic Flute inspired by... Read more... |
Howards End, BBC One review - EM Forster adaptation is finding its footingMonday, 13 November 2017
Can it really be a quarter-century since that finest of all Merchant-Ivory film adaptations, Howards End, was first released? So it is, astonishingly, which surely means the time is ripe for a fresh celluloid take on EM Forster's enduring 1910 novel... Read more... |
The Exorcist, Phoenix Theatre review - see the movieWednesday, 01 November 2017
Although playwright John Pielmeier, who has written this stage adaptation of The Exorcist, reckons that “I adapted the novel, not the film,” the indelible images from William Friedkin’s 1973 movie were always bound to define an audience’s... Read more... |
The Slaves of Solitude, Hampstead Theatre review - crude, over-dramatic and under-motivatedTuesday, 31 October 2017
The Second World War is central to our national imagination, yet it has been oddly absent from our stages recently. Not any more. Nicholas Wright’s new play, an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel about lonely English women and American... Read more... |
Call Me By Your Name review - a star is born in a heartbreaking gay romanceFriday, 27 October 2017
It's not every day that an actor breaks your heart playing a character who surrenders his. But that's among the numerous achievements of Timothée Chalamet's knockout performance in Call Me By Your Name. Playing a culturally savvy and... Read more... |
The Snowman review - Michael Fassbender can't save Harry HoleThursday, 12 October 2017
The crime novels of Jo Nesbø are rampaging Nordic psycho-operas. The author's Oslo detective Harry Hole is a lofty alcoholic who takes an outrageous pummelling in his pursuit of deranged serial killers. His many adventures fill the crime shelves in... Read more... |
Jane Eyre, National Theatre review - a dynamic treatment that just missesFriday, 29 September 2017
Sometimes you go to the theatre and in the first 10 minutes are convinced that the production is going to smash it, only to find by half time that it’s not. Initial delight gives way to mild irritation, and as a member of the ticket-buying public... Read more... |
