Neil Armfield’s resonant, turbulent production of Kate Grenville’s classic Australian novel The Secret River sing out from the stage of the Olivier like an epic, with its conflicts, culture clashes, and quest for new territories.
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.
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.
London’s Troubadour White City theatre has got off to a, literally, flying start.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
“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.