About a week after my modern adaptation of The Seagull closed in 2012 at Southwark Playhouse the director Russell Bolam texted me, "Same again?" So it’s now in 2014 that at (the new) Southwark Playhouse we’ve got our modern take on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which has just opened.
It’s the bad books, it has been famously said, that make the good films. As for the good ones, they have to take their chances. There is so much more to lose, so many nuances of tone and subtleties of texture to be sacrificed. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is one such good book. It won the Orange Prize for fiction in 2007 and became a bestseller. Being a multi-stranded narrative peopled by a rich array of characters against an epic backdrop, its journey to the big screen was always on the cards.
When a book is published, there are broadly speaking three alternative fates which lie in wait. It goes global, it sinks without trace, or it sells modestly and steadily to the readership for whom it was intended. There is, however, another potential option, which is that it catches a thermal and veers off in an unforeseen direction.
“It’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind,” advised Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West when writing the spoof biography Orlando as a “love letter” to her. When she had finished the novel, depicting Vita as an androgynous time-traveller, she wrote defensively: “It is all over the place, incoherent, intolerable, impossible.”
“Her most devastating surprise ever.” Thus spake The Guardian, a quote happily slapped across the cover of the first paperback edition of Agatha Christie’s 1967 thriller Endless Night. While I wouldn’t go quite that far – that honour goes to her still startling, genre-busting The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) – it’s a compelling little chiller. Small wonder that ITV wanted it for their franchise. Just one tiny problem: it’s a crime novel without a detective.
How do you solve a problem like...no, not Maria, Candide? Musicals are loved for their scores – and Leonard Bernstein’s one for this really is a cracker – but they’re held together by their books, i.e. the script/dramatic context that makes audiences care about the characters and plot. Filled to bursting with good intentions, Matthew White’s exuberantly rough’n’tumble new Menier production does its damnedest but there’s no disguising the fact that Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of Voltaire’s satire of inexhaustible optimism remains tension-free.
Classic children’s stories often have a darker side; a shadowy area that lends an eternal quality to an otherwise merely durable yarn. Such is Mary Poppins. How and why it came to the big screen is one of Hollywood’s best tales, previously untold until now with Saving Mr Banks, a controlled yet poignant story hinging on the persistence and pain essential to bringing even the cheeriest film to fruition.
Blind Side director John Lee Hancock’s high-profile effort focuses on the psychological backstory of one of the most famous children’s stories of all. It is a big mission – even if few will know what PLTravers, the author of Mary Poppins, looked like. Nor will many younger viewers recognise Walt Disney, the moustached face so familiar to an older generation. Emma Thompson plays – with amazing focus – the picky, prickly, complicated and over-protective author resisting Disney’s lucrative offer to transform her adored children’s book into a feature film. Saying that it was the favourite book of his daughters, Disney (Tom Hanks, working his character’s calculated charm) won’t take no for an answer. Sending an emotionally sensitive chauffeur (Paul Giamatti) to pick Travers up from the airport is only one of Disney’s nice little ploys to soften her up. For the audience, returning scenes with Disney’s nimble team of incredible songwriters (Jason Schwartzman and BJ Novak) lifts the tension with the original film’s trademark songs.
The clash between Disney, poised to succeed after 20 years of trying, and Travers, adamant to preserve her vision after 20 years of resistance, flashes back and forth from the 1960s to Travers’s girlhood in 1907 Queensland, Australia. Her father (Colin Farrell, pictured right) is a drunken dreamer, as adorable as he is unrealistic but, like most fathers, a hero to his daughter. His attempt to be a responsible adult is the emotional core of Saving Mr Banks – with a heady reveal at the film’s denouement. (But who is Mr Banks? If you don’t know, it’s worth watching the film to find out.)
Kelly Marcel’s script came through the Black List, a project that tracks the best unproduced scripts each year and its strength benefits from compelling performances. Saving Mr Banks relies too on sensational visuals: hair, makeup, wardrobe and production design cannot be discounted in its evocation of a period where manners, thoughts and actions were very different from today. This is an exploration of love, between that of an author and her work, between a daughter and a father but also between a creative businessman and a money-making film opportunity. The conflict between art and money – ever-present in filmmaking – is palpably displayed by Thompson as Travers protects not only her art from Disney but also her past.
Saving Mr Banks achieves the rare feat of taking us behind the candy-coloured curtain of fun to show how serious the world of Disney business really was. You may come for the story but you'll leave with a revelation. Make sure you linger through the credits to hear recordings of the real Travers, made at her behest.
TO THE RESCUE: TOM HANKS SAVES THE WORLD (AND SOME IFFY MOVIES)
A Hologram for the King. Tom Hanks is the reason to see Dave Eggers's sentimental Saudi comedy
Bridge of Spies. Spielberg's warm-hearted Cold War thriller is lit up by Tom Hanks (pictured below) and Mark Rylance
Captain Phillips. Piracy drama prompts bravura all-action display from director Paul Greengrass and captain Hanks
Cloud Atlas. Star company assumes various guises as David Mitchell's time-travelling masterpiece is lovingly told in under three hours
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Oscar-nominated adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel is lacking in magic
Sully: Miracle On The Hudson. Eastwood and Hanks are the right men for an epic of understated heroism
Toy Story 3. To infinity and no further: Woody and the gang (sob) go on their final mission
PLUS ONE TURKEY
Inferno. In Dan Brown's dumbed-down Florence, Tom Hanks saves the world. But not the movie
Whether you’re partial to Highsmith or Hitchcock, or both, there’s something deliciously exciting about the prospect of Strangers on a Train. Much of that anticipation lies in the intriguing question of which side of the material this adaptation will fall – with book or film, two very different animals – and curiosity as to the staging. "Hitch" has rather spoiled us for visuals. Or has he?
“Everything has happened so quickly,” Katherine Glendenning mused as the new series of The Paradise shot off the block. She'd been en voyage for a year, losing a father and gaining a husband, but now Katherine was back. Moray’s melancholy sojourn on coffee and cognac in Paris – “thoroughly French in every way,” he found it, with less originality than we might have expected – had been suddenly cut short too, and he was hot-footing it back to the waiting arms of Denise. The dramatic rapiers were drawn.
It's dueling stars when Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson go quite delightfully toe-to-toe as Walt Disney vs P L Travers, author of Mary Poppins, in Saving Mr Banks, the closing film of the London Film Festival 2013. The title suggests the Russian doll-like nature of the story – a story within a story wrapped in an enigma, with seriously fabulous hair and make-up turning both Hanks and Thompson into characters you can almost completely believe in.