Monthly Archives: October 2011

Plays have been turned into films ever since cinema began; but turning films into plays is relatively new and rarely successful. Emma Reeves’ adaptation seems a particularly pointless exercise, especially when the vastly superior film is so readily available on … Continue reading →

Sister George, a cheery district nurse, who rides around the countryside on a moped, is a national favourite in a popular radio serial of village life. The BBC decides to kill her off in a road accident in order to … Continue reading →

It took Saul Rubinek 30 years to get round to writing his first play, an American comedy and, somewhat strangely, it is getting its premiere in London. It is billed as a dark, dirty and dangerous play, which makes it … Continue reading →

John Millington Synge had deliberately set out to annoy the Irish nationalists and had succeeded far better than he could ever have imagined. The call-boy at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1907, armed with an axe, threatened to chop off … Continue reading →

Christopher Hampton, author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, had this, his first play, performed in the West End in 1966 when he was only 18, a remarkable achievement. What negates against this revival of adolescent gunge is Harry Melling’s performance as … Continue reading →

Does London really need another jukebox musical? I don’t think so. Rock of Ages, better known to the cognoscenti as Rock Bottom, has been described as Spinal Tap meets Rocky Horror. It’s a smash hit in America and Tom Cruise … Continue reading →

Arthur Miller has written three plays about the Holocaust. Incident at Vichy, staged in 1964, was about the rounding-up of Jews. Playing for Time, premiered on television in 1984, was about a Jewish chamber orchestra surviving in a concentration camp … Continue reading →

Mike Leigh develops his highly convincing slices of everyday lives in films and plays through improvisation with the actors. His bleak new piece is a lot of tiny scenes set in middle-class suburbia in the late 1950’s. Leslie Manville, a … Continue reading →