Stage-to-screen review: Good Night, and Good Luck

Former Golden Girls guest star George Clooney made his Broadway debut last year in Good Night, and Good Luck, an adaptation of one of his own films from twenty years earlier. One performance was broadcast live on CNN of all places, and that recording has now been added with very little fanfare to Netflix in the UK - possibly to make sure everyone forgets about Jay Kelly a little bit quicker. For David Cromer's production Clooney and Grant Heslov adapt their own script, with Clooney moving up to the lead role of Edward R. Murrow, the 1950s CBS news reporter whose team took on the, at the time seemingly all-powerful, Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy's HUAC witchhunts, most famous on stage as the inspiration for The Crucible, used a panic they themselves had largely created about Communist spies hiding in America, to build a culture of fear where McCarthy was the ultimate arbiter of what was true and who was loyal.

Stage-to-screen review: Death of England: Closing Time

The show I was due to see tonight got cancelled at the last minute, so I replaced it with another show that I'd missed the first time, and that I'd been keeping in my back pocket for just such an occasion: I had a ticket to Death of England: Closing Time's premiere at the Dorfman in 2023, but my performance got cancelled when Jo Martin fell ill. I wasn't too worried about missing the latest part of Clint Dyer and Roy Williams' increasingly epic project as I knew it would turn up on NTatHome sooner or later, which it now has: It played in rep as part of a trilogy (the made-for-TV Face to Face seems to have been quietly forgotten) that played in rep last year at @sohoplace, the theatre with a name so current it's working on a gag about what "Zig-A-Zig-Ah" means that it'll find a punchline for any day now.

Stage-to-screen review: The Piano Lesson

Maybe we should change the theory that most playwrights secretly just want to write a ghost story, and accept that all of them do. America's great chronicler of the 20th century August Wilson did so in the 1930s instalment of his play cycle, and while by all accounts Malcolm Washington's film version has edged more into horror movie tropes than the original suggests, Wilson's The Piano Lesson does centre on a literal ghost as a way of dragging up a whole lot of metaphorical ones. The literal ghost is that of Sutter, last descendant of a slave-owning family, who's recently died in vaguely suspicious circumstances. Boy Willie (John David Washington) brings news of his death to his sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) in Pittsburgh. Their own ancestors were slaves owned by Sutter's family, and while it's been decades since their emancipation a grim connection to their former owners has continued through the generations.

Stage-to-screen review: The Old Man and the Pool

We're coming up to mid-September, traditionally the time when London theatre suddenly goes from a wasteland to a frantic stampede, so barring any unexpected health issues (whether global or personal) this should be the last of the current crop of screen and radio adaptations I use to pad out the dry season. Speaking of health issues, that's the focus of Mike Birbiglia's mix of stand-up and autobiographical storytelling, The Old Man and the Pool, which ran in London at Wyndham's Theatre a year ago. I'd been vaguely tempted but I do occasionally remember not to spend money I don't have on shows I'm not sure about I didn't book, and only a few months later Seth Barrish's production got added to Netflix anyway. Here the starting point is a medical check-up that reveals his regular breathing strength is the same as that of someone in the middle of a heart attack, and is advised to take up regular swimming.

Stage-to-screen review: Tartuffe (BBC iPlayer)

Next up in my digital theatre catch-up is a production I'm pretty sure I had been due to see at the RSC's Swan, but had to skip when I got ill. A couple of years later Iqbal Khan's production of Tartuffe moved up to Birmingham, where Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto's adaptation is set, and that's where it was filmed for the BBC. Molière's farce is a satire on religious hypocrisy, and here the con-man posing as a holy man becomes a fake Imam, manipulating and destroying a well-off British-Pakistani family for his own ends. In place of a servant we have a Bosnian cleaning lady, Darina (Olga Fedori,) who acts as a chorus figure and outside eye on the Pervaiz family, whose patriarch Imran (Simon Nagra) has been charmed by the wise and pious words of a seemingly homeless man he met at the mosque. He's invited him to live in the family home, and pretty soon he's reliant on Tartuffe's words for every decision he makes in his life.

Stage-to-screen review: Macbeth (See-Saw Films)

Once again a quiet August sees me throw a few screen versions of stage plays into the mix, and as the 2015 version of Macbeth is about to expire on Netflix I thought if I was going to bother with it at all I'd better get on with it. Set very much in the grubby middle ages of the story's inspiration, Justin Kurzel's film opens with the titular couple burying a child, so we can get that particular clichéd misreading of the text out of the way early on. To be fair this is only really offered as an explanation for Lady Macbeth's (Marion Cotillard) actions, as Macbeth's (Michael Fassbender) seem very much motivated by PTSD and the general bloody ruthlessness of the times: The action properly begins with the gruesome battle he leads to victory; it's actually during the battle that he first spots the three witches (who are seemingly Romulans?) who'll eventually prophesy his rise to the throne of Scotland.

Stage-to-screen review: Hamlet (Bristol Old Vic / BBC)

It's been a couple of years since I last saw a full production of Hamlet, and with a while yet before the next major one is due (now watch as another gets announced the second after I click Publish,) it seemed as good a time as any to check out the version the BBC offered up recently as part of their First Folio season. This was John Haidar's 2022 production at the Bristol Old Vic, one that had caught my eye for casting real-life husband and wife Finbar Lynch and Niamh Cusack as the king and queen of Denmark. Haidar didn't cast Calam Lynch in the lead to complete the family set, but instead Billy Howle plays Hamlet, the prince of Denmark who's moping quietly at the start of the play after his father's sudden death. Alex Eales' set is slickly black and I want to call Natalie Pryce's costumes modern-dress, except the characters' tech is very Nineties: Hamlet loves soliloquising into his dictaphone, and "The Mousetrap" is interrupted when Polonius' pager goes off.

Stage-to-screen review:Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical

Dennis Kelly (book) and Tim Minchin's (music and lyrics) musical adaptation of Roald Dahl's Matilda was first seen in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2010 and made it to the West End in 2011, but it took until 2022 for a movie adaptation (now streaming on Netflix) to be released. The wait seems to have been an entirely positive thing, as it's allowed Matthew Warchus - who also directed the original production - to look at it afresh, and come up with a screen version that doesn't really take many visual cues from the stage show, but does match it for eccentric charm. The opening song, "Miracle," is set on a maternity ward, and when we got a series of shots of babies in cribs, soundtracked by their thoughts singing about how amazing their parents tell them they are, I knew this was going to be fun.

Stage-to-screen review: All's Well That Ends Well(RSC / Sky Arts)

Last year, like this year, a couple of my planned theatre trips outside of That London got scuppered by rail strikes; one of them was Blanche McIntyre's production of All's Well That Ends Well at the RSC. It was a particular shame because McIntyre has been an interesting director of some of the more obscure, more problematic Shakespeare plays, and you don't get many that fit both descriptions better than this one. Rarely performed (arguably with good reason,) it was even included in the original trio of Problem Plays whose tone made them difficult to categorise (like Measure for Measure, which McIntyre's also tackled before, this one got lumped in with the Comedies by the First Folio.) The fact that its lead romantic couple are actually meant to lack any hint of sexual chemistry is the least of the issues which has kept it on the expanded list of plays with seriously problematic elements for a modern audience.

Stage-to-screen review: The Play What I Wrote

As usual January has some lulls in theatregoing that I'm topping up with filmed productions I missed the first time. and one BBC iPlayer offering leftover from the Christmas schedule seems a pretty appropriate choice for the time of year, even if it wasn't specifically festive: Morecambe and Wise were a comedy duo and beloved British institution, and particularly in the 1970s their Christmas special was always the most-watched show, fondly remembered to this day. (I'm sure it creates an annual bind for the BBC - if they don't show an episode they'll get complaints about breaking with tradition, if they do they'll get them about flooding the schedules with reruns.) I'm sure we did get a showing of the real thing, but a good compromise between new and old is this filming of the 2021 revival of Sean Foley, Hamish McColl and Eddie Braben's tribute The Play What I Wrote, inspired by Braben's original scripts.

Stage-to-screen review: London Assurance

When NTatHome first launched I tried it out with the oldest recording they'd put on the platform; I think Phèdre still holds that title but another of the early NTLive screenings has recently joined it, giving me a chance to rewatch a show I remembered fondly, and see how well it held up. A far cry from Peloponnesian angst and bloody horse-related deaths (although they do have a bit of forbidden lust in common,) in 2010's London Assurance Nicholas Hytner revived the early hit for largely forgotten 19th century theatrical juggernaut Dion Boucicault. Boucicault's work generally hasn't stood the test of time, and tends to work best when radically reconceived or flat out parodied, and this too has needed some tinkering: In an ongoing collaboration that would have its most famous example the following year, Hytner got Richard Bean to do a thorough rewrite of the script.

Stage-to-screen review: Oliver Twist

The National Theatre's NTatHome platform won't be troubling Netflix in terms of volume of content any time soon, but its library has grown significantly since it launched a couple of years ago. As well as the NT's own archive and the productions screened to cinemas with NTLive, it also makes sense as a longer-term home for filmed performances that were screened online during lockdown by a variety of UK theatres, on a variety of platforms. So one such show is Leeds Playhouse's 2020 adaptation of probably the best-known full-length novel by Charles Dickens (Chickens to his friends,) Oliver Twist. Intended to tour, which obviously in 2020 wasn't going to happen, Amy Leach's production was instead made available to stream, in a filmed version that occasionally uses subtitles to supplement the access features that are incorporated into the staging itself.

Stage-to-screen review: Much Ado About Nothing(RSC / RST & BBC)

After Covid kept me away from Stratford-upon-Avon for two years, the aftermath of 1990s Gladiators winner Storm Eunice kept me away a bit longer when I was due to see the RST reopen with Roy Alexander Weise's take on Much Ado About Nothing. The BBC has come up with another chance to catch it though, with a filmed performance that's now available on iPlayer. Much Ado is set to be this year's most ubiquitous Shakespeare play, and another 2022 meme it's contributed to is the understudy having to permanently take over a lead role: Michael Balogun, himself the beneficiary of a sudden promotion, dropped out just before opening and Luke Wilson (not that one) got the plum role of Benedick. And he makes the most of the opportunity, easily becoming one of the best things in a frankly bizarre production whose high concept design overwhelms it.

Stage-to-screen review: tick, tick... BOOM!

Touch wood and everything, but I seem to be back at a point where a completely theatre-free week is a bit of a rarity for me, but I did know that a couple, like this one, were coming up. So I made sure to hang on to a few of the radio or screen adaptations of stage works that I used to keep myself and this blog going during lockdown, including the Lin-Manuel Miranda-directed adaptation of tick, tick... BOOM! This also ended up being the week Andrew Garfield got an Oscar nomination for the film, so it's turned out to be fairly apt timing as well. I seem to be regularly drawn back to Rent despite my very mixed feelings about it, but Jonathan Larson's punctuation heavy* earlier musical is one I'd only seen once in a fringe production which left me distinctly underwhelmed. But Miranda does have the advantage of a new screenplay by Dear Evan Hansen's Steven Levenson to help make sense of the story.

Stage-to-screen review: Death of England - Face to Face

You could certainly call what the National Theatre's been on with Death of England a rollercoaster ride, as there have been sharp ups and downs ever since Clint Dyer and Roy Williams premiered what was then a standalone monologue: Michael's side of the story, about a man both mourning his father and confronting his racist legacy, was one of the venue's hits of the year. The fact that the year in question was 2020 is a clue to where the downs came from: The same team came up with Delroy, a sequel from the point of view of Michael's black best friend, which culminated in him having a baby with Michael's sister Carly - while also crtically well-received, this installment suffered first from appendicitis taking out its star, and then from a story set during the first Covid lockdown being cut short by the second. Having managed to catch Delroy on stage I guessed that Dyer and Williams might now have an eye to a trilogy, with Carly perhaps the final piece of the puzzle: I was half right.

Stage-to-screen review: Constellations(Anna Maxwell Martin/Chris O'Dowd cast)

I doubt regular readers of this blog (either of them) will be particularly shocked to see me make one last return to the 2021 West End casts of Constellations in the final week of their availability online: Having watched three out of four casts it would have felt like unfinished business not to complete the set. And it's no slight on Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O'Dowd that they were last on my list, but with the first and second London casts of Nick Payne's play having been straight white couples in their thirties, a straight white couple in their early forties weren't as much of a stretch when Michael Longhurst's consciously diverse season also offered a black couple in their twenties, an interracial gay couple and a pair in their sixties and seventies. But Payne's love story with infinite possibilities across the multiverse has also proved to take on almost as many possibilities with different casts, so another one always seems to be worth the time.

Stage-to-screen review: Constellations(Sheila Atim/Ivanno Jeremiah cast)

Do you know why you can't lick your own elbow? I certainly do, given the amount of times I've heard the opening lines of Nick Payne's Constellations, and Marianne's eccentric pick-up line that, depending on how she delivers it and what kind of Roland she meets, either falls flat on its arse or begins a complex relationship that'll be a major part of both their lives. I've previously seen the roles played by Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall (twice,) Joe Armstrong and Louise Brealey, Peter Capaldi and Zoë Wanamaker, and most recently Omari Douglas and Russell Tovey. When Michael Longhurst's production returned to the West End this summer as the Donmar's response to the challenges of Covid-safe theatre, it was with four alternating casts, and I was tempted to see all of them. But I thought after a year without live theatre, the same play four times in a couple of months might blow my mind, so I gave myself the rule of sticking to two - the casts I considered furthest from what I'd seen before.

Stage-to-screen review: Diana the Musical

On the one hand, mere days after its release, what could I possibly have to say about Diana the Musical that hasn't already been said? On the other this is a theatre blog that, over the last 18 months, has by necessity had to diversify into a lot more on-screen theatre, and it's one hell of an elephant in the room to try and ignore: David Bryan (music and lyrics) and Joe DiPietro (book and lyrics) have collaborated on musicals before, scoring a big international success with Memphis and more of a cult hit with The Toxic Avenger. Their latest work hits some kind of cursèd sweet spot between "obvious cynical moneymaker" and "obvious terrible idea" to give the musical treatment to the life of Diana, Princess of Wales (Jeanna de Waal,) and especially her miserable marriage to Prince Charles (Roe Hartrampf.) As if what Diana's life really needed was another car crash.

Stage-to-screen review:Everybody's Talking About Jamie

I loved Everybody's Talking About Jamie when it first transferred to London, but I did worry how long it would last without star names attached. As it turns out, it eventually took a pandemic to knock it off the West End stage, and while its recent return to the Apollo was short, its London run is officially only "paused," while a UK tour goes on, and a North American premiere is on the cards. And then there's this from the original creative team of writers Dan Gillespie Sells (music) and Tom MacRae (book and lyrics,) director Jonathan Butterell and choreographer Kate Prince, who've decided to turn it into something incredibly rare and precious: A movie musical without James Corden in it. There's a new, slightly starrier cast taking on the central roles, although a few of the original stage performers get cameo appearances, as do Jamie and Margaret Campbell, the story's original inspiration.

Stage-to-screen review: Masks and Faces, or,Before and Behind the Curtain

The Finborough has held off on reopening for live performances until next month due to the added challenges faced by a venue of its size; but not having any intention of being forgotten until then, it's continuing with the online offerings. This time it's the unlikely pairing of Restoration Comedy with Zoom calls with, as part of the Kensington and Chelsea Festival, the rediscovery of Charles Reade and Tom Taylor's Masks and Faces, or, Before and Behind the Curtain. It's fair to say I approached this one cautiously: I've enjoyed Restoration Comedy before but usually it takes quite a lot of work from a production for me to like it. Most of the time we see people in the usual ridiculous outfits and wigs blandly exchanging lines that were very funny at the time but... not so much now. So in a format that just relies on the lines and the actors' faces, with no chance of physical interaction with each other, let alone the audience, I didn't expect much. So what a pleasant surprise for Matthew Iliffe's production to add Masks and Faces to the list of "where has this been hiding all these years?" Finborough rediscoveries.