26/08/16
013 Adaptation – Old
I really adored the adaptation by Michelene Wandor of Sara
Paretksy’s VI Warshawski novel Deadlock from
1993. I found it the equivalent of a
hard-to-put-down novel, and I’m not usually that susceptible to mysteries.
Warshawksi (played here by the incredible Jessica Turner) is undeniably cool;
she’s like Candy Matson for the 1990s.
(Though I did begin to question how the story was portraying any women
other than VI—unfortunately, they’re mostly superficial ice queens obsessed
with money enough to commit crimes or office bimbos or mean nurses or powerless
Black southern women. The only one who
doesn’t conform to that is Dr Herschel, VI’s friend.) I was pleased in the end that the guy VI
liked, shipping magnate Martin Bledsoe, was not the killer of her cousin,
retired hockey player Boom-Boom. The
story was exciting, following VI as she investigated her cousin Boom-Boom the
boxer’s death; it was meticulously made, three hours long (six parts),
suspenseful, and interesting, having to deal with Great Lakes shipping (how different
is that world now?). Some may have
balked at the time at the expense, and time, and talent expended on an American
pulp mystery, but it’s very well-done. I
was amused that I had heard an actor playing the only British role in the
thing, a very stolid English accent; I was thinking he was in the Bill Nighy
vein, and guess what . . . it was Bill Nighy!
I very seldom listen to audiobooks and very rarely review
them with audio drama, but I had to make an exception with The House on the Borderland, written by William Hope Hodgson, read
by Jim Norton, and directed by Lawrence Jackson. I don’t know what I was expecting—I guess
something along the lines of Robert Westall, written in a contemporary style
but set as a piece of Victorian Gothic horror. I soon realized that this was
the real thing, complete with ambiguous/disgracefully underwritten female
character. It was not horror, it was not
science fiction, it was not mystery, it was an incredible mix of all of this,
with some of the most startlingly original imagery I’ve ever heard; it was also quite scary.
It took a little while to get into The Absentee by Maria Edgeworth, adapted by Nick McCarty, but, once
again, I’m glad I made the time. It’s
all of a style contemporary to Jane Austen, and while the soul might crave
something more akin to Elizabeth Gaskell or Kate O’Brien for effecting social
change, you did root for the young Lord Colombory, played by a young Stephen
Rea, to change the mind of his mother about living in Ireland, to find a
solution to the scandalous background of his cousin Grace Nugent (Anna Healy)
so he could marry her for true love, and to outwit the evil money-lender
Mordecai. The Anglo-Irish Colombory
family were absentee landlords in Ireland, as the mother (Franchine Mulroony)
was devoted to her London society, even though Londoners were laughing at her
behind her back; living in London made little sense, given the fact it was
putting the family into financial ruin and causing untold havoc on the tenants
back in Ireland. Edgeworth wasn’t
suggesting the tenants should rise up and democratize themselves, but she did
allow the moral Colombory to see how unfairly treated they were at the mercy of
unscrupulous middlemen. Rea was
excellent, infusing emotion into rather a thankless part. There were a lot of conversations between
Colombory’s London and Irish servants, which was annoying at first but
eventually became an economical way of finding about the action. There was an interesting set of characters,
mother and daughter, who from a gender point of view you can’t help but
admire—such a cool operating system they had for getting what they wanted and
wrecking the lives of others—but obviously as human beings you thought they
were simply deplorable. It was directed
by Claire Grove.
Nadia Molinari’s 2009 production of The Wizard of Oz is in an odd spot, given how much people associate
the MGM musical with the story (even if the book has come back into the
spotlight a bit since Wicked). That said, it moved at a brisk pace and had
some wonderfully inventive/psychedelic radiogenic moments that were really
stunning and memorable. It’s hard to know if the American accents were a
directorial choice or just a consequence of the way the majority of British
actors do American accents (it’s much easier for British people to do southern
American accents than anything else.) If
it was a directorial choice, it was a slightly off-kilter one, given that the
Scarecrow and Dorothy sounded like they’d just walked off the set of The Walking Dead. I’m nitpicking slightly, but if it was to
emphasize the poverty of pre-dustbowl Kansas, it worked. Overall, though, the voice acting was
fantastic and married very well with the effects. There were several biting commentaries wiped
clean from the MGM film—how did Dorothy become an orphan; the poverty
surrounding the Emerald City because of the Wizard’s ineptitude; a darker
indictment of the Wizard’s moral cowardice generally; the fact the flying
monkeys had been the Witch of the West’s slaves for three hundred years. The Witches, meanwhile, were probably the
most difficult to visualize, perhaps due to the fact they were all played by
one actress! The aural evocation of a
cyclone was superb, as was the way the Wizard inspired fear in different forms
to all the travellers, and the way his machinery finally broke down, was
incredible. As a Burn Gorman fan, I
enjoyed getting to hear him play the Tin Man; it must be incredibly hard to
play metal that needs oiling on radio! Linda Marshall Griffiths adapted the play from
the book by Frank L. Baum, and it starred Jonathan Keeble, Kevin Eldon, Zubin Varla,
Emma Fielding, Andrew Westfield, and Graeme Hawley.
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