013 Adaptation – Old
Don’t Look Now was
a thriller written by Daphne DuMaurier and adapted quite successfully, I hear,
into a film. The radio adaptation was
interesting and fatalistic. John
(Michael Feast) and Laura (Anna Chancellor) have gone on holiday to Italy in
order to escape the pain of the death of their young daughter. Things are going
well, until they meet Scottish twin sisters in Venice, one of whom is blind and
psychic and tells Laura that their daughter is with them. Not only that, they insist that John and
Laura must leave Venice before something terrible befalls them. John, not wishing to be taken in by scammers
(who say he has latent psychic abilities too) and angry that Laura is taking up
the sentimentalist/spiritualist bent of the sisters’ rhetoric, resists
them. Then their son gets sick in
England, and they try to get back to him as soon as possible. He survives the operation for appendicitis,
but John and Laura are split up in the process.
John is convinced that Laura has missed her flight to England because he
sees her back in Venice with the sisters, but eventually discovers that Laura
did make her flight and the sisters were nowhere near. Befuddled, he eventually realizes that he has
seen a vision of the future. It’s a
spooky story, wonderfully adapted by Ronald Frame, the key thing being its
attention to minutiae and its use of the intimate radiogenic address,
epitomized by Michael Feast’s compelling performance as John. Originally from 2001, it was directed by
Patrick Rayner and starred Sean Baker, Ewan Bailey, Colette O’Neil, Carolyn
Pickles, and Carl Prekopp.
I was pretty impressed with the three-part adaptation of The Divine Comedy from 2014 by talented
radio dramatist (and one-time Doctor Who
writer) Stephen Wyatt. I thought it was
a brilliant idea of Wyatt’s to put the older Dante (John Hurt) in Ravenna in
conversation with the younger Dante (Blake Ritson) who had “lost his way in a
dark wood” only to be put right by the intervention of his Lady Beatrice
(Hattie Morahan) in Heaven and guided through Hell and Purgatory by his master,
Vergil (David Warner). The performances
were excellent, and I suspect the actors enjoyed the range of playing tormented
souls in Hell and Purgatory and blessed souls in Heaven. I have read Inferno and Purgatorio but
never Paradiso, which was actually
more interesting than I thought, mainly because of a very strong performance
from Hattie Morahan. However, it goes without saying that Hell is the most
interesting part, and the sound design (by Keira Knightley’s brother Cal) was
fantastic. It’s a hard drama to make
relevant for this increasingly secular age, which Wyatt accomplished by
allowing the older Dante to make observations about putting his enemies in Hell
and his critique of the Church. I had
never really thought before that when Dante said he was lost in a dark wood at
the age of 35 that he meant he was suicidal, but it makes a lot of sense. Directed by Emma Harding and Marc Beeby, The Divine Comedy also starred Sam
Dale, Michael Bertenshaw, Priyanga Berfid, Clive Heyward, Steve Toussaint,
Carolyn Pickles, Cassie Layton, and David Cann.
Also from 2014 and also extremely impressive was Adrian Bean’s
adaptation of Alan Le May’s book The
Searchers, of course made into a well-known film by John Ford. I always thought that pre-1970s Westerns were
black-and-white morality tales at which I would cringe at the depiction of
Native Americans. Not so with this
incredibly authentic, nuanced, tragic drama, on par with Hostiles which I also saw in 2018.
I was blown away by the performances; while most of the time, BBC radio
drama delivers good (if not excellent) American dialect performances, these
were above and beyond. Some of the usual
suspects were there—great to hear the phenomenal William Hope as Amos Edwards,
as well as Kerry Shaye as Aaron Matheson—but very impressed to hear Alun Raglan
and a string of actors I’d never heard of really deliver flawless Western
American accents. Martin Pauly (Simon
Lee Philips) was adopted when Comanche killed his family in Texas. He is thus spurred into action when Comanches
abduct his foster-sister Debbie. The men
of the settlement go searching for Debbie and her older sister, both abducted
while their parents and siblings were slaughtered. Many fall on that search, an age-old battle
of wits that hadn’t changed since 1704 when Eunice Williams was abducted from
Deerfield, Massachusetts, and a similar fate to hers ultimately belongs to
Debbie, which Martin learns to his cost.
However, as Martin teams with grizzled Amos—who, he realizes, was in
love with the abducted girl’s mother, his sister-in-law—he no longer has a part
in the white society he has been trying to protect. In learning more and more about the Comanche,
including accidentally taking a wife, called Look, Martin ultimately gets put
in an uncomfortable position of belonging no place. The music—though not strictly period—was also
arresting. It was very exciting, and
overall, top-notch radio drama. Directed
by James Robinson, it also starred Fiona Marr, Kezrina James, PJ Brennan, John
Cording, and Marilyn Leconte.
No comments:
Post a Comment