Tuesday, May 07, 2019

Captain Corelli's Mandolin at the Rose Theatre

Kingston. Tuesday 07-May-2019.

We squeezed in a trip to the theatre between trips to Penrith, Scotland and doing some decorating in one of our buy-to-let flats.

I was wondering how they would manage to cram an entire book into the timeframe of a play but they did a cracking job.


Arif Akbar writes in the Guardian: 4 * "Captain Corelli's Mandolin review – wartime weepy is shocking and wondrous"
"Director Melly Still manages to both stay faithful to the original and inject it with freshness, while Rona Munro’s adaptation distils key themes, especially the question of whether the “enemy-occupier” in a war is ever free to show love or compassion to the occupied."  Full Review...



Ann Treneman in The Times also gives it 4 * "The 2001 film adaptation of this novel may have been a turkey, yet this true-to-the-story stage adaptation is anything but"
"There are some nice touches. The idea that animals provide a way to the human heart is explored in a playful way: Luisa Guerreiro makes a really rather fantastic goat and Elizabeth Mary Williams will have endeared herself to pine martens everywhere. There is also an excellent performance from Joseph Long, as Pelagia’s father, the philosophical doctor. Bravo, too, to the sheer theatrical nature of it all, the attention to detail and the emphasis on surprise and spectacle, bound together by some moving musical moments. War is hell, of that we are sure, but there is a bit of heaven here too." Full review...
And I agree with The Times, Luisa Guerreiro as the goat was brilliant!

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