Adapting the Unadaptable
WNO does Bernstein's Candide, and Radio Four tackles Caradog Prichard's One Moonlit Night.
Gary Raymond takes in a week of adaptations from “problematic” source material, with WNO’s production of Leonard Bernstein’s difficult Candide, and Rhianon Boyle‘s radio adaptation of Caradog Prichard’s dream-like novella One Moonlit Night (Un nos ola Leuad).
Read the whole piece here.
“James Bonas’s WNO production goes the only direction it could, which is to follow Voltaire and go all in. Bonas clearly understands satire, what it is, what it is for, its history and its modern malaise (which, incidentally, was why Bernstein was so attracted to Candide in the first place). Bonas’s engagement with the form is evident in every decision presented on stage, most powerfully in Grégoire Pont’s lively and hilarious animations that dominate the staging, projected onto a gargantuan chainmail curtain. Interacting sometimes with a Pythonesque divinity, sometimes with a clever subtlety, in the real action, it is the perfect vehicle for the absurdity of the satire, and it moves the action along from clunky plot point to clunky plot point. The style is the answer to the problem of form.”
“... as a potential piece of drama, it is, as Jan Morris wrote, a novel “beyond rational analysis”. Which brings us to the question of how one might adapt that which is beyond analysis? Boyle’s answer has been to delve deeper into the dreamscape (and Nigel Lewis’s luscious sound work augments this extremely well, as does the careful and compassionate directing of Ffion Emlyn and Emma Harding). Prichard himself said of the book that it was “an unreal picture, seen in the twilight and in the light of the moon”. Boyle’s One Moonlit Night radiates in the twilight – a canny effect to conjure for the mind’s eye.”
Read the whole article here.