PAUL DONOVAN is chilled by the contemporary resonance of Harper Lee’s coming of age tale amidst racism and white supremacy in this excellent production
Latest editorial
Theatre: Matching up to Expectations
SUSAN DARLINGTON recommends a dramatisation of Charles Dickens’s great Victorian novel at the West Yorkshire Playhouse
GEOFF BOTTOMS recommends the unashamedly light-hearted escapism on offer in this stage version of the 1963 film
Full of mysterious religious references and radical sound design, the Scottish duo’s new offering is candidate for album of the year, suggests SIMON DUFF
MARY CONWAY revels in a powerful reminder that human lives are not defined by physical perfection
PAUL DONOVAN recommends the fine performances in this account of the pre-war meeting between the US president and the British king
TECLYN AROD relishes an intimate celebration of jazz improvisation that mixes local and national musicians
Great Expectations
West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds
4/5
THE lives of the orphan Pip and escaped convict Abel Magwitch, mutually “shackled” by their chance encounter on the Kent marshes, is one of the great dramas in literature.
It’s one which Michael Eaton’s new adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations places firmly centre stage in a lengthy dramatisation of a novel which tackles the big themes of wealth, poverty, love and rejection.
Similar stories
JULIA THOMAS unpicks the mental processes that explain why book-to-film adaptations so often disappoint
PETER MASON applauds a stage version of Le Carre’s novel that questions what ordinary people have to gain from high-level governmental spying
With the recent release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie One Battle After Another, STEPHEN ARNELL gives the storied history of the British real-life left-wing urban guerillas
MARIA DUARTE recommends the ambitious portrait of an agricultural community confronted by the trauma of enclosure