Steve Crook

It is 1945. A young airman jumps to certain death from his burning aircraft. His last words are to a girl he has never met:
"I love you June. You are life and I am leaving you"
Following an angelic blunder, caused by a classic English pea-souper, Peter Carter miraculously survives and finds June in the flesh. But, things are not so simple! To stay alive, Peter is forced to take himself, and the heavens to the Universal Court of Appeal.
2007 sees Kneehigh on the Olivier stage at the National Theatre in a new adaptation of this much loved war movie by Powell and Pressburger. This is simply the largest and most ambitious indoor production that Kneehigh has tackled in its 26 year history. With a cast of 5 musicians and 22 actors and dancers and a strong team of Kneehigh regulars, this promises to be a project of epic proportions. A love story set against the backdrop of the Second World War. Romantic, surreal and poignantly funny, this is one of the most exciting projects Kneehigh have ever attempted.


At the Olivier Theatre on the South Bank (of the Thames, in London) from May 3 - June 21

Should be interesting

Steve

National Theatre
Kneehigh Theatre Company

Wee Sonny MacGregor

Hope they've got room for the staircase

Wolfgang

They will have to call it "Stepladder to heaven".

Steve Crook

The Olivier's a big theatre. They could easily fit in as much of the staircase as was seen in the film (most of which was hanging miniatures). But that's part of the skill in adapting a film for the stage. We'll have to see what they do with that and other ideas

Steve

ChristineCB

I'm hoping to read reviews here. I haven't considered this film as a stage production, and I'll be interested to see how the sets were done (full, minimalist?)

penfold

Minimalist, but with very clever use of back projection and sound. I'll wait until more people have seen it before commenting further....

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

julian_craster

Some reviews of the stage production...

A mixed bag

Theatre
A Matter of Life and Death
Olivier, London

Michael Billington
Friday May 11, 2007
The Guardian

The 1946 Powell-Pressburger movie, on which this show is based, was an
optimistic paean to passion. Tom Morris and Emma Rice, as co-adapters, have
transformed it into a pessimistic assault on the random brutality of war.
The result is a fascinating reappraisal of the original work, flawed only by
a lack of narrative dynamic.
Structurally, Morris and Rice remain suprisingly faithful to the movie: RAF
pilot Peter Carter falls in love with a radio-operator in the course of a
crash-landing, and, in his subsequent coma, imagines himself arguing to a
celestial court for the right to live.
But, where the film unequivocally states "nothing is stronger than love",
the play strenuously argues our culture is imbued with a sense of death. In
his heavenly trial, Peter is confronted not only by his war-victim father,
but by the widows of the Coventry and Dresden bombings, and, somewhat
tendentiously, by Shakespeare. The meaning is clear: war will always triumph
over private passions.
What prevents this seeming a bleak coda is the way Rice's production brims
with an urgent sense of life. Tristan Sturrock's Peter and Lyndsey Marshal's
June, at one point seen swinging merrily through the air on a hospital-bed,
possess a sexual frenzy lacking in the chaste movie. The film's brief
allusion to a village version of A Midsummer Night's Dream is here expanded
into a major motif, leading to a bracing piece of calypso rock from Stu
Barker and his on-stage band. And a table-tennis game between June and the
neurosurgeon trying to save Peter's life becomes a wittily choreographed
dance conducted with the aid of ping-pong balls on poles.

All this is in the best tradition of Rice's Kneehigh company. But, in a
stage-version 30 minutes longer than the movie, the narrative occasionally
sags, and the production periodically lapses into a self-delighting
virtuosity. The story's crucial heavenly messenger has been transformed from
a dandified French aristo into an unfunny Norwegian illusionist, and the
film's famous camera obscura effect is turned into a lavish panorama of life
on Waterloo Bridge.

If the production, with its constant use of bicycles and hospital beds,
sometimes seems self-consciously clever, it boasts a fine performance from
Douglas Hodge as the life-affirming surgeon. And, on a day when Tony Blair
unapologetically stood by the Iraq invasion, you have to admire the show's
moral animus against the ongoing destructiveness of war.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Put this soulless adaption out of its misery
By Nicholas de Jongh,
Evening Standard 11.05.07


Adaptors Tom Morris and Emma Rice have torn the heart, soul and magic from
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's famous fantasy film of 1946, in
which David Niven's airman, Peter Carter, jumps from his plane and manages
to survive.

They have transformed A Matter Of Life And Death, with its anxious brooding
over post-war Anglo-American relations, into a finger-wagging, pacifist
sermon, as if victory over Hitler in 1945 was a source of shame not joy.
They have even dispensed with the film's happy ending in the high court of
heaven, when Carter relishes a life and future with radio operator June who
has fallen in love, with his voice, nose and every other bit of him. Instead
they consign Carter to death, repudiating the film's muted tribute to the
nonchalant heroism and self-sacrifice of magnificent young men such as
Carter in their war-time flying machines.

Morris and Rice's adaptation is a glossed-up, flamboyant piece of physical
theatre, the film's atmosphere of visionary strangeness sent up by actors
climbing ropes, fires burning in buckets, bedsteads on ropes and a line of
nurses frantically bicycling while horizontal in bed.

Do not ask how or why these nurses are so portrayed, since Rice's production
keeps subordinating sense to meaningless spectacle and flickers of comic
amusement. The acrobatic Gisli Orn Gardarsson, who plays a swinging,
airborne Nordic clown in tights, Conductor 71, offers touches of pantomime,
when compared with Marius Goring's effete French heavenly messenger in the
film.

There could be no better example of the director's eagerness to compose
flamboyant but vacuous stage pictures than a scene in which a table tennis
match between June and the village doctor, Douglas Hodge's vigorous Frank,
is parodied by a chorus of blandly choreographed dancers, employing long
poles and blue balls. Here is evidence of how much Morris and Rice wished to
tilt their adaptation in a musical's direction. And to some extent they do.
A five-strong band forms a regular accompaniment, with a score by Stu Barker
that ranges through about 59 varieties of music, from jazz to rap and a bit
of the blues. The song and dance frivolity only distracts.

Bill Mitchell's design, based on two white sets of curved stair-ways, are
also assembled in a shape not unlike that of an aeroplane's framework. Yet
how much the film's eerie scene setting is missed.

Powell and Pressburger steered A Matter Of Life And Death between the realms
of life and death, moving out of our three dimensions and into space.

The airman's vision of the battles between heaven and earth are surely to be
taken as hallucinations induced by the intracranial pressure on his brain,
for which he has that successful operation. No interesting attempts to
represent this mental landscape are made.

Rice stages the final battle of life or death for Peter with a final fling
of silly acrobatics. Lyndsey Marshal's June, not American as in the film,
has displayed precious little fervour for the airman, but is finally
required to sacrifice herself to heaven. Equipped with a harness she swings
meaninglessly through the air until grabbed by Conductor 71.

Even the arrival of Peter's dead father, another Morris-Rice novelty, fails
to energise Tristan Sturrock's torpid Peter. Rice's grim, new Matter Of Life
And Death is fit for mercy killing.


--------------------------------------------------------

A Matter of Life and Death
The Stage

Emma Rice and her designer Bill Mitchell, both Kneehigh stalwarts, make
thrilling circus-style use of the wide-open Olivier stage to retell the
iconic movie story of an RAF pilot without a parachute, who jumps to certain
death from his blazing Lancaster bomber. Thanks to an angelic error he
survives to fall in love with a WAAF wireless op, but has to face a heavenly
tribunal to convince the authorities of his right to live.

The stage version at first sticks closely to Emeric Pressburger's original
screenplay, while more clearly marking the spectral events as the pilot's
brain-damaged visions. But the adaptation wisely ditches the tendentious
Anglo-American tensions that marred the film, and with a wholly new
courtroom sequence and outcome, it offers an immensely enjoyable evening of
physical, musical and dramatic theatre. A half-dozen lively song and dance
sequences explore composer Stu Barker's passion for tango and bossa nova -
admittedly with dire lyrics to match.

The limber Tristan Sturrock as Peter and graceful Lyndsey Marshal as June
play the lovers with tender passion and commitment, she dangerously
clambering to heaven on a stairway of hospital beds. But the centre ground
is occupied by Gisli Orn Gardarsson, converting the film's larky French
emissary into a Norwegian escapologist, forever cracking gags while dangling
from a rope or disappearing in a puff of smoke. The focus is also on Douglas
Hodge, displaying a lyric tenor talent as the ill-fatud neurosurgeon whose
dazzling ping-pong game with June becomes another cue for music.

Dorothy Atkinson's sombre figure in black, perhaps Death, emerges as a
victim of the Luftwaffe attack on Coventry to make a case against war and
the bombing of innocents. But true to Kneehigh's reputation, this is finally
an exuberant exhibition of astonishing physical skills, far more telling
than the film's special effects.

Steve Crook

I saw it last night.
Performances: 9.9 / 10
Cleverness of theatrical devices in bringing such a complicated film to the stage: 10 / 10
The actual adaptation: Hmmm, not so sure.
They dropped some parts which I really loved in the original and what they replaced them with sometimes didn't work for me. But I'll still give that a 6 or 7 out of 10

Overall a very interesting experience

Steve

Steve Crook

PaPAS

silverwhistle

The reviews say that the ending changes with each production!

"Trust me, I'm a doctor...!"

julian_craster

SUSANNAH LIKES IT !

Theatre
Sweet dreams are made of this

Kneehigh's ingenious adaptation of A Matter of Life and Death is both homespun and heavenly
by Susannah Clapp

Sunday May 13, 2007
The Observer

A Matter of Life and Death
Olivier, London SE1
It is a phenomenal achievement. Actually, more than one. To flood the huge Olivier stage with a dream. To take one of the most revered of movies and make of it something richer and darker. And to prove that a theatrical vocabulary of the future is now flourishing at the National, where, only a few years ago, visual and movement theatre slunk in only as illegal immigrants.

The once tiny Kneehigh company, based in Cornwall, where it has produced plays in quarries and castles, on clifftops and in the Lost Gardens of Heligan, now commands the treacherous swamp of the National's biggest stage. In fact, this is probably less challenging than performing in a gunpowder works, where the company has also acted. Kneehigh's artistic director, Emma Rice, directs. She, with Tom Morris, has adapted Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1946 movie, which tells, in intertwined conventional and fantastic strands, the story of a British airman who, shot down on a mission on 2 May 1945, finds himself not dead but in love - with an American girl - and obliged to plead for his life in front of a heavenly tribunal.

The movie is indisputably full of dazzle and unforgettable set pieces - the famous celestial stairway; the celebrated shift from colour to black-and-white as the action moves from Earth to Heaven (where there are no shades of doubt); the moments when the action freezes to allow an otherworldly, extra-dimensional intervention - but its morality is timid. Prompted by the Ministry of Information, which was eager to procure propaganda designed to improve relations between Great Britain and the United States, it says that, in the end, love conquers all.
Well not in Rice's version. Sensibly junking the American-British theme (how far would it make sense to urge today that the two countries could do with more buddying-up?), she has made an anti-war pageant. In one sense, it is desolating: it banishes the idea of the triumph of romance, of personal and international healing. But it is finally invigorating. The vitality of the pictures that seize the stage makes it impossible to repine.

This A Matter of Life and Death begins - as does the movie - by creating a mighty, midnight-blue, smoky space: the stage seems to go on forever. In the background is a cluster of iron hospital bedsteads; coming towards the audience is a host of lights, headlamps borne by a fleet of bikes. Their white-robed riders dismount: they are nurses who together mime a routine of pulse and cardiac checks, and cigarette-lighting. It's a characteristic Kneehigh mix of the humdrum and the mystical, and it's hard to know - as it should be in a properly integrated piece of theatre - who most to congratulate: Rice for her direction; Bill Mitchell for his constantly morphing design; Mark Henderson for lighting which surrounds the most mundane episode with gloom or glimmer.
The homespun wears a halo of the peculiar. It's created not only by light but by the music of Stu Barker. An onstage band weaves its sounds around each event: when the airman and his girl fall in love, the beautiful chimes of handbells ring out; later, there are tangos and jives and jaunty strummings, as well as the notes of harmonium, mandolin, marimba and hammered dulcimer.
Nothing is constant here. Floating above the stage, a crusty, white moon turns into a clock which ticks away the minutes until our hero (Tristan Sturrock is both jutting-jawed and lithe) lives or dies; it later becomes a penny which flips over from heads to tails. Destiny, the play says, is unpredictable and arbitrary, and in this production it really is: the ending varies from day to day.

Down below, the actors swivel dextrously between the verbally realistic and the physically suggestive. Douglas Hodge is breezy, poignant, totally in period as the earnest, lovelorn neurologist; Lyndsey Marshal makes something truly touching from what you'd think was the thankless part of the loyal sweetheart: a tiny, bright-faced, totally believable figure, whether she's in uniform or impressively shimmying out of her peach-coloured, satin camiknickers.
Yet they are also - like the whole of the play - off for a lot of the time in another sphere, revealing themselves through woozy, agile, flabbergasting pantomime. A game of table tennis (a set piece in the film) is brilliantly transposed: the ball, attached to a hugely long rod, like a giant gong, is waved by an actor between the two bats, while the players, leaping and stretching to deliver their winning strokes, are pushed high into the air by the arms of others: they make a ping-pong ballet. Lolling in bed, the lovers are swung on their blissful mattress from one side of the stage to another - until the heavenly messenger arrives, with his power of suspending time, and they are suddenly seized and held still by a silent army of attendants in pyjamas.

It's the mixture of modes that makes this distinguished. Kneehigh haven't abandoned their folksiness: the messenger from heaven, who in the movie is a furbelowed French flunkey, is here a barmy Norwegian magician (the Icelandic actor and gymnast Gisli Orn Gardarsson) in wet suit and goggles who swings through the stalls on a rope; the surgeon who operates on our hero reappears at his trial as a simulacrum of Shakespeare, with his ruff made out of cream-coloured, sterilised gloves. At the same time, respect is paid to Powell and Pressburger in the form of videos (an unexpected but welcome form for Kneehigh, the most hand-knitted of companies) which run in the background, as a skyscape of lowering clouds, a seaside with a dog bounding along a beach (an actor stands in front of the screen, barking) and, finally, footage of bombed cities, with grey, ruined vistas reaching into the distance. At the end of the evening the dead of Dresden come forward to meet the dead of Coventry: it's a moment without consolation and it's truthful, like the large and beautiful play it precedes.

Steve Crook

Apparently. He lived when we saw it. I can't understand why they'd want his appeal to be refused. That would seem to deny the point of much of the rest of the story.

Steve

julian_craster

The Times
May 14, 2007

A Matter of Life and Death
Benedict Nightingale at the Olivier


Once seen, David Niven is unforgettable. There sits his Peter Carter in his
blazing Lancaster bomber, exuding English sang froid. Then he jauntily tells
Kim Hunter's dewy-eyed June, who chances to be in radio contact, that he's
baling out, unluckily without a parachute. Then cut to the grey-and-white
afterworld, which can't understand why he hasn't joined the dead airmen
thronging through its portals. So begins Powell and Pressburger's 1946
Matter of Life and Death, one of the most eccentric films yet made.

But then eccentricity is what Kneehigh does. So don't be surprised to find
that the director Emma Rice has introduced loads of circus and balletic
effects. I'm hard put to explain the nurses who lie on beds, pedalling on
upended bicycles, but, like the aerial cavortings that follow, they are
presumably meant to create a feeling of surreal wonder.

The piece needs that feel because it's less exceptional than it seems. If
Tristan Sturrock's doughty Peter had simply suffered brain damage serious
enough to need an operation, but was seen through it by Lyndsey Marshal's
doting June, it would be just another romantic tale. The notion that a
celestial emissary has got lost in the Channel fog, allowing Peter
temporarily to evade death and meet the girl, is an attempt to dress up an
old, old story with spurious metaphysics - and the result can be pretty
silly.

Rice and her co-adapter, Tom Morris, have made big changes to the film, not
always for the better. The expansion of a rehearsal of A Midsummer Night's
Dream into a subplot involving a sickly, suicidal Bottom adds more confusion
than dark magic.

And the ending, in which Peter pleads for life before a heavenly court, is
unrecognisable. In the film, he was prosecuted by an angry 18th-century
American for the crime of being English and fancying a Bostonian, which June
then was. Here, his dead father and Shakespeare, along with widows from
Coventry and Dresden, inexplicably press the claims of death over life.

Maybe this means that the piece, which originally reflected postwar tensions
between our boys and the GIs, is now less dated. But neither that change nor
the conversion of Heaven's emissary into a fey Norwegian
conjuror-cum-escapologist makes it better. Still, the introduction of
Douglas Hodge as a wise GP adds class. And the period music, like the
theatrical wizardry, can be diverting. I liked the stylised ping-pong Hodge
plays with Marshal's June - but not enough to feel that this was a play that
mattered.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

A Matter Of Life And Death
National Theatre, London, 3 May - 21 June 2007

It's worth my pointing out at the start that the 1946 Powell and
Pressburger film on which this production is based is one of my all time
favourites. So I suppose I was always going to be difficult to please with
this new stage adaptation of the film by Emma Rice's Kneehigh theatre
company.
Commissioned to aid relations between the English and the Americans, the
film told the story of Peter, a RAF pilot who we meet minutes before he is
about to bail out of his burning plane without a parachute. He knows death
is imminent, as does June, the American radio operator with whom he shares
what he thinks are his last words.

But he doesn't die, due to administrative cock-up in heaven, the conductor
assigned to collect him getting lost in the fog, he is granted more time on
earth, during which he manages to meet June and fall in love. Visually the
film was incredibly inventive, with heaven famously being rendered in rich
black and white. I was intrigued to see how all this would translate to the
stage.

The answer is: not particularly well. Kneehigh are an exciting company, and
when on form, produce exciting, enchanting theatre, but their techniques
have quickly become over familiar. The aerial stuntwork, the visually
cluttered stages, Stu Barker's genre-hopping on-stage musical
accompaniment - these things all worked superbly in a piece such as Nights
At The Circus where they suited the source material, but here they feel out
of place and often threaten to overpower the narrative. Nurses cycle this
way and that, hospital beds overtake the stage and the famous heavenly
staircase is replaced by a sort of arched climbing frame. The use of music
is jarring and annoying.

There are some moments of genuine visual invention, a slow-motion ping-pong
game made me chuckle, as did their recreation of the camera obscura scene,
but more often then not the piece felt overly noisy and messy.

The heavenly conductor, a French aristo in the film, is here played by GÃ*sli
Örn Gardarsson, the stage aerialist and founder of Iceland's Vesturport
Theatre, as a Norwegian magician. Though Gardarsson was a delight in Circus,
here his character's interjections quickly start to irritate. Of the
remaining cast, Douglas Hodge stands out, maintaining a stoic dignity as the
doctor who doesn't let his soft-spot for June prevent him from doing all he
can to help Peter. Tristan Sturrock and Lyndsey Marshal are adequate as the
besotted couple.

In the final scenes, where Peter ends up in heaven's version of an appeal
court, to argue that - having fallen in love during the extra time on earth
mistakenly awarded to him - he deserves to stay alive, he is now confronted,
in Rice's staging, not only by his dead father, but by the victims of the
Coventry and Dresden bombings.

The production loads these closing scenes with a sense of despair over the
futility and indiscriminate barbarity of all war. But while there is a
degree of power to the way this is done, it is undermined by having June's
last emotive plea for Peter reduced to a physical scramble over a row of
floating hospital beds.

Though visually striking in places, Kneehigh's approach simply doesn't work
with the material here. This, coupled with the decision to perform the
production without an interval (it runs to around two hours and ten
minutes), makes it very hard to warm to.

- Natasha Tripney

------------------------------------------------------

A story of love, death and bicycles
By Kate Bassett

Published: 13 May 2007
The Independent

A flock of nurses, all in white, are pedalling upside down, lying on their
backs with bicycles between their legs. One hospital bed has, surreally,
burst into flames. A huge moon is spinning, up above, and a mental patient
launches into an aggressive rap song.

Anyone who hasn't seen Powell and Pressburger's classic Second World War
movie might, briefly, wonder what on earth is happening in the NT's new
stage version of A Matter of Life and Death. Cinephiles unfamiliar with the
freewheeling imagination of Emma Rice - director of the exhilarating
physical troupe, Kneehigh - may be in free fall for a moment too. But after
a second it's clear. This is a bombing raid and Squadron Leader Peter
Carter's strafed plane is going into a nosedive. Tristan Sturrock's Peter
has feverishly fallen in love with Lyndsey Marshal's June, the radio
operator trying to save his life. He then bails out with no parachute.
Leaping from his cockpit - the top rung of an arcing ladder - he hangs from
two thin wires in space, slowly somersaulting, head over heels.

When he wakes up on the seashore, he may have tumbled into the afterlife, be
hallucinating or have miraculously survived. He joyfully finds June,
wheeling past on her bike, before his brain damage becomes apparent and he
has visions of having to face trial in the beyond, for giving death the
slip.

Rice's work has reached a new level of technical wizardry here in the
Olivier, but without losing her playful inventiveness. Blips and slack
patches do arise, including a tediously expanded role for Kneehigh's
founder-actor Mike Shepherd. Gisli Orn Gardarsson's quirky clowning becomes
slightly tiresome too, playing the spirit-catcher, Conductor 71 as a
flailing illusionist-contortionist. However, Marshal and Sturrock are
poignantly intense and ecstatically loving, undressing and falling into each
others arms as if they are flying, spun over the shoulders of the supporting
cast on to a bed that swings like a giant pendulum against an sudden
explosion of red flowers.

Rice and her team's vision is entrancing, with much of the original dialogue
interwoven with aerial gymnastics and filmic projections - which never
slavishly borrow from the movie. Composer Stu Barker's on-stage band makes
this an alternative musical as well, with sultry tangos and eerie
campanology.

penfold

It's worse than that....on the night me, Nicky and Richard were there the appeal was allowed...and then Carter dies in the recuperation room....on a toss of a coin. Which makes no sense whatsoever IMHO. At least I have the AMOLAD/Blimp double bill in Bristol on Monday to look forward to.....My emails down due to server work at the mo, Steve, in case I've been missed...

Bit of a Bay Window, what??