Bernard Cuffling in a publicity still for The Woman in Black
(Photo by Bill Allman)
The Woman in Black is a good ol’ yarn and I am for that.
On one level, Stephen Mallatratt’s script, which he adapted from Dame Susan Hill’s novel, is a straight-up ghost story — and it scared the bejeezus out of me a couple of times. (Fellow critic Jo Ledingham, who was sitting beside me, said she felt my chair lurch.) [Read more…]
Bernard Cuffling slips effortlessly into the hear of George Bowling in George Orwell’s Coming Up For Air.
A huge part of the reward in Coming Up For Air is the depth that it finds in an ordinary life.
Both George Orwell’s 1938 novel and Leslie Mildiner’s stage adaptation begin with the immortal line: “The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.” That’s George Bowling speaking. Fat and middle-aged, he lives in the suburbs with his fretful, narrow-shouldered wife Hilda and their two demanding children. Feeling trapped by domesticity and by his work in the insurance business, George describes his neighbourhood on Ellesmere Road as “a line of semi-detached torture chambers.” [Read more…]
