literature
michael.pennington
The Russians have always been good at writers' houses. The Soviets especially. When I first saw Tolstoy's house his blue smock was hanging behind the door, a manuscript was on his desk but the chair pushed back as if he'd nipped out for a moment and would be back. It was a frankly theatrical effect and the better for it. Like Tolstoy’s, Chekhov's two houses - one in Melikhovo near Moscow and the other in Yalta in the south - were well funded and maintained and imaginatively presented in those days. Only the last is true now.When I went to Melikhovo in 1997 it was in the hands of dedicated Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’ll always be Austen on the telly. As the Bard is to the boards, so is Saint Jane to the box. The six novels were published (though not all written) in a seven-year period in the 1810s. In a rather shorter tranche of the 1990s they were all adapted for the (mostly small) screen. They’ve now just been done again, on the whole rather less well than the first time round.And such is the public’s greed for stories from Austen’s world of box-hedged romantic decorum that these days even the authoress gets pressganged into starring as herself. Her early life was covered in Becoming Jane, her Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Adrian Lyne met controversy in the cinema with it head on, while Vladimir Nabokov's novel prompted one of the resounding Broadway flops of Edward Albee's stage career. (Trust me: I am among the few who caught its 1981 New York run.) So here is Lolita once more, this time filleted and distilled into a one-person show suspended somewhere between a stage reading and an actual play. Call it what you will, the result is mesmerising.By letting Nabokov's own sly, ever-shifting narrative voice do the talking, Richard Nelson's adaptation cuts to the quick in a way that the various other Lolitas simply Read more ...