Night Manager

The sharpest review of the TV adaptation of The Night Manager has been supplied in The Guardian by  John Le Carre himself. He makes vividly clear what has been done to his 1993 novel, and how, and why, it has needed to be made palatable for an audience in 2016.

Having read the book for the first time only a couple of months ago, and without knowing that it was about to be screened, I wondered how on earth I had missed it 23 years ago.  Seeing the first episode of the TV version on Sunday, I thought at first that the book had been fine as it was, and saw no reason for the multiplicity of changes that had been inflicted upon it by the BBC. Was the updating really necessary and did the settings need to be so ruthlessly altered?

But a book is a book, and an adaptation has nothing to gain from being a meticulous copy. To film it creatively is almost bound to change it into something else.    So Zurich, where the hotel’s night manager originally operated in the book, inevitably becomes Cairo in the film. This, as it happens,  helps to tighten the action in a quite serviceable way and we do not reach Switzerland until later, when it appears, more scenically, in the form of Zermatt in the glare of the Matterhorn, and where the suave villain, described by Le Carre as “the worst man in the world,” arrives by private helicopter instead of by taxi - though with the same entourage of people as in the book.

Meanwhile the British secret agent, a man in the original, who wants to infiltrate the courageous night manager into the entourage and thereby capture the villain, is transformed not uninterestingly into a woman - and a visibly pregnant one at that. Behind all these changes the bones of the story are, so far, faintly discernible. But would I be aware of this without knowing about it beforehand? Perhaps but perhaps not.

Does it matter? It would certainly matter to me if I myself had written the book, one of Le Carre’s most gripping in a surprisingly James Bondish sort of way, with the action shifting around the world.

Yet Le Carre’s famous touchiness as a man and as an author does not seem to have been hugely disturbed by this. He accepts what has been done. Far from dismissing the alterations as gratuitous, he finds them largely understandable, and maybe he is right.

Far from being a grossly modernistic piece of tampering, the story - at least in its first episode - actually seems to be working. Though Le Carre was not consulted, the results have not offended him. Indeed, as far as I can tell, he sees things in the TV version that he never saw in the original.

Certainly my own initial irritation is already waning. I am looking forward to episode two, next Sunday, even although I know that it omits what in the book was some wonderful material. But the film, or so it seems, has its own merits. It is undoubtedly well acted and discerningly shot. Only the critics, it seems to me, have failed to recognise its qualities and have been too eager to find fault with it.

The Night Manager is a good book but, by the look of things, it is also a good film, with Tom Hiddleston -so memorable in Archipelago and Unrelated a few years ago  - as its very definite star. And the leisurely format, like  that of the Alec Guinness version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, will surely suit it.
23 February 2006  

Where are they now?

How many of Scottish Opera’s past successes still exist?  Without looking back to early days, I am impatient to know if Berg’s Lulu and Wozzeck - good productions of the two finest operas since Debussy’s Pelleas - survive in the company’s capacious storage premises, recently pictured in Brio, the Scottish Opera magazine.    And what of Pelleas itself?

Is Britten’s Death in Venice, a brilliant production shared with the Geneva Opera, still revivable,  even if the sets rest in Switzerland?   And what of the company’s great enduring Britten cycle itself? What of Luc Bondy’s Macbeth, seen in Vienna and Bordeaux after its Edinburgh debut? Bomdy has died but has his production been preserved?

What remains of David Pountney’s substantial Janacek cycle shared with Wales, and of his vivid Street Scene?   It would be interesting to know these things, which are, after all, things that should matter more to the company than some of its less desirable revivals.

No doubt it is too much to hope that we may see the most recent of the Ring cycles anytime soon,  though every national company should have a serviceable Ring - and this one is more than that - in its repertoire, not to mention a Rosenkavalier  as good as McVicar’s, along with his dark, strong Idomeneo.

Meanwhile, in an interview in the February issue of Opera Magazine, the company’s new music director seems to be envisaging a cycle of the works of the insignificant Jonathan Dove - could this be another looming Scottish Opera misadventure?
17 February 2016

War Works

Frank Bridge, famed as Benjamin Britten’s teacher, remains less famous as a composer.  Yet his Violin Sonata, composed in the aftermath of the Great War, is one of the British masterpieces of its time, a work of passion and high originality. The opportunity to hear it at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh’s final New Town Concert of the season on February 29, will be something to seize.

Like Britten in Aldeburgh, Bridge was a product of the English coast. Born in Brighton, he died in Eastbourne, and his Violin Sonata could be said to stare across the English Channel towards Pourville, where Debussy in 1917 composed one of his last works, likewise a violin sonata, when the war was at its destructive height and the battles of Verdun and the Somme formed the background that prompted Debussy to call himself Musicien Francais.

Bridge, a  pacifist thrown into dark depression by the war, was a deep admirer of Debussy, and the linking of these two works in Jack Liebeck’s  recital with Katya  Apekisheva  as pianist will give his programme a special sense of purpose.

Framed by the bleak beauty of Brahms’s “Rain” sonata and and the sudden final vivacity of a sonata by the American composer John Corigliano, these pieces will give the Edinburgh audience something to think about. Though Bridge’s day has yet to dawn, it is getting closer.

His devotion to the music of Alban Berg - an unwilling soldier in the Great War who was later to be shunned by the Nazis - prompted him to draw Britten’s attention to that inspired Viennese at a time when few British composers had learned to love him. But Bridge did so, and it set him startlingly at odds with the English pastoral tastes of the period, helping  Britten to make Peter Grimes - as well as the subsequent Billy Budd, Owen Wingrave, and Gustav von Aschenbach  - the great operatic outsiders who could stand beside Berg’s Wozzeck.
15 February 2016

This week's wine: Chilean Chardonnay

Chilean chardonnays and sauvignons do not figure frequently on this blog because so many of them are routine and, though perfectly welcome, seldom worth championing.

Every so often, however, something turns up to remind you that Chilean wines can be better than that, and one of Waitrose’s latest is certainly worth a try.

To claim that this 2015 Montgras Reserva chardonnay at £8.99 is like a white burgundy would be unfair to white burgundy as well as to this Chilean bottle. It is not a burgundy but it is definitely a chardonnay, better than many you will find on our supermarket shelves, with enough personality and zest to make it well worth drinking.

Though it does not require a meal to accompany it, it would go well with seafood and dishes with a certain amount of spice. Waitrose calls it fruity, with exuberant notes of pineapple, apricot, and peach melba - words that are  used of many wines but seem thoroughly apt in this case, even if melba is a word too many.

Its taste is bold and bright but, though high in alcohol, it stops short of of seeming overwhelming.  It’s a chardonnay I opened this week while cooking and continued pouring it during our Chinese New Year meal that followed.

But if £8.99 is more than you want to spend on a South American white, Waitrose also sell a Touraine Sauvignon for £6.99, which is no mere bargain basement tipple. The 2014 vintage is as fresh as they come.  It is a good example of a an unpretentious household wine,with a label depicting a lawnmower as proof that it comes from the garden of France.  A few bottles would be worth keeping  at the ready in your chiller.
12 February 2016

Adieu, Terry

I was once invited by Terry Wogan, who died yesterday, to lunch with him in an Edinburgh restaurant about which, in my secondary role as The Scotsman’s food and wine critic,  I had written a hostile review.

As the local critic - the only one at that time - I frequently received invitations of this sort from celebrated commentators who operated elsewhere but who were passing through and wanted to exchange views about the Edinburgh scene.  The title of my fortnightly column - “Gut Reaction” - had presumably caught Terry’s attention, and so perhaps had my name, because, though I did not know it at the time, he was a deep admirer of the great German actor, Conrad Veidt, after whom I was named and whose film, The Spy in Black, had been set by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in the north of Scotland.

Our lunchtime conversation, nearly forty years ago,  ranged beyond eating and drinking into the realms of Irish writing - we liked the same novelists - and music. Though period pop music - a taste for which was something else we shared -  he did not stop at that. Like Gershwin before him, he could speak of the classics and his conversation was as delightfully droll as those who knew him said.

But because, when we met, boil-in-the-bag cooking had become a trend, the topic inevitably came up. Since our talk was off the record, I did not make notes, but we agreed that it was not always as bad as it was made out to be (by me among others). What mattered was what went into the bag  and whose hand was holding it.

He knew, I thought, what he was talking about. As a result, he has gone down in my store of memories alongside David Wolff of Decanter Magazine and Johnnie Apple of the New York Times, whose visits to Edinburgh I grew to cherish.
1 February 2016