The Ladykillers, 20/11/2012

Original screenplay by William Rose
Adaptation by Graham Lineham
Directed by Sean Foley



We're accustomed to thinking that transfers from stage to screen are often tricky things to manage.  However, it's just as difficult in reverse, and a lot rarer.  This staged version of the classic, 1955 Ealing comedy The Ladykillers was created last year and I daresay it seemed like a good idea at the time.  Obviously it was successful enough to generate a UK tour, and the show arrived in Glasgow this week, but I'm afraid it's only a very pale shadow of the original.

I should make the effort to take in more live theatre; I think I may have forgotten what actual performance, and particularly comedy, could sound like.  My primary impression of tonight was that everyone was, to put it bluntly, chewing the scenery and mugging their texts with over-emphatic delivery.  A stage adaptation was never going to be a reproduction of a filmed original; it's neither practical nor effective to attempt such a thing, and I was expecting some major adaptations.  What I wasn't expecting was the whole thing to be played as broad nudge-nudge-wink-wink farce, because that, however extravagant the situations of William Rose's original screenplay might have become (and they were pretty stretched, looked at objectively), was never the point nor the strength of the original.

There were two major factors missing here.  The first was the psychological portraits of the five gangsters.  At no point in the film do you ever lose the impression that, all ridiculous incidents aside, these men are very dangerous, whereas here they were all buffoons.  Louis, for example, is meant to be a psychopath from the get-go, barely held on the leash by the Professor, whereas the Professor himself gradually slides into something close to madness as his plans are countered one after another by the implacable nature of his apparently inoffensive landlady.  None of this came through in Lineham's adaptation.

The second problem was Michelle Dotrice's Mrs. Wilberforce.  The whole point of Mrs. Wilberforce is that she is adorable.  She is a elderly woman with a wasted intelligence that leads her to be meddlesome, but a heart of gold with an unshakeable moral compass.  It's a fine line to tread, but a very important one, and Dotrice came across as merely an annoying old biddy, slightly funny, but not compelling.

The staging, confining most of the action to the inside of Mrs. Wilberforce's home, was quite ingenious, notably the skewed sets to indicate the subsidence thanks to wartime bombing and the obtrusive presence of a railway line, and the evocation of the heist, with its little toy vehicles scuttling around, was rather funny.  However, as a whole, this was only a mildly entertaining evening, instead of a successful adaptation of one of the great black comedies of the last century.

[Next: 24th November]