I READ in the programme for the excellent production of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe at London’s Bridge Theatre that C. S. Lewis’s novel has been translated into almost 50 languages and sold more than 100 million copies. The figures are staggering, especially when you consider that Lewis, when he wrote the book in 1950, was a bachelor Oxford don. How did he create a seemingly timeless story with a global popularity?
Watching Sally Cookson’s brilliantly inventive version, first seen at Leeds Playhouse in 2017,it struck me that Lewis’s book has the endless adaptability of myth. It can be seen as a Christian parable, an endorsement of monarchy, a fable about seasonal change. It may even be all those things simultaneously, but in this dramatisation, with Adam Peck credited as ‘writer in the room’, it’s also a study of wartime evacuation with the four Pevensie children pitched into a world that’s both perilous and exciting. The company has seized on this idea by issuing the audience with green identity labels, having an onstage band play wartime standards and showing Operation Pied Piper, the code name for the initial evacuation in 1939, in full flow. Even when the Pevensie four go through a wardrobe to enter the kingdom of Narnia, we are reminded that the Second World War is never far away.
Denne historien er fra December 04, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra December 04, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
