Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility

by
Deborah Ayorinde as Elinor

Ragebait Sense and Sensibility from the Hallmark Channel, which seems perverse on the face of it. The home of white-sliced drama brings us a Jane Austen adaptation peopled with black faces. Bonnets and breeches are as per, stately piles visited, manners and refinement much in evidence. Before the purists take up their burning torches, this version does have something. Chiefly its two stars, Deborah Ayorinde and Bethany Antonia, as the sisters Austen teases mightily with suitors appropriate and inappropriate, blabbermouth cousins, silly-arse older men and busybody older women. Elinor the practical, Marianne the impetuous, which is how “sense and sensibility” translates in the 21st century, with a bit of poetic licence. Among the … Read more

Persuasion

by
Ciarán Hinds and Amanda Root in Persuasion

Before popping up seemingly out of nowhere when he directed Notting Hill, Roger Michell had had a successful career as a theatre director, at the groundbreaking Royal Court Theatre in London with Samuel Beckett and John Osborne (where he also met Danny Boyle), before moving on to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and then switching to directing for TV. Persuasion was his second gig for the BBC, and considering that stories of difficult love (Notting Hill, The Mother, Venus) would be his future, and the theatre was his past, it is the Venn diagram overlap of the two spheres. His cast for Persuasion is theatrical through and through, Amanda Root (an RSC stalwart) … Read more