Poor Marc Warren: stuffed with boiled eggs yet still no match for Paul Newman. The critics deal a blow to the West End show
Pity the producers of the West End's Cool Hand Luke. The trouble isn't that their show, about a defiant prisoner on a Florida chain-gang, sounds very terrible. Its star Marc Warren (you might remember him from Hustle) isn't truly dreadful either. It's that – no matter how noisily they proclaim the 1965 novel as their source material – this story has been acted out before, by Paul Newman, very famously, on film. And movies have an awkward habit of hanging around to be compared with.
"Having watched the screen version a few days ago, I can't say that the play that opened last night at the Aldwych seems much different to me," says Charles Spencer, innocently, before going in for the killer blow. "Apart from being inferior in almost every respect.
Pity the producers of the West End's Cool Hand Luke. The trouble isn't that their show, about a defiant prisoner on a Florida chain-gang, sounds very terrible. Its star Marc Warren (you might remember him from Hustle) isn't truly dreadful either. It's that – no matter how noisily they proclaim the 1965 novel as their source material – this story has been acted out before, by Paul Newman, very famously, on film. And movies have an awkward habit of hanging around to be compared with.
"Having watched the screen version a few days ago, I can't say that the play that opened last night at the Aldwych seems much different to me," says Charles Spencer, innocently, before going in for the killer blow. "Apart from being inferior in almost every respect.
- 10/7/2011
- by Leo Benedictus
- The Guardian - Film News
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