The Remains of the Day review – Ishiguro's novel makes cerebral theatre

Royal & Derngate, Northampton
Barney Norris’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker winner about the perils of blind duty speaks to modern Britain

‘The play must be unlike the book or the film or it shouldn’t exist,” says Barney Norris about his adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s story of unspoken loves and unburied pasts. Norris lives up to his word: his adaptation is not the intimate confession of Ishiguro’s Booker prize-winner, centring on the inner world of the emotionally repressed butler, Stevens. Nor is it primarily about his almost-romance with the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, dramatised in the Oscar-nominated film.

What is drawn out here is a more panoramic story of collective guilt and shame in postwar Britain as Stevens looks back at his – and the nation’s – wrong turnings. Stevens is consumed by the question of what makes a “great butler” and this production interrogates the blind duty that lead him to stay in service to Lord Darlington, an aristocrat with fascist sympathies in the 1930s who calls for the appeasement of Hitler.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2VqTwex