Simon Friend Entertainment has announced that a brand-new stage adaptation of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is set to be a major new theatre production.
A Midwinter s Tale may not sound like a cheery title for a comedy, but reflect that when I saw the film the first time, at the Venice Film Festival, it was titled In the Bleak Midwinter. Nor is the subject matter promising: A poverty-stricken group of has-been and would-be British actors band together to put on a Christmas play in a cold, drafty old church. The play they choose is, somehow inevitably, Hamlet. And yet this is the kind of movie you can settle down with.
Populated mostly with unfamiliar faces and photographed in black and white, it s like one of those 1950s British comedies that assumed the audience was paying attention. It s about characters and dialogue.