The Remains of the Day
Northampton Royal, then touring

Betrayal
Harold Pinter Theatre, London

Adaptations of famous novels that have also become hit films are an increasingly popular product for theatres, not least because the audience’s foreknowledge of the story makes publicity easier. The risk, though, is that narrative methods differ between media.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel, The Remains of the Day, is narrated by Stevens, an elderly country house butler, whose visit to a former colleague, housekeeper Miss Kenton, slowly exposes the protagonist’s emotional isolation and shame at a moral decision he made in 1930s Britain. The 1993 Merchant Ivory film used voice-over and camera point of view to keep the internal focus mainly on Stevens.

Theatre, however, is a wide-shot screen, with viewers choosing where and at whom they look in the rectangle of action. So the brilliance of The Remains of the Day that Christopher Haydon has staged from a script by Barney Norris is how completely it rethinks the material dramatically.