JOSS AND DAVE’S PEN POWER
SINGER Joss Stone has teamed up with Dave Stewart to write the songs for a stage version of novelist Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling weepie The Time Traveler’s Wife.
Stone and Stewart have already composed several soulful numbers for the musical, adapted by Lauren Gunderson, which tells the story of Henry, a man with a genetic anomaly that causes him to flit back and forth in time, where he keeps bumping into the same girl: Clare.
A godawful film version, starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, focused on Henry’s story. However Stone told me, in an email sent from her home in New Jersey (where she’s nursing fiveweek-old daughter Violet), that ‘given that the title is The Time Traveller’s Wife, we wanted to tell the story from Clare’s point of view’.
‘Clare inspires me, because she is a strong character who has so much love in her heart that she is willing to give fully, if she feels respected and cared for,’ she continued. ‘Isn’t this how we all want to be?’ And she added that even though
Clare has to endure a lot, she ‘never wallows in self-pity’.
Stone recently wowed TV audiences with her amazing voice when she won The Masked Singer (as Sausage).
I’ve listened to her singing some of the powerful and romantic numbers for the new project, and they’re very good. But she won’t be starring in the show, which producer Colin Ingram said will open next year at a non-profit theatre, with Bill Buckhurst directing, before transferring to the West End. Ingram said he intends to cast a black actress to play the central Clare (though she will be played by different actresses at other ages).
In the film version, Bana’s Henry kept turning up naked when he journeyed back in time to see Clare. ‘He’s not going to time travel without his clothes!’ Ingram assured me. ‘You’ve got a Clare aged nine, and you can’t do a scene with a little girl and a naked man.’
However, there will be a moment when Henry’s in the shower — when Clare’s all grown up.
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NEWLY crowned Golden Globe winner Emma Corrin (left) will morph into Gina McKee (right) in the new film My Policeman, about a married couple caught up in a polysexual love triangle. This page broke the news last month that Corrin, honoured this week for her sizzling portrait of Diana in The Crown, will star with Harry Styles in the film adaptation of Bethan Roberts’s 2012 novel about the sexual mores of the 1950s and the criminalisation of homosexuality. Corrin will play Marion, with McKee (Bodyguard, Line Of Duty, Notting Hill) taking on the part 40 years later, when the story moves into the 1990s. The Amazon Studios production, directed by Michael Grandage, will feature Styles as Marion’s husband Tom Burgess, a police constable. Linus Roache (Homeland and The Vikings) will play the older Tom. Rupert Everett has been cast as Tom’s lover, Patrick Hazelwood. David Dawson (Ripper Street and The Last Kingdom) will take on the part of the younger Patrick. The movie will shoot from April 12 on locations in London and the SouthEast coast. The more intimate moments will be filmed at one of the big film studios.
WITH more news stories emerging almost every day about the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a new documentary about the whole disgraceful business, The Dissident (★★★★I), is nothing if not timely.
Khashoggi was a courageous columnist and commentator who deplored the human rights abuses presided over by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (folksily known as ‘MBS’) and paid for his outspoken candour with his life. In October 2018 he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to get documents he needed for his impending marriage, but never came out alive.
Bryan Fogel’s film establishes that Khashoggi was almost certainly killed on the direct orders of MBS, and his
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corpse burnt. In one macabre detail, we learn that the consulate ordered a huge consignment of meat on the same day, which was probably cooked to mask the stench of burning human flesh.
Fogel is a hugely accomplished documentary-maker whose 2017 film Icarus, about doping in the world of sport, won an Oscar. The Dissident is researched and made with the same rigour, and although a throbbing percussive score is overdone, it does add a kind of thriller vibe to a film that should be seen by as wide an audience as possible.
The same cannot be said of Wander Darkly (★★III). I’m a fan of both
Sienna Miller and Diego Luna, who play a couple in an edgy relationship whose lives are torn apart in a fatal road accident. They are both reliably excellent, but Tara Miele’s film is a confusing hybrid of psychological thriller, creepy ghost story and sentimental romance. Miller’s character lurches through much of it certain that she is dead, and is looking at earthly events from an unhappy afterlife. Long before the end, I’d begun to feel the same way myself.
Raya And The Last Dragon (★★III) is a Disney animation that feels as if it might have been pieced together from the stuff they cut out of Mulan. I can’t claim to have seen too many films about a girl and her cute woodlouse companion trying to bring dragons back to life, but in all other respects it’s standard Disney fare. n The Dissident premieres tomorrow at the online glasgow Film Festival, and is on general release next month. Wander Darkly is available on streaming platforms, and Raya And The Last Dragon is on Disney+