Lanny, Bristol Old Vic – Review Round-Up

Introduction Adapting Max Porter’s Lanny was always going to be a bit like trying to bottle fog. The novel slips through your fingers the moment you attempt to pin it down; less interested in narrative than atmosphere, less concerned with character than voice, it drifts between gossip, folklore, memory and myth until the village itself begins to feel alive. The challenge facing adaptor Bea Roberts and director Nancy Medina was never simply how to tell the story, but how to recreate the sensation of being inside Porter’s world. Reading across the critical response, there is notable agreement on almost every constituent part of the production. The cast are widely admired, the design work frequently praised and the atmosphere consistently celebrated. Where critics diverge is on a larger, more elusive question: whether the production ever manages to summon the spirit of the novel itself. As Neil Norman writes in The Stage, Porter’s prose “doesn’t translate easily to the stage”. Claire…