Yet against this threat of a completely deja-vu culture can be set the fact that the first television of next year feels very fresh and new - two single dramas by Stephen Poliakoff, the sci-fi crime series Life on Mars - and that the theatrical tendency of last year seems to be completely reversed: with new plays due from premier playwrights including Tom Stoppard, Mark Ravenhill, Christopher Hampton, David Harrower and Terry Johnson.
#Mr deja vu translation code
As the word gets round that retro is go-go, opportunistic producers will be working on Strictly Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club for TV, or translations of Schiller juvenilia for stage.Īnd, alarmingly, Hollywood already has slated for 2006: Mission Impossible 3, Basic Instinct 2, Spider-Man 3 and X-Men 3, while the year's pre-ordained blockbuster - The Da Vinci Code - is theoretically new but feels that it has been around for years. The only serious risk of this visual revisionism is the tendency to copy popular successes. Many of these examples prove that flashbacks can be forward-looking. Strictly Come Dancing is also an intelligent merger between the modern and traditional strains of TV. These were not lazy restagings but exuberant rediscoveries, including an improbable pair of Schiller hits (Don Carlos and Mary Stuart), little-known Ibsens (Pillars of the Community) and John Osbornes (Epitaph for George Dillon), and a neglected Simon Gray (Otherwise Engaged.) All of these productions imbued the word "revival" with an almost medical meaning.Įqually, in television, what Russell T Davies did in bringing back Doctor Who went beyond the Hippocratic oath to Lazarus: here was a sci-fi show which had become a joke to all except aficionados, turned into a witty, clever and political series. Looking at these pictures of familiarity across television, film and theatre, it's possible to argue that imagination has come to a standstill and that, from now on, writing is rewriting and the job of director becomes truly deserving of the French word répétiteurĬertainly this pessimism is hard to avoid in cinema, where it's clear that a combination of large budgets and fierce commercial competition have encouraged a dependence on familiar brands: titles which audiences will recognise either because there was a previous film in the series or a classic version in the early days of Hollywood.īut a more optimistic view would be that good artists have a sense of the history of their medium and that these old stories are often retold with originality: Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, though a continuation of a franchise, saw the series through new eyes, while Spielberg's War of the Worlds was a conscious post-9/11 take on alien invasion rather than a case of a film-maker borrowing inspiration from the video-shop.Ī similar generosity is possible towards the number of repeats in theatre this year. At the global box office, the flag of originality was carried by Mr & Mrs Smith, Hitch and Madagascar, and might have been fighting for one available place if the remade King Kong and Narnia (already filmed several times for TV) had not been released so late in the year. In Screen International's December list of the biggest international hits in this period, seven of the top 10 were either remakes (War of the Worlds, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) or sequels (Harry Potter, Star Wars, Batman Begins, Meet the Fockers) or, in the most spectacular case, a sequel to a remake: Ocean's 12. This museum-feel was also true of London theatre where, by coincidence, Mrs Rosenthal (Maureen Lipman) has the distinction of starring in the only play currently in the West End written since the 1980s: Peter Quilter's Glorious! Every other production is a revival, a translation or, in the case of the "new" musicals (Billy Elliot, Mary Poppins) a staged movie. Even the most intriguing piece of the week - the final work from the great small-screen dramatist Jack Rosenthal - was a reworking of a script first filmed in 1976: Ready When You Are, Mr McGill. Elsewhere, the schedules were a dead comics' society: featuring obituary compilations of Ronnie Barker (with the living Corbett) and Dave Allen.
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