[category]
[title]
A month after the London riots, this stage version of Anthony Burgess’s satire about a feral underclass engaged in meaningless (ultra) violence could have been the sort of zeitgeist-grabbing spectacle not seen at TRSE since Joan Littlewood’s day.
Unfortunately, in his new stage adaptation, New Yorker Ed DuRanté fulfils the cliché of the American who ruins a great British work by totally misunderstanding it. Rather than the sociopath of book and film, here antihero Alex (Ashley Hunter) comes dangerously close to being a mixed-up kid with a heart of gold.
He conspicuously fails to rape anyone; and the worst act of violence we see him commit is the murder of an insane serial killer who, y’know, probably deserved it. Presumably DuRanté’s intent was to tone down Burgess’s vision so that it might serve as a recognisable tale of life on the modern street. The effect is simply to sentimentalise and dumb down.
The jazzy, hip hop-inflected musical numbers are tolerable (and a neat way of slipping in bits of the ‘Nadsat’ argot spoken in the book) and the cast performs with conviction, but DuRanté’s text is pretty much inexcusable, a trite bastardisation of a classic.