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On paper, it’s red-hot. Capitalise on the Jubilee / Will & Kate / Royal Baby mania with a show starring Helen Mirren as Elizabeth Regina (again) backed by the writer and director of The Queen and a neat concept: a series of era-hopping sequences giving us a backstage pass to the Queen’s weekly audience with the Prime Minister.
While the title may sound like a Jazzy Jeff album, In the House is one of those sophisticated French films that makes you wonder why more people don’t gargle their Rs and hang up Klee watercolours in their corridors.
On paper, this sounds a dream: a new big-screen adaptation of one of Dickens’ strongest, most beloved stories, featuring a cast of British heavyweights.
When Arthur Wing Pinero, the Victorian theatre world’s ultimate funny-man, wrote his very own ‘woman with a past’ problem-play, no-one could have predicted its immense success. Or, for that matter, its subsequent vanishing into obscurity.
The script is a dazzling theatrical mosaic that requires Simon Callow to play no less than 49 separate characters.
One can only assume that ITV1’s Titanic was scripted in-between sips of a G&T on the Downton Abbey set.