Mike McCahill 

The Sea review – glum psychodrama adapted from Booker winner

John Banville reduces his Booker prizewinner to jumbled pound-shop Proustisms in this choppy adaptation, writes Mike McCahill
  
  


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More proof that writers should be kept from adapting their own work comes with Stephen Brown's glumly listing psychodrama, in which John Banville reduces his Booker prizewinner to jumbled pound-shop Proustisms. Grieving scribe Ciaran Hinds's return to the coastal getaway of his youth strands us amid oddly artificial, advert-coloured flashbacks; there, we're left waiting for some formative trauma to reveal itself, while rent-a-rake Rufus Sewell struggles to pull off an Adge Cutler-like hat-and-neckerchief combo. Hinds is a strong, wounded presence, but the laboured structure cuts insistently around him to get at a psychology mostly scrambled in translation. This Sea's just too choppy.

 

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