The Guardian

Atonement review – guilt and love battle for an unhappy ending

Chichester Festival theatre This stage version of Ian McEwan’s devastating class novel shows inspiring touches and the cast play adeptly, yet the tale’s emotional sweep feels underpowered Ian McEwan’s novel begins with a play. It is written by 13-year-old Briony Tallis, who has a gift for telling stories. It is perhaps appropriate that Briony’s tale – the one she is constructing through the course of McEwan’s novel – has been adapted for the stage itself now, although it is a hard act to follow the magnificence of the book and also Joe Wright’s celebrated film starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy . The plot reflects on the healing power of storytelling but also its potential to cause damage and destroy. It opens in 1935 in an aristocratic English country home, when one evening, after seeing the housekeeper’s son, Robbie (Jasper Talbot), having sex with her sister, Cecilia (Miriam Petche), she wrongly accuses him of raping her 15-year-old cousin Lola (Yanexi Enriquez). Briony lives with the guilt of that lie long after Robbie has been sent to prison and then the frontline of the second world war. Continue reading...