"How do you feel?" "Squidgy." "You get used to it." Towards the end of 2022
I wrote about a few PINOCCHIO adaptations I... hadn't got on with, let's say, and about Gemma Brockis' attempts to explain to me what Collodi's book had originally been about. Yesterday, the two of us managed to catch the very last show of The Globe's Christmas adaptation (a packed Sunday matinée, featuring Lucy McCormick beaming through grief as a blue fairy) and, readers, it was beautiful. It was perfect.
It had heart, and sense, and fun, and painted sets and giant puppets, all perfectly coordinating with the preexisting ersatz marble pillars on the Globe's thrust, and it kept surprisingly close to its episodic source material, with a lucid sympathy for its antagonists (theatre is work, and money does matter) but also an understanding that, at some point, we were owed some real nightmares.
It also did a great job on that winter's afternoon,of drilling home just how great a sacrifice Gepetto makes exchanging his only coat for schoolbooks. I felt every hug.
It was no less cheering to discover afterwards that the extraordinary creative team behind all this was also responsible for the much-loved COWBOIS at the Royal Court, a show whose every choice I'd found baffling, sad, and timid. It was, in fact, healing to discover this. Lively and freeing.
Where I took the stills from.
And talking of the murder of indigenous Americans: among the many Pinocchio adaptations I saw in 2022 was THIS beautiful restoration of a silent film from 1911 directed by Giulio Antamoro that included amongst its narrative tweaks a sequence about half an hour in, in which Pinocchio is rescued from the whale by "Indiani" who make him their chief but also attempt to roast Gepetto on a spit, prompting the puppet to sneak out of his teepee and seek the help of a nearby troop of pith-helmeted machine-gunners. This creative addition stopped me sharing it originally, but I'd always meant to cut a genocide-free edit so that the rest could be more easily enjoyed, and now I finally have, and here it is...
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