25 Aug 2007
I feel for Dominic Leyton this weekend. His play COLLISION, which we premiered to great success three years ago and revived for a British Council visit to Malta, has been made into a film by Gary Love, titled Sugarhouse. The critics have been merciless.
I couldn’t face seeing the film so can only rely on watching the trailer and reading the reviews, but it seems Love has turned this excellent play about a young black, drug-addicted man and his confrontation with a middle-class failure, into a gangster movie. Which seems odd given that Leyton wrote a powerful, exciting and deeply moving potrayal of two men on the brink of despair, taking the audience into their lives with a painful but deliciously funny journey into darkness. The violence represented by the character Hoodwink is simply there to highlight the pit into which the character ‘D’ has fallen. Nathan Constance, who premiered the role of D in our production, gave an extraordinary performance which Time Out reckoned deserved an Oscar.
Dominic Leyton is a very talented writer and I can’t wait for the opportunity to arise to produce one of his next plays.