Play for Today: Red Shift

I finally got round to seeing the Play for Today adaptation of Alan Garner's novel Red Shift last night, adapted by Garner himself, and directed by John Mackenzie. Pointedly describing itself as 'A Film by...' the writer and director, the production is nonetheless highly televisual in a 1970s sense, made up of tight screen-friendly portrait shots and (albeit on location) confined spaces which identify the psychological and psychical pressure its protagonists endure with the television itself. These make the sudden vistas of the rugged Cheshire/Staffordshire borderlands more surprising and more provocative, the uncertainties of time, place, self and other folded into a near-forgotten marcher land. I hope to write more about the play elsewhere, but in the meantime I have begun to re-read the novel.