Luchino Visconti got there first. Ossessione, his unauthorized version of James M. Cain‘s The Postman Always Rings Twice, hit the screens in 1943, and Italian neorealism was born. Hollywood’s noir take, starring Lana Turner and John Garfield, appeared three years later. Postman was remade in the 1980s with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson, and Stephen Paulus and Colin Graham turned it into an opera in 1982. This year, avant–garde director Ivo van Hove returned to Cain via Visconti, and brought OBSESSION to the London stage.
Jude Law is Gino, a drifter who arrives at a roadside diner/garage and finds himself in a situation of immediate, mutual attraction with the proprietor’s young wife Hanna (Halina Reijn). Dissatisfied with her lot as kitchen slave and wife of a control freak, Hanna and her lover plot to murder her husband (Gijs Scholten Van Aschat).
L.A. Theatre Works (LATW), the premiere Los Angeles screening venue for National Theatre Live, brings this Barbican Centre/Toneelgroep Amsterdam co-production to the James Bridges Theater at UCLA for an encore on Sunday afternoon, June 4.
OBSESSION screening, Sunday, June 4, at 4 pm.
JAMES BRIDGES THEATER/MELNITZ HALL, 235 Charles E Young Drive North, UCLA.
latw.org
web.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/969897
ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/venues/2021214338-james-bridges-theater-u-c-l-a
(Top) Clara Calamai and Massimo Girotti in Ossessione, directed by Luchino Visconti.
