press
Christopher Hampton on adapting his friend J.G. Farrell’s novel The Singapore Grip for ITV:
Elizabeth Tan: "It's rare to find a three-dimensional East Asian character in period dramas"
Elizabeth Tan: "It's rare to find a three-dimensional East Asian character in period dramas"
‘I never imagined I would do it’
Four decades after J.G. Farrell's death, the author's final novel has been made into a drama starring David Morrissey, Charles Dance, Luke Treadaway and Elizabeth Tan.
J.G. Farrell’s The Singapore Grip was published in 1978, just a year before the Booker Prize-winning novelist’s tragic death in a fishing accident at the age of 44. And now that final novel has been adapted for ITV by his “admirer and friend” Christopher Hampton – who says he could “never” have imagined he would get the chance to bring it to the small screen.
read the full story here:
https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2020-09-03/the-singapore-grip-adapting-writer-interview/
Elizabeth Tan: "It's rare to find a three-dimensional East Asian character in period dramas"
Elizabeth Tan: "It's rare to find a three-dimensional East Asian character in period dramas"
Elizabeth Tan: "It's rare to find a three-dimensional East Asian character in period dramas"
‘Timely’ has become one of this year’s most reached-for adjectives, surely second only to ‘unprecedented.’ It’s been applied with abandon to everything from prestige TV to personal essays and zeitgeisty fiction as we’ve desperately clung on to anything that might help us make sense of the never-ending hellscape of 2020.
Using such a word to describe a Sunday night period drama might seem like a contradiction in terms. And yet watching The Singapore Grip, ITV’s new adaptation of J.G. Farrell’s sprawling World War II novel, it’s hard to ignore some very uncomfortable parallels. A bunch of plummy-vowelled public school types pontificating over Great Britain’s place in the world, wilfully ignoring an unfolding catastrophe? Sounds familiar.
“I hope that audiences see that this is very relevant for today even though it’s this historical piece,” its star Elizabeth Tan agrees.
read the full story here:
https://www.standard.co.uk/stayingin/tvfilm/elizabeth-tan-singapore-grip-itv-a4542626.html
David Morrissey: "Britain needs to 'be honest' about 'ourselves and our history'"
Elizabeth Tan: "It's rare to find a three-dimensional East Asian character in period dramas"
The Singapore Grip review: ITV’s sumptuous drama is a gentle satire on British colonialism
"We pick and choose the events we want to highlight."
The Walking Dead's David Morrissey leads the cast of new ITV series The Singapore Grip, a political drama about the Japanese invasion of Singapore in World War II.
Morrissey stars as cruel rubber merchant Walter Blackett – who is co-head of British Singapore's most powerful company alongside his business partner Webb (Charles Dance). Speaking about the series and his character, Morrissey said that Britain needs to "be honest" about "ourselves and our history",
"These people, for me, are the embodiment of entitlement. They are racist, they are a bit monstrous, they're sexist," he told Digital Spy exclusively.
"What happens to them is a part of our history, a part of our British colonial history that we don't know that much about. It's a part of history that I didn't know about because we very conveniently – when it comes to empire and our own history – pick and choose the events we want to highlight.
read the full story here: https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/a33957020/singapore-grip-david-morrissey-britain-history/
The Singapore Grip review: ITV’s sumptuous drama is a gentle satire on British colonialism
Luke Treadaway on British Empire drama: "We owe it to the future not to sugar-coat history"
The Singapore Grip review: ITV’s sumptuous drama is a gentle satire on British colonialism
The Singapore Grip, ITV’s sumptuous new six-part ITV drama is based on JG Farrell’s (extremely long) 1978 novel, and was adapted by the Oscar-winning screenwriter Christopher Hampton, who counts himself as a “friend and admirer” of the late author. Farrell unexpectedly died aged 44 shortly after this book was published, leaving behind a body of work consisting of three hefty novels – the ‘Empire Trilogy’ – about British colonial rule in Ireland, India, and finally Singapore, and Hampton has labelled it “the most significant chunk of writing about colonialism in fiction that exists.”
That’s not to say it’s all so serious.
read the full story here:
https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2020-09-03/the-singapore-grip-itv-review/
Luke Treadaway on British Empire drama: "We owe it to the future not to sugar-coat history"
Luke Treadaway on British Empire drama: "We owe it to the future not to sugar-coat history"
Luke Treadaway on British Empire drama: "We owe it to the future not to sugar-coat history"
This adaptation of JG Farrell's 1978 darkly satirical novel is set in colonial Singapore, beginning just before the Japanese invasion.
When The Singapore Grip‘s “naïve and innocent moralistic” young protagonist Matthew Webb (Luke Treadaway) arrives in colonial Singapore, he is disgusted by what he finds: his father’s friends and business partners living a life of excess, all while sneering at the locals and exploiting their labour and resources. Meanwhile, the threat of Japanese invasion looms – but the leading lights of the British Empire are too busy partying (or are too convinced of their own military superiority) to pay attention.
read the full story here:
https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2020-09-03/the-singapore-grip-luke-treadaway-empire/