Atonement
Chichester Festival Theatre
until 20th June 2026
The decision to adapt this Booker Prize shortlisted novel into a play is a brave, some would say foolish one. It’s 25 years since Ian McEwan completed arguably his finest achievement which was subsequently adapted for the screen in 2007, a film that was widely praised as an emotionally devastating masterpiece.
McEwan’s painfully middle-class novels are rarely if ever (I’m happy to be contradicted) transformed into works for the theatre and his recurring themes of guilt, the unreliability of memory and the irreversible consequences of a single choice that translate so successfully to the medium of film simply get lost in this very disappointing production.
On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge.
By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl’s imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.
The novel is brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class. It is profoundly moving in its exploration of shame and forgiveness, of atonement and the difficulty of absolution. This world premiere at the Festival Theatre in Chichester quite simply isn’t which is surprising as well as frustrating because it has been adapted for the stage by Christopher Hampton who so successfully wrote the screenplay in 2007.
Very little blame can be laid at the feet of the cast who all do their best with a woeful script although there are a couple of dubious accents on show. There are solid performances from Isabella Dempster (Briony), Jasper Talbot (Robbie) and Miriam Petche (Cecilia) and a scene-stealing Tom Chapman manages to garner an extra star single-handedly for his equally excellent turns as both Paul Marshall and Corporal Tommy Nettle.
The direction is laboured and unimaginative – scene changes are laborious and reminiscent of Pickfords Removals, the set design is bland and the music (the film picked up it’s only Oscar for the equivalent) is uninspiring.
By the final scene, which brought me to tears when I watched Vanessa Redgrave deliver her dying confession and the twist denouement which genuinely shocked me 25 years ago, I really couldn’t of cared less about what had happened to the main protagonists.
⭐⭐
Reviewer: Patric Kearns
Photo: Manuel Harlen