Book, play or film? (From Lancashire Telegraph)

Book, play or film?

3:20pm Tuesday 16th June 2009

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I had a little time for myself a few days back. So I watched two DVDs. Brilliant, aren’t they?

One was The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, a child-oriented depiction of the Holocaust and concentration camps.

The other was Cabaret, the early 70s film with Lisa Minelli and Michael York, similarly about Berlin in the 1930s.

Striped Pyjamas is a film from a book, Dr Google tells me, written in 2006 by Irish author John Boyne. I’ve not read the book yet – it’s on 'that' pile!

In about 1972, I was taken by my mates, forced to go and see the film Cabaret.

I hated musicals. I could never understand how Rex Harrison or Julie Andrews could suddenly burst into song, knowing the words and the tune!

Cabaret transfixed me. I must have seen it dozens or more times!

It’s from a thin-ish book by Christopher Isherwood, loosely known as the Berlin Stories drawn from his 1929-33 visits to Germany as Germany drifted and dragged themselves down into Nazism.

A book about a real life cabaret performance, made into a play then a film.

I’ve seen it as a play with the likes of Helen Shapiro and others as Sally Bowles.

But what’s best? Book, play or film?

Films often get me to read the book but sometimes I don’t get round to it.

What book, play, film have you liked most and in which format? I nearly said 'genre' then!

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