Don’t Look Now/Radio 3

Many a well-known film or play has started life as a radio play – Bill Naughton’s Alfie being an example.

Don’t Look Now, the 1973 film directed by Nicholas Roeg starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, is so well-known that many may not be aware that its source was a short story by Daphne di Maurier.

This was dramatised yesterday as part of a celebration of her work. On Wednesday there is another play featuring Helen Bonham Cartier and Bill Nighy.

Don’t Look Now – in a word – is sinister.

A couple, recovering from their daughter dying in a drowning accident, go to Venice to restore churches.

There they encounter a blind clairvoyant who claims to be in touch with the dead daughter.

The husband is cynical but – in an ingenious twist – it is he who turns out to have second sight.

The film was intensely visual and the atmosphere of Venice contributed to its gothic horror as a killer is on the loose.

The film is largely remembered for the explicit sex scene between the couple – of which it is said they were actually performing, not acting – (director Roeg had dismissed all the camera and sound crew save one).

The play made a passable attempt at recreating the drama but I found myself always comparing it to the film.

It shows what am imaginative writer Daphne de Maurier was, as her inspiration was a blind woman who rented Keeper’s Cottage on the Menabilly Estate.She has a great ability to draw from her environs and to weave a story around it.

The more famous Birds was inspired by a bird attacking a man on a tractor.

I thought the husband was a tad insipid and failed to make the most of the revelation that he had second sight.

Also, in a radio play, it is necessarily harder to create the unique atmosphere of Venice.