The Night Watch

The Royal Exchange's production of UA's Hattie Naylor adaptation of Sarah Waters' bestselling novel The Night Watch opens to four star reviews this week.

What a haunting, unusual thing Hattie Naylor has made in her adaptation of The Night Watch. Sarah Waters’s 2006 novel is so confident, large-scale and apparently unselfconscious that it is easy to forget how subtle it is. And how delicately layered. It winds backwards in time, beginning in 1947, ending in 1941. Its love affairs come bathed in the after-knowledge of sadness.Hattie Naylor's exceptional adaptation of the best-selling novel about women condemned to their own personal circles of hell in 1940's London achieves the feat of suggesting time passing slowly while remaining admirably concise.

It would be so easy to flatten this in adaptation. A generous wish to include as much as possible might tempt a writer to make it bristle with period detail.Naylor avoids the trap. She gives only slivers of the prose in the dialogue, relying on Rebecca Gatwards’s first-rate direction and a wonderful cast to embody the rest.

Atmospherically lite by Elliot Griggs

'Be patient, this burns with furious passion by the end' (Paul Vallely The Independent) ★★★★

'Gripping new stage adaptation of novel bestseller' (Roger Foss, The Stage) ★★★★

'Captures the heart of Sarah Walters love story' (Alfred Hickley, The Guardian) ★★★★