Written by Jasper Rees

Sarah Waters’ highly praised novels have marched from the page to the screen with regimental regularity and no apparent sacrifice in quality. Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, with their big Victorian brushstrokes, were built for television no less than Dickens is. With The Night Watch, adapted last night, her subject was still the love that dare not speak its name. But two things were different. This time Waters’s narrative was compressed into a single film. And it was set in the Blitz, when a modern lady’s drawers could be removed in a flash.

As usual with popular quality fiction, those with a strong loyalty to the original will be posting their objections in the comments box. But clearly this was an efficient filleting by Paula Milne. All the important marks were hit: the terror of discovery for young gay men and women, somewhat alleviated by wartime when everyone was too busy licking Hitler to keep an eye on the same-sex fumblings among pert young flatsharers. In 90 minutes the more sinuous and serpentine coils of Waters’ plotting were sacrificed in the interests of clarity. But something of the structural ambition was preserved as, like Harold Pinter’s portrayal of a love triangle in Betrayal, the story came by its relevations by travelling backwards in time, in this case from 1947 via 1944 and thence to 1941.

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July 13, 2011 by Anna • "The Night Watch", Articles

Sarah Waters interview for ‘The Night Watch’

By Eithne Farry – 12 Jul 2011

Sarah Waters is the historical novelist that television loves to adapt. The author of Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith and Affinity has already seen her first three novels reach the small screen; The Night Watch is the fourth. This time round, though, the drama is not set amid the seedy Dickensian alleys of the Victorian era, but the bomb-damaged streets of wartime London. “It was a disruptive time, a really porous time,” Waters says. “People were living with a few layers’ less skin than usual. The landscape had been blown up, exposed, and people were sharing space with strangers, but all sorts of people benefited from it too, found new ways of living.” Continue…

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July 12, 2011 by Anna • "The Night Watch", Articles

Claire Foy – ‘The Night Watch’ interview

We speak to Claire Foy who plays Helen in the BBC drama The Night Watch. Based on the novel by Sarah Waters the drama centres on the interwoven stories of four women before, during and after the Second World War. Here Claire talks about period dramas, sex scenes and working with so many of her peers

You’ve had roles in things from Little Dorrit to Upstairs Downstairs and now The Night Watch – so do you like period dramas?
Claire Foy: I like any drama that pays me to be in it! Period or otherwise! Why are people so obsessed with this I find it very funny? But yes I have done quite a few period pieces. Really I like anything that’s got a good character and a story. They do so many adaptations and remakes and are always finding literature and turning it into dramas so as long as they’re doing that hopefully I’ll do lots and lots and lots, but mix it up with some modern things as well.

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July 12, 2011 by Anna • "Little Dorrit", "The Night Watch", Articles

‘The Night Watch’: Even More UK Scans

“It’s all about how the war frees you, but binds you at the same time”

Helen is far less at ease with her sexuality than Kay, and struggles to come to terms with her affections — leaving her wracked with insecurity.

“Helen makes a lot of bad decisions,” Claire tells Inside Soap. “She wants to do the right thing all the time. She’s concerned about what people think and what the right thing to do is — but she doesn’t know what that is. She wants love, but doesn’t know what to do when she gets it — that’s why her relationship with Kay goes so wrong.” (Source)

The Night Watch will air tomorrow, July 12, on BBC2, at 9pm.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Scans: Inside Soap (UK) – July 9-15, 2011
- Scans: Sunday Telegraph Seven (UK) – July 10, 2011 –> Sarah Waters on being adapted and letting go
- Scans: The Observer – The New Review (UK) – July 10, 2011
- Scans: Clippings from 2011

Big thanks to Lorna.

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July 11, 2011 by Anna • "The Night Watch", Articles, Gallery, Media Alerts

Screencaptures from the ‘Night Watch’ Official Trailer

The Night Watch will air next Tuesday, July 12, on BBC2, at 9pm.

GALLERY LINK:
- The Night Watch (2011, TV): Official Trailer

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July 10, 2011 by Anna • "The Night Watch", Gallery

Foy: My search for Nicolas Cage

Claire Foy has revealed she went on a Nicolas Cage hunt while filming her new period drama The Night Watch.

The Upstairs, Downstairs star worked with Cage on the film Season Of The Witch, and while filming on location in Bath, where she knew he had a home, decided to try and track him down.

Claire said: “I did walk around the crescent where he lives going, ‘Nic, Niiiiiic!’ in the hope he would open his door.”

She added: “He’s a lovely man. When I first met, him he strode across the car park and went, ‘I’m so glad you’re doing this movie’. I thought, ‘Oh my God, are you mad?’ It was such a bizarre experience. I couldn’t think of what to say, because Nicolas Cage saying he’s glad that I’m doing the film that he’s doing was just a bit odd.”

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July 10, 2011 by Anna • "Season of the Witch", "The Night Watch", Articles

‘The Night Watch’ – Official Trailer

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July 09, 2011 by Anna • "The Night Watch", Videos

Claire Foy: ‘Next I want to do some singing and dancing’ – interview

Spend a little time in Claire Foy’s company and you get the sense that, while she might be a bit stunned at how rapidly her acting career has progressed, she’s certainly going to seize her moment. Irrepressibly cheerful, fast-talking and candid, the 27-year-old has barely rested in the four years since she left the Oxford School of Drama. It was only a matter of months before she starred in the pilot episode of Being Human (she always knew it could be huge, she says); she went on to take the leading roles in the BBC’s 14-part adaptation of Little Dorrit and in Peter Kosminsky’s acclaimed Israel-Palestine drama The Promise, which she describes as “a real love project for everyone who did it”. Oh, and she’s also squeezed in Upstairs Downstairs and a Hollywood fantasy thriller, Season of the Witch, with Nicolas Cage.

Now we’re about to see her playing the romantically tortured Helen in Paula Milne’s adaptation of the Sarah Waters novel The Night Watch. She says that when she first read the script she thought “Oh God… On the outside you see her as what she is, which is doing lots of things wrong, like when you look into someone’s relationship and think, ‘Don’t do that, Don’t do that, Don’t do that’ – and then they keep doing it. It’s painful to watch, in a way.”

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July 09, 2011 by Anna • "The Night Watch", "The Promise", "White Heat", Articles, Gallery

‘The Night Watch’: More UK Scans

Helen, played by Claire Foy, is Kay’s girlfriend but she’s less certain of her sexuality than Kay and struggles with social taboo.

“Helen is a lost soul who doesn’t really see herself as a lesbian,” explains Claire, 27. “She doesn’t like living a lie and she can’t justify being with a woman in her mind if other people think it’s a bad thing to do.

“So when she falls passionately in love with a woman, that’s a shock for her.” (Source)

The Night Watch will air next Tuesday, July 12, on BBC2, at 9pm.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Scans: Daily Express Saturday (UK) – July 9, 2011
- Scans: Daily Mail Weekend (UK) – July 9, 2011
- Scans: Woman (UK) – July 11, 2011
- Scans: Clippings from 2011

Big thanks to Lorna.

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July 09, 2011 by Anna • "The Night Watch", Articles, Gallery, Media Alerts

‘The Night Watch’: Claire Foy interview

BBC Two’s been having a stellar run of drama recently, and the latest show aiming to capture the attention of the British public is The Night Watch. Based on the novel by Sarah Waters – she of Tipping The Velvet fame – the film focuses on the lives of several women living in wartime, and just post-wartime, London. Among the list of amazing stars taking part is Claire Foy, who recently chatted to reporters about her role in the drama. Read on to find out what she had to say about researching smoking, why love scenes are easier with two women, and whether she’s nervous about how the film will go down… Continue…

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July 08, 2011 by Anna • "The Night Watch", Articles

Love among the ruins

“You don’t see the broad sweep of London at war,” explains Claire Foy, who appears in the one-off drama as an insecure and brittle marriage bureau owner called Helen Giniver. “It is more personal, about people trying to live their lives while a war is going on and how it affects their decisions and erodes their lives.”

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“Working backwards is a really clever device,” says Foy. “You really get the sense that life was almost easier in the war because every decision was made for you and you lived day to day because you knew you might die at any moment. After the war, none of the characters knows what to do with their life and the country is in a state of flux.”

(…)

“The four main characters are outsiders, because they are not really part of the status quo,R