- See the full list of Fatal Attraction cast and crew including actors, directors, producers and more.
- The Oscar-nominated movie that made “bunny boiler” part of the lexicon was released 30 years ago. A TV VERSION OF FATAL ATTRACTION WAS. The full 229-minute version is the one that.
There is something pathetic about the commercial theatre's increasing reliance on movies for source material.
You can make a good musical out of a movie, as Billy Elliot has proved, but it puzzles me why people should be expected to cough up to see a transplanted screenplay; and, even though James Dearden has made some adjustments to his 1987 script for Fatal Attraction, it remains an essentially hollow experience.
Fatal Attraction (1987). In the network version shown on TNT in the scene where Alex phones Dan at 2:13 a.m., there is additional dialogue between Dan and Beth.
The story outline will not greatly surprise anyone who saw the film. We still see a happily married New York lawyer, Dan Gallagher, having a two-night stand with a book editor, Alex Forrest, while his wife is away in the country.
As before, actions have consequences since Alex turns out to be a determined woman who is not to be lightly discarded.
In the end, desperate Dan is stalked and haunted by the tenacious Alex so that his marriage, his job, his car and even his daughter's rabbit are not safe from her attentions.
So what's new? Where the film depicted Alex as a mad harridan whose hairstyle alone should have set alarm bells ringing, Dearden's play lays more stress on Dan's culpability.
After first meeting Alex, he talks of 'that sense of exhilaration when the hunter closes in on his prey'. He goes on to describe his bout of weekend sex as a 'minor indiscretion' and his chum, Jimmy, seeks to justify male infidelity by saying 'we're programmed that way – we can't help ourselves.'
But these tonal shifts do nothing to explain Alex's singular ferocity. The story is still seen from Dan's point of view: even more so in that, in the play, he becomes the narrator. And, although the intention is clearly to suggest that Alex is as much victim as avenging fury, she remains curiously enigmatic.
Dearden's chief innovation is to use her obsession with Madam Butterfly as a clue to her character. This reaches absurd proportions with the suggestion that Alex is a modern equivalent of Puccini's heroine; Cio-Cio-San was a guileless 15-year-old rather than a 36-year-old editor with a personality disorder.
One is left with a dizzying succession of short scenes that, in Trevor Nunn's production, whisk us from bars to bedrooms to offices and the Gallagher family's rural home.
But, although Robert Jones's designs lend the show a mechanical efficiency, no scene lasts long enough to make an emotional impact. You don't even get the sense, as you did in the movie, of the daily routine of routine domestic contentment on the verge of destruction.
The actors do all they can within the script's limits. Mark Bazeley as Dan conveys the man's escalating panic and self-loathing.
Natascha McElhone makes Alex a softer and more initially hesitant figure than Glenn Close in the movie but lacks the backstory to illuminate her descent into borderline psychosis. And Kristin Davis, in the underwritten role of Dan's wife, is left trying to make bricks without straw.
Dearden's script doesn't do enough to reimagine the movie. A film that was at least a brutally effective psychological thriller has become a modern morality-play that simply confirms the dismal truth of Arthur Hugh Clough's poetic couplet: 'Do not adultery commit, Advantage rarely comes of it.'
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